Having Fun All The Time

Before I left to go on my visa run to Hong Kong, I really tried to find a site on the web that would explain everything to me. But I couldn’t find one. So I want to create a quick guide here to going to Hong Kong to change your visa status.

The whole thing is actually pretty easy, and once you get to Hong Kong there are so many English speakers that you really have nothing to worry about.

Here’s what you need to do: If you have a tourist visa and you want to switch it to a Z visa, there is no way to do that in mainland China. You have to leave mainland China to go to the embassy for your country (or, if you’re like me and hate waiting in lines, you can pay a travel agent in HK to go to the embassy for you). A great place to go is Hong Kong, because it’s close to the mainland and easily accessible and you don’t need a visa to enter Hong Kong if you’re U.S./British citizen.

What you need: You need a Foreign Expert’s License from the provincial capital of whatever province you intend to work in. This is a pink-colored piece of paper that says you are a foreign expert. You also need a letter from the Provincial Capital directing you to apply for a Z visa at the Hong Kong Embassy for your country.

NOTE: The letter MUST say Hong Kong. If it says “apply forthwith at the nearest embassy in your home country”, you will have to send it back to the provincial capital to be changed, which could be a delay of another week or so.

You also need a passport-sized photo for the application.

When you actually get to Hong Kong and apply for your Z-visa, the embassy or travel agency (whichever you use to get your Z visa — I used Shoestring Travel in Kowloon and they were quick and decently helpful and relatively cheap) will take the original documents away from you and just give you back a passport with the Z-visa in it. The Z visa will have a “duration of stay” of 000 (zero) days on it. But really this means that you and your employer have 30 days from your date of entry to mainland China to get a temporary residence permit so that you can stay in China. The residence permit can be valid for up to 12 months and allows you to travel in and out of China freely.

How to get to Hong Kong: If you’re relatively new to China as you’re thinking about going to China to apply for a residence permit, your Chinese skills might not be so good and you might be worried about expensive Hong Kong. I would say the first one, traveling with weak Chinese skills, shouldn’t be too much of a problem, and the second one, HK being expensive, you can’t do anything about.

But you should be able to get to HK pretty cheaply, especially if you’re in sourthern China.

Here’s how: Go to Shenzhen and take the subway from there to Hong Kong Go to this web site and look up the train schedule from your city to Shenzhen.

Shenzhen is in mainland China, right next to Hong Kong. If you take a train to Shenzhen, you can get off the train and inside the Shenzhen train station you can go through mainland China customs and cross over to official Hong Kong, and then take the Hong Kong subway to HK. (Once you get off the train in Shenzhen this will all be easy, because there are signs throughout the train station that say, in English, “HONG KONG”. You just need to follow these signs through the train station [most people will go that way] and you will find customs and the subway). The web site linked to above will give you pricing and time schedules for the trains going to Shenzhen. In my experience the site has always been accurate.

You have to actually go to the train station to buy train tickets in China. So go to your local train station and figure out how to buy the tickets you need. Basic Chinese should be able to accomplish this. You can say “dao4 Shen1 zhen4″, they will ask you what day, you say the day, whether you want a soft sleeper or hard sleeper (ruan3wo4 soft sleeper/ying4wo4 hard sleeper) and presto, you’ve got your ticket. (From what I understand, you can’t buy a train ticket more than 10 days in advance in mainland.)

If you’re traveling a really long ways and have money to spare, soft sleepers aren’t bad. There’s less cigarette smoke and it’s theoretically more secure because you get a small cabin with only 3 other people, so there’s less risk of someone poking around in your stuff. The beds are about the same in terms of comfort. The difference between the two is just that hard sleeper you share a whole train car with maybe 80 other people in 3-stack bunks, whereas soft sleeper you get a more secluded (and quieter) cabin with 4 bunks, 2-stacked.

