random pix: Songyuan foods

These are sold at little produce stalls all over Songyuan. I'd never seen them before, but they're called bayberries.

The flavor varies a lot from berry to berry depending on ripeness, but the most interesting thing is the texture. They're almost sinewy and they have a small, hard pits, like olives.

What could this possibly be?

Biggest durian ever!

Yes, you can order meat right off this carcass at the beer fest in front of my old school. Appetizing, no?

QRAX are for kids!

Reassuring huh?

random pix: hk visa trip

This was on my hotel bed... is it necessary to let me know the pillow is clean?!?!

Tallest bar in the world, 118th floor. Your ears pop in the elevator. Twice.

Hong Kong taxi drivers can open and close the back doors from the front seat with a button. Sweet.

World's coolest car park.

From the bus in Shenzhen, 5th icon down... no puking?

hēi shèhu

Also, there was some absolutely crazy stuff going on in Songyuan the last month I was there, some of it involving the Chinese mafia.

A bunch of us were out to dinner about a while ago and a really drunk Chinese man wandered into our room (we usually get seated in private dining rooms). He looked at the lot of us and immediately fixated on my Canadian friend. He somehow instantly knew he was from Canada and went on and on about how he loves Canada people and somewhere in his past (University perhaps) he had been very close with a "Canada man." The guy made us all drink with him and we ended up all having to stand up and basically leave mid conversation or he would have kept us there drinking forever.

Before we left, he got my Canadian friend's phone number. He called him a week or so later and invited him out to dinner, so my friend brought a few other foreigners and they all went out. Apparently the guy was again very intensely in love with my "Canada man" friend and also seemed to be pretty shady, mentioning hēi shèhu ties (which essentially amounts to Chinese gangsters). The other foreigners were weirded out and said they wouldn't go out with the guy again, assuming everyone felt the same.

My Canadian friend continued to keep in contact with him though for some reason or other, texting and going out to eat and such. Then, one day, the guy calls my friend and tells him to come outside his apartment. The guy has a Chinese girl there and tells my friend that she doesn't speak any English, but that he should take her upstairs to his apartment, have sex with her and send her on her way. Clearly, this chick is a prostitute. Apparently, this was not so clear to my friend, because he does it.

A few days later, he comes home from school to find the Chinese man, accompanied by two other, large Chinese thugs wielding baseball bats, waiting for him. They demand 5,000 yuan to pay for the hooker. My friend says he doesn't have any money, it's all in his apartment, so they march him up there, ransack the place and take all his money (11,000 yuan total).

Songyuan is a seriously small town. The fact that this happened there is absolutely crazy to me, but my friend was kind of asking for it. In the end, he went to the police a few times (the sex factor made it a "domestic dispute" so they didn't want to get involved), talked to my old boss and a few Chinese friends and ended up getting 5,000 yuan back. Soon after, he got fired.

random pix: racism

This is from a school in Xiamen that I had interviewed with and decided not to go with. I had forwarded them a friend of mine's resume, she's an amazing teacher. She also happens to be black.

visa lording, epilogue

After all the crap I've been through with my visa, I couldn't be done. Of course not. Not until I get away from this wreck of a school. I have tried for the past six months to not be super negative, just objective but honest on here about them, in case anyone from school (staff or students) was reading, but I am absolutely done at this point. DONE.

Where did I leave off this saga? Ah yes, after five months of jerking me around, my school FINALLY got my work visa in early July, making me legal with just one month left on my contract. The school got me a single entry visa, so leaving Hong Kong to come back to work used the entry, but documents you get after your visa essentially act as a new visa.

In order to get the visa in the first place, you must have a Work Permit and an Invitation Letter. After you get the work visa, you have 30 days to get a Foreign Expert Certificate and then a Residence Permit. The Residence Permit is a page in your passport, like a visa, and allows you to travel in and out of the country as you please, like a visa.

As soon as I got back from Hong Kong on July 11th, I was calling, texting, QQ messaging and just generally bothering the guy that handles all that kind of stuff at my school every day to stay on top of my paperwork because I was planning to leave the country August 1st when I finished my contract and I needed to be able to get back in. He kept saying he knew, everything was fine and I would have my paperwork in time.

Then on Thursday of last week, he took me to the police station to have my picture taken for something related to that. The picture was funny, they pulled my hair back, pinned my bangs back, powdered my face with white makeup, covered my clothes with a Chinese scarf and didn't let me smile. After the photo, he grabbed me to leave, but we hadn't been given anything, so I started asking questions. He pretending not to have enough English to answer me (I know he does) and made us go back to school to have a TA translate.

There, he told me that I wouldn't have my Foreign Expert Certificate until this Thursday... after I was already going to be gone. Which would mean no Residence Permit. Which would mean no getting back into China. Which I had a bit of a problem with. My pestering had clearly done nothing, if he'd started the paperwork right away, I'd have had everything no problem.

So, I made a big fuss. I talked to my school VP, the owner, the paper work guy and a bunch of the TAs. They all said they'd see what they could do. And then no one got back to me or gave me any answers or would even talk to me all weekend.

