One small thing about our return.

Moving back from China the majority of our belongings were packed up several weeks before we left and shipped on a slow boat. We still had far too much luggage at the airport as we mentioned, but overall we thought that we did a fairly good job of packing. All of our summer clothes are packed in a container, and since we were doing our last minute purchasing of almost an entire wardrobe of tailor made clothing most of my regular work clothes were also packed up and shipped. We were just informed that our shipment has cleared US customs and is now in transit to Chicago, but since we are still just in temporary housing until we can move back into our condo in April all of our stuff is going to go into short term storage.

One thing that we hadn't really thought about turns out to be one of the things that we complained about while living in China - doing laundry. Tina was glad to have a washer and dryer in the apartment, mostly to have the dryer so that we wouldn't have to hang up all of our clothes up and wait for them to dry. The downside to this is that our nice new tailor made clothes had never been in a dryer before...

So my six pairs of new pants all came back from the cleaners just a little bit smaller, having shrunk after being introduced to the dryer. It looked like I had suddenly grown 3" since moving back, and that forced me into having to head out and buy all new pants. Between the tailor and now I've purchased more pants in the last three months then I probably have in the last four years.

Tina with the tailors that made a lot of the clothes we brought back.

Tina's also seen some shrinkage in the pants, but most of hers were made long so she could wear heels and thus it's not as noticeable, and the majority of her tailor made clothes still packed in our main shipment. She sees it more in her shirts, now being a little smaller, but luckily the shirts that I had made didn't seem to shrink too much and they are still perfectly wearable.

We should have seen this coming, we had mentioned it before and even talked about taking material to a hotel so that it could be washed and dried before taking it to the tailor, but in those last few hectic weeks preshrinking material somehow slipped our mind. Something to think about if you are trying to save money by having clothes made while in a country that's mainly without dryers.