Overall I think both are pretty safe. If you are traveling with a lot of stuff and are seriously worried about someone stealing your stuff, go with the soft sleeper, but if you’ve just got a bag of clothes and a camera, keep your money and passport on your body and sleep with your camera by your feet or head, and put your bag of clothes wherever. Nobody wants to steal a bag of clothes anyway.

When you get on the train and find your bunk, just relax. Someone will come and take your ticket from you. They will give you a plastic card. Keep this card. When you are close to arriving at your destination, they will come back and get your card from you, which will of course wake you up if you’re sleeping. If they’re taking your card, it means you’re almost there so you can get your stuff together. If you want to ask someone when you’re going to arrive, you can say “wo3men shen2me shi2hou4 dao4 Shen1zhen4″ (I’m not good at Chinese so the grammar here is probably wrong, but it gets the message across).

In Shenzhen, it’s easy to find the border. Cross the border and take the subway to Hong Kong. The HK subway is labeled in English and now that you’re in HK it will be super easy to get around because at least half of the people around you are fluent in English.

Once you’re in Hong Kong: If you have your papers with you when you arrive in Hong Kong, it will only take two to three business days (maximum) to get your visa. You might be able to do it in less than 24 hours.

If you’re like me and had to go to Hong Kong to wait for your papers to come in the mail, you might have to hang out for a while. If this is the case and you’re trying to reduce expenses, I would recommend staying on Lamma Island. It’s way cheaper than anywhere in HK and it’s easy to get to by a 20-minute ferry ride and much more relaxing. If you’re staying in HK for a while and want to keep costs low or just not stay in the busy city, just go to Lamma. But, if you want to stay in the city and money isn’t really a problem, SoHo is nice. If you want to stay in the city and you want to save money, the ChungKing Mansions in Kowloon (hostels) are definitely the cheapest place to stay in the city. I stayed in the New Peking Guest House (actually called the Peking Guest House once you arrive there) and it was satisfactory, about 180 HKD per night for a tiny private room.

I think that should cover most everything for someone who has to go to HK to change visas. Once you get your Z visa, of course, you have to return to mainland and still get your residence permit, which requires that you have a foreign expert’s card, which is like a second passport, kind of. So that’s potentially another hassle if your employer is as unhelpful as mine was. But this little guide should get you through the trip to HK and back without costing you too much money.

If any travelers in this situation actually stumble across this and have any questions, I’m happy to answer.

And remember to have fun while you’re in Hong Kong. : )

Hong Kong is a very Western city dropped in the middle of Asia: When I arrived there by subway I had the reverse sensation from what someone coming directly from the West might feel: it seemed totally familiar to me, way more like home than mainland China.

I just returned from 10 days in Hong Kong. I initially went there because my tourist visa ran out and it wasn’t possible for me to remain in China without going to Hong Kong (“HK”) to switch to a working visa. But, my employer (a university in Fujian Province) hadn’t finished securing a proper working license for me. So off I went to Hong Kong, to wait for an indeterminate amount of time for the school to finish securing the working license and then mail it to me. I left mainland China on Feb. 3 and returned to my home on the 17th, so in all the trip was about two weeks long.

The view from the 43rd floor of the Bank of China building, next to the tram that goes to the top of Victoria Peak. The tall building at center is called IFC2.

One of the first sights I saw was this one. The Bank of China building lets you go to the 43rd floor viewing deck for free, which is not spectacular but I would say worth it, especially if it’s foggy and you’re not sure there will be much of a view from Victoria Peak (which was the case for me), which is the mountain next to HK that you can take a fairly expensive tram up to see the whole city.

I met some cool German folks and went to the Bank of China building with them. This is them.

And onto the next thing…

A gracious CouchSurfing host took me on a walk through the Night Market.

And then…

I'm not sure she wanted me to take her picture, but I took this one anyway. : ) I would highly recommend CouchSurfing to anyone even considering traveling, because it's awesome.

