First off, I officially have clearance to enter China legally!!! The visa paperwork arrived on Monday and today I spent the day in New York City at the Chinese Consulate getting my visa approved. Now, for those of you who have never been, there is no straightforward way to enter because the sidewalk is divided by metal barriers which can only be entered from the sides of the building. Of course, for a person with my caliber of intelligence, it took me about 5 mins to figure out how to get into the building. Whilst I was wondering outside the building, I heard loud shouting and hollering. I normally would've just ignored the shouting since I was in NYC, and people do strange things there all the time (today I saw a fully grown male in a Jane costume. As in Tarzan's Jane. Without shaving his copious amounts of body hair. He was also wearing earrings. It was weird); however, it sounded like Chinese people were doing the yelling so I had to listen in. I soon realize there was a Free Tibet protest across the street! Needless to say, that made entering the consulate rather embarrassing, what with people screaming about bloody Olympics, Chinese genocide, and something or other about the Dalai Lama (quick fieldtrip for everyone, go to the Google and use it to look up Xinhua's (the official Chinese news agency) interpretation of the Tibetan protests. Interesting stuff). Getting into the embassy I had to show my passport, go through a metal detector, and they made me check my camera. Unless they thought it was a bomb, I don't understand the no camera rule; the place looked like a DMV, except there were a bunch of Chinese people in there. Whatever. Anyway, I got stuck in traffic so I didn't get to the embassy until after noon and was fearful they wouldn't be able to process my application in the same day (for a fee of course, gotta love those pseudo- communist capitalists!). However, the paperwork was taken care of in less than two hours and I now have a shiny (not really) new visa inside my passport! How exciting! I also realize I need to start going places other than China. 15 pages of my passport have been used, and I think China has 9 of those pages. So now that I'm legal, and my plane leaves Tuesday morning, I have pretty much no time to get everything together to live in China for 11 months. Good times. I'll attempt to post an update before I depart, but I make no promises.
P.S. Alex started his own blog, which I presume means he won't be guesting here any more, and good riddance! Anyway, here's the link to his blogpiece. I plan on posting a rebuttal to his interpretation of the Beijing Opening Ceremonies, but I fear by the time I get to it, it'll be old hat and I won't remember my specific points. In case I don't get around to making said post, I disagree with his opinion.
P.P.S. I'm thinking of changing the URL because, you know, having my last name attached to a blog on which I frequently go on profanity laced tirades about a myriad of subjects may not be the smartest thing I've ever done, so if, for some reason, you have this favorited, it may not work in the future.
P.P.S. While typing that last P.P.S., I accidentally deleted the screen and was pissed that I was going to have to rewrite the whole post again, which would've been disastrous. Luckily Blogger is retard proof and saved a draft of the post.
No comments:
Post a Comment