Pictures!!!

Woohoo! Its time to catch up on all of the scenery we have been checking out. Some of it is old news (like the palace we visited). So have fun looking and feel free to ask any questions of the places we have seen.
P.S The last few are pictures of a recent night out with friends we have made in our short visit here : )

Our apartment building.

Down the street from our place is a big mall called Wanda, and a huge stadium that shows different talents every day.

kids at Jonathan's job

This is where Jonathan works

some more pictures of our time at the palace

This is a famous restaurant we went to after we saw the palace.....can't remember the name but the food was awesome!

The building at the end is our home. We went on a hike to Olympic park, which is right next to the Hun He River.

Taking a break, that is the stadium that is right outside our apartment.

Margarita Mondays at Casey's, the only american food restaurant we know of, with Chelsey and Caleb (our mentors/ bosses/ friends)

The huge outdoor market we visited

no, that is not a cucumber its a melon

these are pets I promise 

this poor dog, on the other hand, was not a pet

random cool looking bug 

awesome people

Jacob's Birthday!

This is a picture of alcohol we took a shot of called Snake Baijiu. Yes it is a real thing, and yes we really did a shot of it.

Last shot of the night, it was Jager, ugg

Baerly 2 weeks in Shenyang and already been to Jail.How I almost started an International media firestorm and other thoughts.

Alright, (JB here) I guess that I should explain myself a bit. Because the title might be a little alarming to all 12 of you who are actually reading this.

In China, there are specific rules as to who can actually hire foreigners to work, and what a foreigner can do while they are here depends on the type of visa that they have. So my school, Langston has the ability to hire foreign teachers, this includes being able to send them letter of invites with government approval. Other schools however to not have the authority to invite and hire foreign teachers, but well they do anyway, so police will randomly search local schools to make sure that you are legal, most of the time I am told that they do a check and if you are good to go they leave, but sometimes, because they need to buy an extra pair of Levis I am guessing, they decide to harrass schools and make up false accusations and charge you fines even if you haven't done anything wrong at all, and if you don't pay they keep coming back.

So this is a thing that you might encounter while in China a lot, corrupt government officials, embezzlement, extortion.. ect I have heard that the president of China is really trying to crack down on this but it seems that every province is on its own. I don't know if the local Chinese government will be monitoring my site, so I will try to be a bit careful about what I say. I don't think that freedom of speech is exactly celebrated here.

We kind of got our first taste of this when police officers came into our local school branch and then demanded that I turn over my passport. I had no idea what the hell was going on. I was sitting in the office working on my lesson plans for the next day when the Chinese versions of Billy Rosewood and John Taggart walk in ( Beverly Hills Cop reference). Scared and confused I gave it over and the guy looks at it puts it in his pocket and then walks away. Alarmed I got up and started to follow him, that's when my Chinese headmaster said something to him and he quickly flashes a badge at me and motions for two other officers in uniform, smoking cigarettes to come his way. They ask me a few questions in Chinese and then start walking around the school taking pictures and looking at different things, while giving me looks like I had poop on my face. ( I checked there was none)

They barge into my coworkers class and start taking pictures, she being very protective and also not knowing if that they were police pushed them out of the room and slammed the door on their faces, as you can imagine the police here are not used to being treated or talked to this way and it took the quick thinking of my headmaster to talk them out of dragging her out and handcuffing her.

Still not understanding what exactly is going on, (there is a lot of loud talking in Mandarin at this point and my coworker was done with her class) Brooke shows up to walk to the store with me, only to be told that we need to get in the police van and we get taken down to the station. So the three of us foreigners and my headmaster were taken to the local police building where we then sat for the next 3 hours.

Here in China everyone uses this app called WeChat, which I hadn't heard of back in the USA but I am told that its around. Well you can talk to people individually or you can create groups where everyone invited will get everyone else's messages at the same time. It just so happens that all of the foreign teachers and some other people for my school all were in a group together Me thinking that I was being clever decided to take a picture of me behind the bars in the actual jail cell, ( which was not even locked by the way and was in the corner of the same room we were in.,) I posted this to our group site with the heading "Hey they let me take a picture in the cell". Well needless to say this freaked out a few of my other coworkers. Phone calls were made, names were dropped, embassies and consulates were contacted, and investigations were started... yea my bad... all because of a picture... however I didn't find out about any of this until the next day, and let me tell you I felt a little bit like the boy who cried wolf. Looking back its pretty funny tho. I almost achieved celebrity status.