And then…

We crossed the harbor from Kowloon (the touristy peninsula north of HK that is still part of HK) to Hong Kong Island on the Star Ferry. The Ferry is quick, cheap, and nicer than the subway.

To have a beer and some tobacco…

On a pedestrian bridge on the way to the bar we saw a lot of these "No Hawking" signs, which were an amusing rebuke to the habits of mainlanders. As my host informed me, Hong Kongers take pride in being "different" from mainlanders. These signs were amusing evidence of that.

And to the hookah bar…

This tiny bar with outdoor seating was located right next to Lan Kwai Fong, in Central on Hong Kong Island, right down the road from a little Japanese barbecue shop. Highly recommended.

Hanging out, drinking beers and smoking hookah was one of the big highlights of the trip. That is something I could never do in Fujian Province. The tobacco was 150 HKD, which is roughly 140 RMB (Chinese money) or about $22 US, which, if you’re on a mainland China budget, is a lot of money (especially with $50HKD beers added in). In all, including travel expenses, visa costs, eating and hotel, I spent about 8000 RMB on my two-week foray to Hong Kong, or a bit over $1000 U.S. dollars. Considering that I make 4000 RMB per month in the mainland, somewhere around $500, every time I opened my wallet in Hong Kong, I cringed.

Hong Kong features what is apprently the "world's largest permanent light show", called the Symphony of Light, which shows right next to the ferry stop on the Kowloon side of the harbor every night at 8 p.m. Pretty, even if the music is weak.

Another reason to do CouchSurfing: the natives can tell you what to do in the area. My first host suggested this light show, which was a fun free thing to do that I checked out the next day after we hung out.

An alley just north of the "SoHo" (south of Hollywood Rd) area

The hostel I stayed in for my 9 nights in Hong Kong, in Kowloon (in the ChungKing mansions) was definitely, without doubt, the cheapest in HK (I had a private single room for 180 HKD, or about $25 USD, per night), but food in the area was no good, it was loud and Kowloon is generally not a fun place to hang out. So I spent a lot of time on Hong Kong Island around the “SoHo” area, which has a lot more charm and more eating options.

These guys were using a badminton-shuttlecock-like object to play hackey sack, and they almost never dropped it. I thought it was cool so I just snapped some photos.

Another…

Closest-up of the object as I could get

And then…

There's a temple in Central Hong Kong Island called the Man Mo Temple.

Incense…

These large burning incense coils filled the air with smoke such that it quickly became difficult to breathe or see. So I soon left, coughing and wiping my eyes.

And then…

Back to Kowloon each evening to go to bed. The hostel where I was staying, the ChungKing Mansions, featured a loud and chaotic Indian market on the ground floor, with lots of guys hawking all kinds of goods. Coming home late in the evening was a little sketchy only because the goods they were hawking became increasingly illicit as the hour got later.

Note the cool red Hong Kong taxis in the previous photo…

A shot from the Star Ferry Terminal, Kowloon side I think. The Star Ferry is great, cheap, and makes the outlying islands really easily accessible. And it runs frequently.

And then…

On my second-to-last day in Hong Kong I took the ferry to Lamma Island, which is a small, more relaxed and much cheaper island right next to Hong Kong Island.

The ferry was easy and cheap and took about 40 minutes to Lamma Island. And as soon as I arrived there I realized I should have gone much earlier in my Hong Kong trip (considering how long I was there and how I spent a lot of time just relaxing and trying to minimize expenses)…

Lamma was relaxed, comfortable, friendly, and cheap. And on the day I went it finally became sunny and warm in Hong Kong, which was a good feeling.

After getting off the ferry I met a guy from Switzerland who had just got his bachelor’s degree in medicine and was taking a year off to travel before going to medical school. He had been to Japan, Korea and Thailand, and was spending a few more days in HK before going to mainland China. He helped me find the beach and then we parted ways, I think both feeling a little awkward because we were both traveling solo and not totally accustomed to talking a lot. I kept meeting people like that in Hong Kong, travelers anyway, many of whom had been all over Asia or were starting out to go all over Asia.

