Android 2D Game With OpenGL

Android 2D Game With OpenGL

Recently I worked on a 2D Game using SurfaceView and I learned a lot about
game loops and everything. But now I want to make the same game using
OpenGL. I read that the GLSurfaceView is the class that would be relative
to what SurfaceView was. But I'm not sure about other things as:
Using SurfaceView, I used the Bitmap class to load a image resource that
would be lets say a character. And that bitmap would be a property of my
Character class. And for the gameloop I used a different Thread
I'm new to OpenGL so I'd like to know how to load image resources (do I
load them using the Bitmap class?), or what to use instead of a Thread for
the game loop?