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