Our first few days

Our adventure began in the wee hours of July 15th.  Up at 5am, pack the truck, arrive at the airport, check in our 11 bags (we also had 6 backpacks and 6 carry-on bags), go through security, and make our 8:30am flight with only a few minutes to spare.

 Three flights, thousands of miles later and we were in Shenyang, China! We flew Alaskan Airlines to Seattle, Delta airlines to Shanghai, and Chinese Southern Airlines to Shenyang.  Three employees from our school, Eagle Bridge International School, picked us up from the airport in Shenyang.  They arrived with two EBIS vans, one for our luggage and one for the humans.  A two and a half hour drive later we were in Dandong!  EBIS checked us into a brand new beautiful hotel, the Wanda Realm.  After checking in around 2:45am in the morning we were told that many of the individuals that we will be working with at EBIS were meeting us at the hotel for breakfast at 7:30am the next morning (roughly 5 hours later).

Delta provides nice BIG glasses of wine

Kids, this is a squatty potty

Eagle Bridge International School

A mini bar with Heineken!

       At breakfast we met Robert, a man who helped set up EBIS, Dustin, our principal, Leif, our assistant principal, Yin, Dustin's girlfriend and office manager at EBIS, Korima, Leif's wife, and Stephanie, the high school science teacher.   After breakfast we set off on foot to see some of the city.  We were told about where to get our hair cuts, where to buy Korean milk (apparently the best milk in town), and the gym.  We were also shown our temporary apartment where we will live until we come back from Beijing.  Our permanent apartment, which happens to be right across the street is not available until the first part of August.  Both building are located right on the Yalu river with an amazing view of Moon Island and North Korea.  North Korea is only a few hundred yards from our front door! We soon left the apartment and took a bus to EBIS.  What an amazing school! The facilitates are gorgeous and the employees that we met seem to be very lovely.  More information about the school later.
     After we left we walked back to Lotte Mart, an updated mall and grocery store that is located right next to the Wanda Realm.  The mall is very similar to western style malls, complete with a movie theater (apparently 1/3 of the movies shown here are in English), specialized stores, and a food court.  The grocery store is located in the basement of the mall.  It was about 4pm when we left the mall and serious jet lag kicked in.  Thankfully, we were able to go back to the hotel and have some down time.
The following day, Leif and Korima met us for breakfast again.  Following breakfast we packed up all of our belongings and moved into our temporary housing.  At that point we had been living out of suitcases and moving every couple of days for 19 days! After we moved in we decided to take a stroll to Peter's Cafe, the local (and only) ex-pat coffee shop for some lunch before we headed down to the Dandong Beer Festival.