They were essentially screwing me over because I had no leverage any more, being pretty much done teaching. I had had a tourist visa that was valid until February for multiple entries, so I would have been fine, but that was invalidated when I got my work visa. After a bit of freaking out though, I came up with Plan B. In Bangkok, I was going to go to the Chinese Embassy and get a new tourist visa, thereby invalidating the work visa. The tourist visa would then be invalidated in three weeks again when I began at my new school. Convoluted and stupid, but my best option.

Then YESTERDAY (I leave China tomorrow morning mind you), the guy tells me they'll find someone to bribe or whatever and get it done (this is commonplace). He takes me to the police station in the morning for another photo for the Residence Permit. Then in the afternoon, he leaves for Changchun to finish the Foreign Expert Certificate process, which must be done there.

 

This morning, the school calls me and tells me that he needs my original university diploma for this. Pardon me, but shouldn't he have known that prior to leaving? It's not like he's never done this before... I brought it to school and they paid someone to drive it the two hours to him in Changchun. Such a ridiculous waste of money (not that I'm complaining there).

After that, I'm calling every few hours to ask when I'll get my passport, paperwork and diploma back from Changchun. Around 6pm, it turns out my passport has been at the police station here the whole time, but everything has gone through and I have everything I need (yay!). I just need the paperwork guy to return with my original diploma before 3:30am, when we essentially trade places and I leave Songyuan to go to Changchun to catch my flight to Bangkok.

What a cluster. It will literally be within HOURS of leaving the country that I finally have everything I need. So, so happy to be finished with this school.

visa lording, the final chapter

As I've mentioned again and again, my school is shady and unorganized. I had told my VP about my holiday in the beginning of May and sent her the dates mid May, via email. She never got back to me about whether or not she had any problems with them so whatever, I booked my ticket.

Then, the day before I was supposed to leave, she sent me the schedule for the coming week, and I was all over it. I reminded her that I would be gone, and asked her if my school owner wanted me to just go to Hong Kong (to get my visa) from Laos, since they're so close. Otherwise I would be coming back to Changchun just to turn around and fly right back to Hong Kong (he has promised to get my visa by July 10th, right at the end of my holiday). No answer. My plan was to pack up all my stuff and be ready to just go right to Xiamen if he flaked on getting my visa this time.

The first I heard from my school about my holiday, visa or anything was ten minutes before boarding my flight to Siem Reap. My school owner called me and said, "So I hear you're going on holiday..." He asked why he hadn't known, and I reminded him that he had told me to coordinate all holidays through the VP. So he called her and then called me back to say she had no idea that I was going either. Ugh.

Eventually, after much back and forth, I got him to agree to meet me in Hong Kong, so I would go straight from Vientiane, to get my visa.

My delayed flight out of Vientiane really messed up my whole traveling plan there. I was supposed to take a 2pm flight from Vientiane, Laos to Kunming, China and then grab a connection from Kunming to Shenzhen, where I could then just take an hour bus into Hong Kong. Sounds complicated, right?! now add a delay in there...

The delay meant that I missed my connection in Kunming; I arrived there at 3am instead of 5pm and slept in a hotel the airline put me up in for an hour and a half before catching my new flight out that next morning. I finally got into Hong Kong and went straight to the visa office, I arrived around 2pm instead of 10am. I was supposed to fly out of Shenzhen early the next afternoon, but visas take 24 hours to process, so that plan was out the window as well.

I stayed in a hotel in Hong Kong, got my visa the next day, got a bus into Shenzhen and was met by a friend of my school's owner. She was basically my babysitter for the evening in Shenzhen, she took me to dinner and a movie and I stayed in her apartment. She sent me on my way back to Changchun the next morning.

I was really excited to finally be legal until another crappy reality hit me. My contract with my school is over August 4th and I had planned to travel outside of China during the month of August. My new Z visa was valid for a single entry into China, so once I left Hong Kong and came back into China with it, that was it. I was HOPING I would be able to go to the local police station and add entries, but luckily, I have since discovered that another piece of paperwork, my Residence Permit, will allow me back in later. I am so glad that bs is all over, I'm legal, and I never have to go through that big of a hassle for it again!

Pakse/Vientiane (days 13-14)

The next day was a traveling day. I was flying out of Vientiane, Laos the day after, and that was a solid 12ish hours away. We took a three hour bus to Pakse, Laos and hung out there for a about five hours before catching the next bus to Vientiane. Pakse really didn't have a whole lot going for it. We mostly aimlessly wandered with another guy we had seen around Don Det that was also on our bus.

The gold thing on the mountain is a crazy huge Buddha.

Wild boar!

Our bus from Pakse to Vientiane was a sleeper bus with double beds that we rode overnight. Each bed had two "seats", so if you were traveling alone (like our friend), you were going to end up sleeping in the same bed as a stranger. Like all the buses, the roads and drivers were completely nuts and unsafe, so if we hadn't had my sleeping pills it would have been a really long night.

We arrived in Vientiane at 7am and went to our hotel to take a nap before showering and sending me off on my 2pm flight. We got to the airport an hour early and were told my flight was delayed at least six hours, so we had some time to play in Vientiane. We got ridiculously massages, wandered around the riverfront market and had an amazing Italian dinner before I left. All said and done my flight was delayed nine hours, and it made for a great last day.