A beach in Lamma. I didn't swim, but the water was nice enough to.

After sitting on the beach and reading the latest New Yorker (another commodity I’m not afforded in the mainland) I decided I had enough time to walk the mile or so across Lamma Island to the small mainland-style town on the other end of the island (the town was Sok Kwu Wan, and was nowhere near as cool as the town I landed in, to the north, Yung Shue Wan)…

...and I snapped this picture on the hike, which was fun and worth it...the town in the background is Sok Kwu Wan.

And that was my trip to Hong Kong. There were other things I saw that I photographed with my disposable film camera, such as the Big Buddha (cool, but if you go, take the tram; the rattly, nauseating bus ride is rough) and the tram to the top of Victoria Peak (it was too foggy to see anything). And there was the night on the town I spent with some Italian friends I met on CouchSurfing.com; that night and meeting up with the other person from CouchSurfing were the best parts of the whole trip. There’s nothing like meeting people from a foreign land. But after my day in Lamma, I picked up my visa from the travel agency and was good to go back to the mainland. So I said so-long to ample Starbucks everywhere, Western food choices and ubiquitous English speakers, and took the Hong Kong MTA back up to Lo Wu, where you can simply walk through Chinese customs within the Shenzhen train terminal (which is attached to the Lu Wo MTA station).

Of course, the day I returned to mainland China to travel back to Fujian was the eve of the Chinese New Year, which is the most hellacious time possible to be traveling in China. So all train tickets for days were totally sold out. Instead, I had to settled for a late-night sleeper bus back to a major city in Fujian, from where I would have to figure out another way to get the rest of the way to my home city, Sanming (this ultimately involved lots of waiting in the rain, waiting in the 24-hour McDonald’s, waiting in the hotel, riding another bus to another city that was not Sanming, and then getting picked up by a very gracious colleage from the college).

To get to the sleeper bus, I had to endure a very sketchy 15-minute ride in the back of a van, scrunched up in the trunk area with the luggage, not sure where we were heading because I had only understood a little of the Chinese the driver said to me. But we made it to the bus, and there was indeed a sleeper bed there for me.

The tiny bunk beds on the bus to Fujian from Shenzhen...back in the mainland. : )

And, last, the grainy shot of me in my sleeper bunk. The bus was definitely tolerable and fine for the 10-hour trip back to Fujian…I think I slept for a few hours.

Grainy shot, sleeper bus, around 9 p.m. Cost of trip from Shenzhen to Xiamen, Fujian: 305 RMB, or about $45 US Dollars. Good night and good luck.

I first learned that I would have to leave the mainland on my last day of classes for the semester, about three weeks ago. My liaison in the Foreign Affairs Office at the college, who was supposed to be taking care of all the visa issues, called to tell me that two packages had arrived, and after giving me the packages she said, “Also, there is something very important that I have to tell you about.” 

She took out a piece of paper that she had showed me about two weeks prior, the working license that allowed me to legally work at the university (and which she said was the last thing we needed before I could get a working visa to stay at the college). She pointed to just below the header, where the letter directed the holder of the working license to report to the nearest Chinese embassy in the United States to get a working visa. 

The last time she had showed me the license, I had not noticed that crucial detail. And after months of nail-biting, hair-pulling, ad politely trying to not be a nuisance but also still persistently question her about when I would finally be legal in the country…I was tired of thinking about it. I just wanted the school to take care of it. I did not understand one crucial thing about the situation I had found myself in, which was that they had told me what I had wanted to hear regarding the visa situation before I came to China, and I had let myself believe them. Everything that happened after that was white noise. For three months I had pestered the Foreign Affairs Office people about my visa, and for three months they had essentially avoided telling me what they knew all along — I would have to leave the country, on my own, to get the visa I would eventually need, and, as an added bonus, I would be expected to pay for that trip. 

