Finally here!

from Monday (8/29)
We made it! We have arrived in Nanjing! I am so glad to finally be in my new home. We are all settled into our apartments and are getting acquainted with our surroundings. The university has taken great care of us. They sent another teacher to help take us to our apartments and to show us around campus. Her name is Jesse and she has been amazing. She knows so much about Nanjing and Jinling and has helped us immensely. She took us to get our cellphones set up and to get internet. Also, Danielle's friend from last time, Sherry, has helped us our tremendously. She picked us up at the train station and got us set up in a hotel for our first night. Then she showed us around the downtown campus, Gulou.

Our apartments are so nice! We are both surprised and impressed. I will post pictures of everything very soon! We live in the foreign teacher's building on the second floor. We are next door to each other, of course! Our apartments have an inclosed balcony where we can hang our clothing to dry and can just sit and enjoy campus. We have a small kitchenette in each of our apartments. It has a fridge, microwave, hot plate, and water boiler. We don't intend to do much cooking, so it should be fine for us. The main area of our apartments is very big. I have a wardrobe, china cabinet, bed, tv, and 2 desks. We do have cable on our tv, but obviously most of the channels are in Chinese. So, we intend to mostly use the tv for movies. We each have our own bathroom. They are basic, the two highlights are the shower doors (very rare) and a light that heats up the room in the winter.

We live on the Pukou campus of Nanjing University. It is across the river from the main campus, but it is newer and very nice. Our campus is huge and well equipped. We have 3 or 4 convenience stores on campus plus a school supply store and a grocery store. We also have a few ATMs and a little area with a phone store, electronics, books, hair salon, fruit shop, stationary, etc. Not much is open yet, but once it is we won't have to leave campus too often. Right outside the main gates of campus is a little area with even more stores and tons of little restaurants. We ate at one of the restaurants with Jesse on the first day. There are also street vendors where we got pancakes for dinner Monday night. I definitely think we will be ok. There is also a larger grocery store there and a Super 8 Hotel.

The Pukou area is about an hour away from the downtown campus by bus. It is more recently developed but is still rather industrialized. We will probably spend our nights out in Gulou. Today we are going over to Gulou to look around and try to find internet. The internet for our apartments won't be installed until Wednesday morning. So we don't have access yet. However, there are a lot of places in downtown Gulou that have free wi-fi so we will be ok until then.

Classes start on September 5, so we have a few days to just get acclimated and figure everything out. I'm so glad to finally relax, we have been going nonstop since we got here.