The plane ride was definitely not as bad as I expected it was going to be! I had a two hour flight from Salt Lake to Seattle, a 3 hour layover in Seattle, and then a 13.5 hour flight from Seattle to Shanghai! I tried to sleep most of the way so I could get on the right sleeping schedule for China and so far...I think it worked! I actually watched a movie on the second plane....and I do NOT like movies, so that's a big accomplishment for me! I did have to pause it in the middle and take a 45 minute break though! :)
We arrived in Shanghai at about 6pm, their time. The Shanghai airport was HUGE and I assumed it was going to be FILLED with people, but really, there was hardly anyone and the few Chinese people that were there were attempting to sell us stuff and rip us off...some of the 18 year old girls almost got fooled, but luckily some of us saw what was happening and told the Chinese people to leave the girls alone. A second later, the security (who carry big guns, by the way) came and pushed the Chinese salespeople away from us! It was wild! But a great adventure! We had 15 teachers flying into the Airport on our flight and then 5 others meeting up with us in Shanghai. Unfortunately, their first flight was delayed which made them miss their flight to Shanghai, so they had to come in on another one and we had to wait 4 hours in the Airport for them to get there! It was all good though #bonding time :) After they arrived, we took a bus to Nanjing. Luckily, the bus ride was only 4 hours instead of 6, which is what they had originally told us it would be!
When we arrived in Nanjing, we had to lug everyone's suitcases up the stairs to our rooms! (That's 60 suitcases up 5 flights of stairs...I better get ripped from that! Kidding! Kidding!) We all crashed around 3:30am, and then woke up the next day at 11am. I've never had a colder shower in my life than the one I had that day! Apparently, the school we teach at doesn't give their students hot showers and they only turn the hot water on for the teachers during specific times of the day! SURPRISE!! It did make me appreciate my hot showers a lot more than I did before though! (And I've gotten to take hot showers the other mornings- I made sure I woke up during the appropriate showering hours haha, so that's a great blessing!)
So
here at the school, we have a foreign coordinator named Wendy who's
supposed to teach us the ropes of ILP and where we will be teaching, but
she got "busy" on our first day and didn't come into work, so we had to fend
for ourselves! It was a great adventure! We gave ourselves a walking
tour of the campus and had no clue what anything was, but that's okay!
:) The kids all saw us walking around the campus though and they were
ADORABLE! They'd scream "HHHEEEELLLLLOOOOOO!!!!!" And then we'd wave
and say hi back! It makes me so excited to teach them! We start
teaching on Monday! :) We also had two briefing meetings and then at
night, we walked to the Golden Eagle Mall! There is a couple that lives
on our floor named Belle (Chinese) and Mickey (American, raised in
Chicago). They've lived here for a year, so they volunteered to take us
to the mall and show us where the ATM's were! They were so sweet! I
got to talk to both of them a lot and they're going to take us to the
"underground" shopping where you can get everything for dirt cheap on
Saturday! (I'm going to buy like 20 apples!) Haha it's random, but
there apples here are ABSOLUTELY DELICIOUS! I'm ecstatic!
Here I am....in China! Happier than happy!
Hooray for adventures!
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