The Beginning

In mid February, during one of my random calls to my friend Patrick, who was in Dalian with me for a few months of my last trip, I was presented with a rather "out of the blue" question. "Do you want to go to China?" We had always talked about going back to Dalian some day after we graduated college. Well, the time had come when we were both finishing up. I had just graduated and Patrick was on his last semester. He had found a blog from a girl who used to work for Future English in Dalian and thought this would be a good company to work for since we had both heard of it before and had friends who had worked for the company.

After a bit of research and some discussions with my family, we decided to apply to teach English in China. It took a while to get everything in order but we were finally given the go ahead and officially hired by Aston English (the corporate name for Future English)for summer and fall semesters. We had our hearts set on going to Dalian but all the schools in this town were filled for the summer semester. We were told that there were openings in Dalian for fall semester but would need to choose a place to go for summer. When we called the recruiter the next day, he suggested that we go to Xuzhou Aston for the summer since they really needed teachers. We didn't really care where we went for the summer as long as we would go to Dalian in the fall.

A few days later we received our contracts and contact emails for the schools we would be going to. We bought our airline tickets and a while later got our tourist visas as instructed. This is how it all started.