Our first day

After waking up (can you do that when you didn’t sleep?), we talked for awhile and then showered in our shower curtain less bathroom. The bathroom is interesting – unlike in the US, there’s no separation between the shower stall/tub and the rest of the bathroom. Needless to say we had to be quite careful where we pointed the shower head. We might have flooded the whole apartment otherwise! After getting dressed, we headed down to the internet café in the first floor of our building. That’s where I posted the previous 3 entries describing the travel to Dalian. Thankfully our families had received our emails from the night before letting them know we were ok.

After our café visit, we decided to take a stroll in our general area to see what’s what. We didn’t go out for long before another student volunteer was coming to help us get acquainted with the area an accomplish some of our initial tasks. Our apartment building is just south of Dalian Maritime University on a little road. Just west is another apartment building. Our building and the other apartment building have a number of little shops and restaurants on the ground floor. There’s a water bottle supply place (no one drinks from the tap in China), a phone card store, and we haven’t figured out the others yet. To the southwest of our building about a quarter mile is the Dalian Maritime University West Campus, which is beautifully laid out. We ventured that far and then came back to meet Sylvia, the student volunteer.

Continuing a trend, Sylvia was very sweet to us and a huge help. We went through our list of todos and items we needed and she helped us plan out what we could get Saturday and what would need to wait until Sunday. Our first destination was the local police station, where foreigners are required to register within 30 days. It seemed to take some prodding from Sylvia to pull the officer on duty away from his TV, but he eventually filled out the required forms while smoking a cigarette. C was a little offended that he ashed his cigarette in her passport.

From the police station which was just across the road to the southeast of our building, we caught the number 10 bus to take us to a shopping area. Each bus ride costs 1 RMB no matter where your final stop is. I was impressed with the bus driver as the bus was a stick shift! I would hate to operate the clutch in their traffic. We stood in the bus and as I held on I noticed there were handles you could grab that had the McDonalds logo and the ubiquitous “I’m Lovin’ It” tagline. The bus also had a strange feature – live Chinese TV. No one seemed to be watching the TV behind the driver’s head but I guess it’s a plus if you have a long ride.

After four stops we got off at the first commercial district we've seen in Dalian. We noted there was a Popeye’s Chicken next to our destination, “Trust mart”. TrustMart seemed to be one stop shopping as they had everything from groceries to electronics. It was a large, well laid out store and we picked up some more bottled water, coke, ramen, silverware, chop sticks, garbage bags, and some hangers. By this time, my 1 hour of sleep in 36 hours had started to get to me. I got really woozy and felt like I was going to pass out. Because I wasn’t feeling well we had to abandon our plan to have a Sichuan Hot pot lunch with Sylvia. Instead we grabbed Popeye’s and headed back to our apartment on the bus. Yes, I know – my first eat out meal in China was an American fast food chain. What can you do…

To close out the day, we walked over to the DMU administration building at 2:30 to meet with Flora, our Foreign Affairs liaison from the School of Foreign Languages. She gave us our class schedule and helped answer a lot of our questions about how the process works with teaching.

Finally, we went back to our apartment and started doing some schoolwork. I was brainstorming for my first class morning and making up a week by week schedule. Around 4:45, both C and I just crashed. We went and laid down and didn’t wake up until 10pm. Then we went back to sleep and didn’t get up until 5am the following morning. Hopefully we are finally starting to overcome the jet lag.