Tuesday, September 1, 2009

My First Post

Alright so here's the blog that I promised I would write when I got to China. I know it's been a week but things have been pretty hectic since we got here, and we're only now kind of settling in. Pat and I got to Shanghai on the same flight and made it to our buddy's apartment with no hassle. James, who has basically set us up with everything here, was more than welcome and showed us around the city for a few days. Shanghai is pretty ridiculous, like unbelievably large and smoggy, with stuff going on 24 hours a day. The first thing we did was treat ourselves to some foot massages, which felt incredible after the long commute. James showed us more of the city and some of the bars and clubs over the next couple days, which were all great. The food is really good also, there are tons of little vendors on the streets where you can get skewers with chicken, beef, vegetables and spices, all of which are good. One thing I have noticed is that almost no one speaks English, and the people that do speak English don't speak Chinese. Luckily James had somewhat of a grasp on it, so that definitely helped. The buildings in Shanghai seem to go on forever, a lot of the sky scrapers are really impressive. The TV tower, which has become an easily recognizable symbol of the Shanghai skyline, is right in the heart of the business district which is very cool. It kind of looks like a spaceship.

Anyways, after a few days in Shanghai we were ready to move on and head to Hangzhou, which was about an hour and twenty minute train ride south. A friend of James, a very good looking Chinese girl names Julia, picked us up in her huge BMW at the train station, and took us to the apartment complex we plan on living at. We're still working out some of the details on that, and currently we're staying at another friend of James. Hopefully we'll have the apartment worked out soon. The place is really nice, like very modern looking and in a great location in the city.

We went into BEAR, the school we'll be working at, yesterday, to meet some of the staff and get a little tour. Dace, who runs the foreign teachers department, showed us around and gave us our contracts. There is still a bunch of little things we need to do before we're completely settled in, but hopefully that won't take much longer. Getting anything done is very difficult, like getting passport pictures. We finally found the place to get those done and went in and took our pictures, and tried to tell them we needed 16 each. We tried to show with our hands what a headshot would look like, outlining our heads with our hands Dace told us it would be the equivalent of about 4 dollars, so when they told us we needed to pay about 100 dollars, we knew something was lost in translation. What we realized was that they were about to make 16 huge prints of pictures of our faces, which would obviously not work for us.

Anyways, we're working out the kinks and settling in. This city is awesome so far, and we really haven't seen much of it at all. We've got a lot of things we need to do, and its nice that we finally met up with our buddy Ned, who we went to Miami with and has been living here for the past year. Hopefully he'll be able to show us around today and get it done.

Sorry this is a long one, but figured I'd try to get a bunch down because I don't know how often I'm going to be able to update this thing. I hope everyone at home is doing well, wish me luck out here. This place really is like another planet

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