Having Fun All The Time

One of the good things about getting a visit from a friend who is also a teacher in another part of China was that I got to hear how her employer had helped her handle the hurdles of moving to the country to teach.

For her, the process sounded remarkably easy once she got the job. Her employer handled all the paperwork before she left the U.S. and provided her with ample assistance finding a suitable apartment when she arrived. They also offered her a pretty hefty salary — not big by U.S. standards, but not small either (she makes almost three times what I make, but she works 30 hours a week to my 12 and she lives in the third-largest city in China while mine probably doesn’t even make the top 100, so that’s the explanation for that).

They also reimburse her each month for a fraction of the flight costs to the country, so that when he contract is up she will have been reimbursed the full amount.

You can probably guess what all this explaining is leading up to…yep, my coming-to-the-country and paperwork situation has been so different from hers as to be totally unrecognizable. My paperwork was not even really started before I left the U.S., I went to Hong Kong about four-ish months in to change my visa status, and now the matter still hasn’t been entirely settled. (I won’t go into details here, but…you get the picture.)

The reason my visa experience has been so much more convoluted is itself convoluted and involves miscommunications, bureaucratic snafus, lackadaisical administrators and probably a fair measure of cultural differences. Suffice it to say that between my school and I, the visa issue has been at times hairy, at times thorny, and even on a couple occasions bordering on antagonistic.

So, a little bit after my sixth month in-country without the visa issue fully resolved, I delivered an ultimatum of sorts. Being nice and friendly had gotten me nowhere, being accomodating but firm had also gotten me just about nowhere, so I decided to make things as clear as possible: get the visa situation taken care of this month, or I’m going to make like a tree and get outta here.

This did seem to make the message much more clear. But things have not taken shape as quickly as I would have liked them to. So I am still holding my breath, in a sense. Which would put me close to seven months of breath-holding. But, things other than that seem to be moving along fairly nicely. And I have been promised that the visa will be done within the week. So when I know, I’m pretty sure I’ll be writing about it here.

Till then thanks for tuning in.

: )