Another view of Fujiazhuang Beach. Dalian is such a nice city.
Cierra enjoying the lovely Fujiazhuang Beach sunset
Cierra and our new friend Peter at an overlook at Fujiazhuang Beach.
Xinghai Square in Dalian. It’s name translates to “the sea of stars.” Unlike most Chinese cities, one really can see the stars in Dalian due to it’s relatively clean air.
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The bridge between the school and our hotel is really nice at night. The whole bridge is illuminated with rotating colors and all the trees along the river have lights with a sort of melting effect. Lot’s of couples come hang out and enjoy the scenery.
Cierra with our green tea pot and an ice cream dish called “Emotion Poured the Aegean Sea Boat” It was actually coffee, kiwi, and berry flavored.
Tianjin at night
We’re here.
So I’m on the other side of the world now. At the moment, I’m sitting in a coffee shop. The hotel our school put us up in doesn’t have wifi. It does have western style toilets, which is nice, along with a tv, two twin beds with very firm mattresses, and a shower that’s basically just a shower head over a gross looking drain. I’ve stayed in worse.
The flights over were uneventful and actually quite pleasant, especially our 13 hour L.A. to Seoul intercontinental whopper. Our Korean carrier Asiana was lovely. We received two pretty decent meals, free drinks of all sorts throughout the flight, lots of On-Demand entertainment (I watched Rio, Source Code, and Rango) a refreshing warm towelette, a pillow, a blanket, and perhaps best of all a nice little pair of slippers which have come in handy for the hotel. Out of curiosity I chose the Korean dishes for both dinner and breakfast, bibimbop for dinner and spicy octopus over rice for breakfast. Both were pretty decent. Octopus for breakfast sounds gross, I know, but I had been up for so long and through so many times zones my body had no idea what time it was.
We arrived in Tianjin Thursday around noon and met a representative from our school who took us to check into the hotel, showed us where our school was, and took us to a place to get dinner. We were told to report to our school the next day at 2pm. Cierra and I both assumed we would be starting our training and going to get our residency permits, but they just asked us to fill out a brief little informational sheet and gave us a little tour of the school. It seems very nice and contemporary-looking with glass walls and neon green translucent chairs. They have what look to be reading areas, computer labs, game areas, and a theater room. Apparently some of the classes we’ll be teaching will somehow involve last year’s Hollywood blockbusters. Sounds fun.
We were then told we had the weekend off and would start in earnest Monday morning. Cierra and I weren’t sure what to do with ourselves for two days, so yesterday we took the bullet train to Beijing. It only takes 30 minutes to get there going roughly 200 mph. Tickets were only about $10 for a one-way ticket in 1st class. We had no idea what to do once we got to Beijing. We just took the subway to the Olympic Park then to Tiananmen Square. In Tianamen, a Chinese girl about our age asked us in English if we would take a picture with a little boy and an old lady. We have no idea why. I was thinking maybe it was their first time out of whatever little farming village to the big city and had never seen any white people before. Who knows. It felt kind of weird.
Well this was a long post, sorry. I’ll write more soon. Pictures to come, too.
