The kids did an entrance test for school on Thursday and started on Friday. The school is called The International School of Macau and is Canadian with curriculum from Alberta Canada. Stephen is already learning a lot about Canadian geography in a unit on mapping. Stephen is going well in Grade 5 and has made a couple of friends and seems to play soccer at recess and lunch. He
has found the maths ok, but they are up to 3 digit long multiplication by 3 digits eg. 368 x 298 and he has not done this yet, so this calls for a few lessons at home (hotel!) Matthew has not said too much about school yet, but is immersed in learning his times tables which we had started on and so that is good. He seems to have made 2 friends which is a positive start. Both boys are getting quite a lot of homework - Stephen is expect to do 60-90 minutes each night and Matthew 45-60 minutes each night. Matthew so far has had a different times table each night. This homework includes homework in Mandarin which
includes learning to write the symbols! Claire is the youngest in her class which has a very high ESL component with a lot of local chinese kids. As a result she is a long way ahead and was tested for year 2 also which academically she would have been fine in. We have elected to leave her in year 1 with her age peers and she is doing extra chinese, so she does double Mandarin
each day in the hope that will challenge her. She will still do the regular stuff for grade 1 - but the spelling list is words like her, him, she, from etc and they are still doing letter blends sounds - so the basic english is very easy for her. She has made lots of friends both at school and with all the staff at the hotel who think she is a very cute blonde thing.

Rich's work is of course the reason we are here and he is trying to immerse himself in it, but it is difficult with a very large team and the cultural differences, but it has after all only been a week. At this stage he is Project Manager for 2 of the hotels (there are to be 4) on the City of Dreams Casino which is being developed by Melco PBL. He is enjoying the challenges and learning who is who and what is what.

We are hoping to buy a small second hand car in the next week or so to make it easier to get around - at the moment it is taxi or walking. Taxis are pretty cheap, but Cath gets several each day, so it would make sense to have a car.

Macau is much less frantic than Hong Kong with a smaller population and it is very safe and the streets are clean with friendly helpful people. The only danger is getting run over by a car as noone stops on a pedestrian crossing -
one has to be very cautious. The air pollution at the moment is really bad - though we are led to believe that it is seasonal as the winds in the winter come from the north (ie the rest of china) and come March the wind swings to the south - blowing all the pollution back into china, leaving clear skies and
the prospect of seeing the sun. At the moment we can only sometimes see the other side of the Pearl River 4 km away. We will live on the island of Taipa which is joined by several bridges to the city of Macau. It is only 10 minutes from the city, but is a little quieter and is also where the school is and where
the site is.