To try and make a long story a bit shorter, the police tried to say that our school wasn't legal, and that we were hired illegally. However since I wasn't actually teaching when they walked in I was off the hook, but because my coworker was working they decided to charge her, they kept her for an extra 3 hours, made her sign a bunch of documents and fined her and the school 10,000 rmb.( around $1,600). Luckily one of the owners of the school is a Lawyer and talked to us the next day..to assure us that everything was fine and that we were indeed here legally and allowed to teach and that those police officers were just corrupt or working for corrupt higher ups, and that this sort of thing is fairly common, and they were contacting people they knew..

We are all fine, and needless to say it was a bit nerve racking, and  I am asking for a raise the next time I sit down with the owners.

The Little Things

          Hello again. Yet another beautiful day in Shenyang China. My wonderful husband, Jonathan seems to have covered quite a bit of our time here so far, therefore I'm going to concentrate on a few interesting details. This past week has been packed full of first impressions and I intend to break these preconceived notions we had developed before coming here... and maybe confirm a few.
          So first I want to mention how glorious it is here. The weather is not always humid, though it is quite hot in the middle of the day, it is definitely tolerable. On our first day in China it rained in the morning! Not cold rain, but hot rain. The rain and clouds of course made it humid, but that was the most humid it has been. In regards to smog we have not seen too many smoggy days, or people with masks on. Of course it has only been a week so we can expect a lot of changes with the atmosphere later.
Now that we are through with the general small talk of weather.....
          There are 8 million people living in Shinyang, that is about the same amount as in New York. When we arrived I expected to be crowded by a lot of "short" people. This is a slightly raciest assumption that they would all be short,of course, I'm sorry. Yet we were not crowded, there is plenty of room to walk around, and in fact most men our age are around my height. The woman are more likly 5'6" or a little shorter. Of course there are the generations before our own that are much smaller here as well. The only time we feel confined is in an elevator or the subway (duh).... or the lines. Funny thing about lines, they tend to clump here, and people cut all the time. This is a normal thing we are still getting use to.
          The other thing we are still getting use to is the driving! Of course we heard the stories and had come to expect it... experiencing it is a different matter. Lines are also just suggestions in this case as well, and pushing into small spaces is an every moment occurrence. Its a good thing they drive at a slower pace or the accidents would be horrific. There also tends to be a lot of honking, I mean laying on your horn when a little grandma is walking too slow in front of you honking. It's not road rage either. Everyone just calmly cuts in front of people and honkes there horn.
          But this is really the only major noise you hear! In fact the chattiness is kept quite polite and low. We also hear a lot of construction in our area because we live in a fairly new area  The New Hunnan district. I can see three different high rise apartment being constructed out our back window. I actually expected it to be a lot louder, and a lot more dirty here. Glad that these things are not true.
          The last thing I wanted to touch on..... With the number of people living here and the bad reputation that Chinese people are a littering people, I expected the streets to be filthy. Maybe I was talking it up too much in my head. Probably psyching myself out to expect the worst. Fact is it's very clean here, and there are trees and parks everywhere! In fact its cleaner then the bay area, the only other metropolitan type area I've really lived in. People do seem to litter, babies and animals are allowed to "go" in the street, yet I haven't seen hardly anything icky. I haven't even seen people picking it up! My guess is they have hired ninjas for clean up duty. I mean that would explain the mystery right?
          So I will leave it at that, I'm sure there are a lot of other small details I could mention but for now lets leave it at the clean up ninjas.
Lots of love to those who follow.

Ps. The yellow and red things are work out machines for anyone to use in our court yard.... and people do use them every evening. In fact it seems like everyone is out socializing and exercising the full hour before the sun goes down. Kind of neat!

First Week in Shenyang

Jonathan here. Wow. So we are finally here, and getting settled into our new apartment on the 23rd floor, of the Nan Ao Guo Ji apartments in Shenyang. This first post is going to be a jumble because I have a lot to cover for the last 5 days we haven't had internet.

It has been quite a journey to get here. I mean the whole process. From having the interview to the whole visa process which I think I went over a bit before. We left San Francisco International Airport around noon on Sunday the 6th of July. Our flight was scheduled for 15 hours but luckily they made good time and we got to Shanghai just 12 1/2 hours later. So instead of a 2 hour layover in Shanghai we had about a 4 hour layover.

