When Alice Cappelletti first moved from London to Hong Kong with her husband, a senior executive at a multinational company, and two daughters aged two and seven months old respectively, she felt bewildered. “I was living in a skyscraper, it was boiling hot and I didn’t know anyone. I felt marooned,” she recalls.

Her isolation began to evaporate after she sent daughter Olivia to kindergarten at an international school a couple of mornings a week. “It’s a way to meet other mums in similar situations and helps to get you out of the house,” she says.