This revelation, on the last day of classes, deflated me and almost squashed me. I was angry, I was frustrated, I felt used, I felt stupid. But I quickly realized (after yelling about it to myself and discussing it over the phone with a couple of key people) that there was nothing I could do about the trip out of the country. I would have to do that, either way. The only thing I could really do anything about was determining who would pay for the trip. 

So I spent a day negotiating with the college and eventually, with the help of a key person at the school, got an extra few hundred U.S. dollars out of them. They agreed that they would refund me for my actual travel ticket, that they would throw in a little extra money for accommodations, and I would go. That was the best I could get without outright threatening to leave the college, which, if I were a more stubborn or hard-nosed person, I would have done. 

I booked a train ticket to Shenzhen. There is a train that passes through Sanming, Fujian and goes all the way to Shenzhen, which is almost directly north of Hong Kong and adjacent to it. I would take the train to Shenzhen the day before my tourist visa would run out, then I would cross customs in LuoHu, which is part of Shenzhen and actually in the same train terminal where I would be arriving, and then, if all went well, I would simply get on the Hong Kong MTA system and head into HK. 

So, I waited. There were about two or three weeks between when I learned that I would be going to HK and when I actually left. Waiting was not the easiest thing I have ever done, because the entire time I was thinking about the fact that there was no guarantee at all that I would be able to return to the mainland. I was heading out of the country just as my tourist visa was expiring on the hope that I would be able to return on a working visa, finally, after being in the country for almost four months. I finished grades for all my students, begrudgingly since I felt that the school was seriously not doing its job in supporting me as a foreign teacher and therefore why should I do my job until they started doing theirs. But I did the grades anyway, submitted them to the college’s intranet and waited some more. Some teachers came by for a party at my place. We ate rat. It was actually a ton of fun. I felt less bad about the whole situation and the people involved. We all went out for karaoke. It was, again, a ton of fun. I felt a little less bad again. The dean in my department and others invited me to spend the Spring Festival with them in their hometowns when I returned from HK. I felt less bad again, and as the time for my leaving arrived I finally decided that whatever happened, whatever the reason was for why I was leaving with no guarantee that I would return, to wait in HK for some indeterminate amount of time for the Foreign Affairs Office to swap my paperwork so I could get the visa in HK — whatever happened, I was totally confident that there were people who really wanted me there, teaching, at the university. They did appreciate my presence, even if a behemoth bureaucratic system, and various slip-ups and textbook cases of miscommunication had seriously gotten in the way. I at least felt welcome, still, as I was leaving. Which helped. 

So with classes and grades and everything else done I packed up almost all of my stuff, or at least everything that I could carry, into two huge backpacks and a messenger bag and set out at 1:30 a.m. to catch the train that would take me to Shenzhen. One of the teachers picked me up and he very kindly waited with me at the train station and helped me find the train car when it arrived. Which was very lucky for me, because there was a lot of running and shouting involved. Apparently the trains tend to only stop for a couple of minutes at each station. So if you have over 100 pounds of gear on you it is not so easy to navigate, read the signs of trains, and try to process train stewardesses speaking Chinese. 

But it worked out. I got on the train, found my car, got into bed, and slept. I woke up at around 7 a.m. and looked out the window. The air outside was smoggy and the sun was up and the countryside looked almost as it had the day before, only a little flatter. We were moving away from the endless egg-crate-like mountains of Fujian, southwest, into Guangdong. There was still only one other passenger in the four-bed soft-sleeper room with me, a young woman, maybe about 23 or 24, with a pale, overwhelmed looking face and a soft voice. I had listened to her talk on the phone in a plaintive, almost whiney Chinese the night before. The only thing I had understood was “Wo hen kun, wo hen kun” — I’m very sleepy. I had been on the top bunk on the front end of the room, listening to Chinese lessons on my iPod as I fell asleep, while she was on the bottom bunk on the other side of the tiny room. I had also been able to smell the shampoo-scent of her hair, for some reason, whenever she moved. Probably because I already smelled like sweat and nerves. I don’t know why I was so worried about the whole thing, now, in retrospect. As I fell asleep, I was less worried than I had been at 11 p.m. earlier that night, waiting to get on the train.