The previous week Brooke and I had been walking around on the Feather River in Paradise and I smashed my toe on rock. The entire plane ride my toe was swollen and black and blue. It was literally throbbing the entire time and it really sucked having to walk all around the place. (luckily when we got here I was able to drill 3 holes into it with my pocket knife, and wow!! it was a wonderful gross almost instantaneous relief as it was able to drain maybe ill include a picture)

So at the Shanghai airport we had to switch airlines which meant we had to go and collect our checked baggage from the carousel which took about 30 minutes and then we had to figure out how to get to our next gate. We had no friggen clue what we were doing, we stood in the wrong line for close to 15 minutes before someone told us that we actually had to go to a completely different terminal. At this point I was super stressed out, with my throbbing toe, lack of sleep, and complete inability to communicate with the people there. Brooke however maintained her usual cool, calm demeanor as I continued to rant and rave about the rudeness and idiocy of the Chinese people who cut in front of us for an elevator and caused us to have to wait another 5 minutes. I quickly learned that the Chinese do not believe in lines, they have no respect for the proper first come, first in, ideas I had engraved into my head, no smoking signs seem to be only a suggestion, there are no rules of the road that they will not break. We will have to talk more later about driving here in China.

We took a quick break to have a massage in these pretty cool chairs that I had never seen before, and soon we were on our plane for our final leg of our trip to Shenyang. We met an awesome Chinese girl from Shenyang, named Annabel who has been living in San Jose for the last 6 years, she was on her way to visit friends and family for the rest of the summer, and she gave us her contact info and told us she would take us around. \

We get to Shenyang and meet up with my new bosses the owner of Langston ,Marvin, and his wife Lily, and their diver Mr. Shu. At this point its 11 pm Monday night in Shenyang, and 8 am Monday morning in California. We had been travelling for 20 hours and had about 3 hours of sleep the entire time.

My first impression of Shenyang was I was amazed at how clean it was. You should know that the district that we are in called the Hunan New District is less than 10 years old. Everything is brand new and the city planning is really cool, with extra wide streets and roads, and parks everywhere and it is massive, with new building and apartments going up everywhere. The streets are all lined with trees, and there are cleaning trucks that come and spray it with water and sweep it several times a day. They took us to a Hotel in the north part of the city in the Heping district, and our room was about 30 floors up. We went to sleep after a while but the sun rises at 4am here! so I couldn't sleep that much. Right in front of us was a large roundabout with a huge statue of Chairman Mao towering over middle of it and I kid you now, 5am there was a group of about 30 people all rollerblading around it. I was told that this is the 2nd largest statue of Chairman Mao in all of China.

Our first day in Shenyang consisted of going to the main branch of the school, meeting some of the employees that were there and then having a sit down discussion via translator with the owner Martin. He is a really nice man, who ironically speaks no English even tho he runs a language school. He talked to us a bit about the history of the school and his involvement with it. He is a really soft spoken man,, but  is very nice and likable handing out high fives, through out the important moments of his talk. After this we went to our apartment dropped off all of our bags and then went shopping for some necessities for the apartment. After unloading our bags we had to go to the police station to register as legal aliens, it was a friggen circus.

The rest of the week has been exploring and doing training. We met up with the girl Annabel yesterday and went to the Shenyang imperial Palace. Which one of us will get on later and talk about we took a bunch of picture. Anyway we are safe and adjusting. We are about to meet with the headmaster of my school and his wife and they are going to show us how to get to and use the subway system here.
Check back soon
The Baers

Can Baers Fly?

Days before our flight we start hearing the horror story's .... "Large percentages of people getting sick after plane flight", "food being so horrible people would rather go hungry", or most common, "no space and your sandwiched between two really smelly people". 

All of this seems innocent and expected, but as the days get closer and the goodbyes become more sad, the horror stories begin to become more gruesome. "Flights disappearing without a trace", "old horror stories of high jacking". 

Because of course we want to be prepared for the worst if it does happen we listen nervously to all wonderful horror stories. Now I'm not thinking it was such a good idea. We are an hour away from hour flight to china.... My tummy hasn't quit making noise for hours. 

Luckily we have drugs to nock us out for a while. More later.... Hopefully....