After waking up at 7 a.m., I quickly fell back asleep and didn’t wake up again until 11 a.m. After an hour or so of reading I got up and moved around a bit, ate, read some more, and then finally decided to try to talk to the girl in the cab with me. Using Chinese, I managed to find out that we would be arriving at about 3:30 p.m., that she was also headed to Hong Kong via Shenzhen, that her parents lived in Hong Kong so she often went there, and that she was, amazingly, a secretary at the very college where I am a teacher. And that she had seen me around campus before. It occurred to me later, after she helped me find my way to customs and the subway to HK, that I never asked her for her name. But I’m hoping that next semester I will be able to find her and thank her. It was not easy for her, I’m sure, to communicate those very basic things to me in Chinese. And the last thing she told me, that once we got to the train station I would be able to tell where to go by the signs inside the station, I didn’t understand until after we actually got off the train and she pointed to a sign that said Hong Kong and she repeated the word — “biao1 zhi4″ that she had used so many times back in the train cabin, while I sat searching through my dictionary, befuddled — which word means “sign” (or as my dictionary defined it, to my confusion, “logo”), as in “YOU CAN JUST READ THE SIGNS”.

As a language teacher, I can totally and exhaustively sympathize with the frustration she must have felt trying to speak to me in Chinese, as I feel that frustration trying to speak to my students in English. But I also know from experience that speaking with someone of a different language takes practice, patience, and the ability to closely monitor your own words and simplify your sentences. Practice, that is, that you maybe only get if you’re a language learner or teacher. 

So, the train got to Shenzhen, I got off, I followed the girl through the train station, and finally we had to split at customs, where Hong Kongers and Chinese people split with foreigners. We waved and I said thank you, and I went to the foreigners customs area. 

The line for Hong Kongers and Chinese looked brutally long, but it took me about five minutes to pass through the foreigners line, and I walked straight down, again following the signs that said “Hong Kong”, to the LuoHu MTA station, used the ATM to get some HK Dollars, bought a subway ticket, and got on. This was when I finally started to get the surreal and exhilirating and confusing feeling that I was going back into something, essentially a kind of world that I had known before, for most of my life, but that I had been living very far away from, without realizing it, for quite some time. 

That description of what I felt sucks. It’s hard to describe. First there’s the fact that I hadn’t seen, looked in the eyes of, shaken the hand of, a native English speaker in four months…it feels strange to mention it, but honestly I also hadn’t seen a caucasian person in four months, which had been a quiet point of interest in my mind. It doesn’t matter at all, but it has relevance purely because of the undeniable role that my caucasian-ness had played in my life in Fujian. As in, people staring, people shouting hello, people continuously turning and saying to their friends, “Ni kan, laowai” — “Look, a foreigner” — wherever I went, all the time. And because of the fact that I had begun to wear my own skin differently, but had not had time or opportunity to reflect on the meaning of that, to step outside the situation, to see it all how I would have seen it if it were someone else experiencing it, not me. 

That’s what I started to think, standing on the subway, a few short miles from Hong Kong Island. I was suddenly very happy, for no one reason that I could pinpoint. I was smiling to myself, even as I realized that compared to all the clean, well-dressed, sophisticated Hong Kongers around me I looked decidedly shabby, my shoes were extremely dirty, and I did not exactly smell like something off a page of “Vanity Fair”. I was stinky, I had a huge load of bags with me on the subway, I was not sure exactly where my hostel was located and I was, despite the excessive sleep on the train, tired. But I was happy to be in Hong Kong. 

I was glad I had made it. 

: )