I know it's been a while since I've posted. It's been a busy month here. The city is slowly going back to normal after the Olympics, although my street remains closed to traffic most of the time (frustrating and inconvenient!).
Aside from that, our life has been a whirlwind of activities. There seems to be a party almost every weekend as well as dinners, lunches, badminton with colleagues, dance classes to get ready for the upcoming St. Andrew's Ball (a black-tie Scottish dinner/dance hosted by the Beijing Caledonian Society). Also coming up is the Marine Ball, another black-tie (or, in my husband's case dress uniform) event celebrating the birthday of the Marines.
Preparation for such affairs is a little more elaborate (although considerably cheaper) here than at home. Instead of heading to Macy's or your department store of choice, evening gowns are made to order by your favorite tailor. To the Marine Ball in a couple of weeks I will wear a long-sleeved top of sheer black silk layered over red silk with a floor-length, tailored, black silk skirt. The St. Andrew's Ball will require a little more inventiveness and definitely an expedition to the gigantic fabric market where $20-$30 will buy yards and yards of beautiful fabrics. Another $30-$50 will get them made into your dream dress.
Also on the drawing board is some upcoming travel. The weekend after next Ben and I head to a tiny village in rural Yunan province to work on a Habitat for Humanity project. Then, after the Marine Ball, Ben heads out for a trip along the Silk Road. I will join him in Xi'an to see the stone soldiers if at all possible.
That's about it for now. Hopefully next time I'll have pictures from the Habitat trip. Bye from Beijing...
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Friday, October 3, 2008
Holiday Madness
This week is National Day, the annual holiday celebrating the PRC's (People's Republic of China) nationhood. I don't know exactly how people celebrate the holiday other than the week they get off work. As far as I can tell there isn't much national or patriotic feeling - mostly people are just glad to have an all-too-rare break from work. As far as I can tell, most Chinese businesses give their employees a one week holiday at National Day, a one week holiday at Chinese New Year (late January or early February) and one day off for mid-Autumn festival. Chinese employees may get some discretionary time off but usually it is quite limited. Time off here makes the 2-3 weeks of paid vacation plus 10-12 company holidays I'm used to in the US seem quite generous (not to mention the 5+ weeks of vacatioon and many holidays most Europeans get!). Not only is the time off so limited (and inflexible), the week-long break for National Day isn't really a week-long break. In order to have 7 consecutive days off (five business days plus a weekend), Chinese employees are required to work the preceding weekend so the advertised 5-day holiday really only amounts to three days off. Thank goodness I'm not Chinese! Lucky for me, my employer grants expats flexible leave time so we can work through Chinese holidays (and not on weekends!) and take time off to celebrate our own holidays (or at other times as we choose).
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
The Visa Nightmare
I reported in my first post on the hassle of dealing with the Chinese bureaucracy especially with regard to obtaining a visa. The result of the first round was that I arrived in China carrying an 'F' visa, the type normally issued to visitors coming to do temporary business (e.g. attend a meeting) here. It allowed me to start work but had the significant defect that it allowed me to stay in the country for no more than thirty days at a time. Obviously leaving the country once a month was pretty inconvenient. The visa administrator at work figured the thing to do was wait until after the Olympics when, presumably, the restrictions that made it so difficult to get visas would be lifted.
In the meantime, my company opened a "representative office" in Tianjin. Visas are controlled at a local or regional level, not at the national level here. Consequently a restriction on visas in Beijing does not mean that its neighbor, Tianjin, is not issuing visas. Since Beijing has not lifted its restrictions (it currently allocates five work permits to my employer, although we have around a dozen expat employees) I (along with two other foreigners hired this summer) had to apply for my permanent work permit in Tianjin. The process went like this...
First my company had to do a bunch of paperwork which resulted in an official letter of invitation. I had to take that invitation letter (within three days of the date of issuance) to a Chinese embassy. Yes, that's right...an embassy. That means I had to leave the country to apply for the new visa. Seoul is the nearest option so that's where I went.
We flew in Sunday evening. First thing Monday morning we headed for the embassy. Thirty minutes later the taxi dropped us outside a drab doorway in the pouring rain. A guard blocked our way as moved to enter and pointed at a tiny sign posted high on the wall. Although we were at the address given on the website for the visa section of the Embassy, the sign informed us that visa applications were to be done at the consular section located elsewhere. We carefully copied the address and hailed another cab. We headed back the way we had come and were deposited no more than five minutes from our hotel. At the top of the steep driveway down to the building we were accosted by a lady offering visa agent services. We declined and proceeded to the gate. The guard pointed us to another tiny sign "All visa applications must be handled by an agent." Now soaked to the skin we returned to the agent at the top of the driveway. As she led us down the street to her office she informed us that the application would take three to four months. Obviously not acceptable! My office told me I should be able to get it processed in 24 hours or, at worst, 48. The agent left us sitting on a tiny couch in her office while her colleague made some phone calls. A quarter of an hour later she informed us that the embassy was only processing applications from Korean citizens. There was nothing she could do. Cold, wet and thoroughly frustrated we decided to have one more go at handling the application ourselves. We returned to the gate and vigorously waved our US passports in the guard's face. When he couldn't dissuade us, he reluctantly let us pass. Once we actually made it into the visa office things couldn't have been easier. The requirement that visas applications be handled by agents meant there were very few people in the office (although those that were there all had huge stacks of passports). We located a form (which by now I am expert in filling out in just the right way), and deposited it and my passport at the drop-off window. Sure enough, within two days my new visa was ready to go.
Application for a "Z" visa, the type needed for long-term work in China, results in a single-entry, 30-day visa. Once back in China you must apply for a work permit and residence permit. Since my visa was issued by Tianjin I had to go through the process there. If all had gone according to plan this could have been accomplished with three trips to Tianjin over the course of about a week and a half. Of course, all did not go according to plan.
The Sunday evening after I returned from Korea I left, accompanied by an administrator from my office, for Tianjin. Until recently Tianjin was a two-hour train ride from Beijing. Thanks to the bullet train which began operation at the beginning of August, it is now about 30 minutes (excluding, of course, the 45+ minutes it takes to get from my apartment to the train station or the 30+ minutes of driving time at the other end to get to wherever we are going). The plan was to make a series of stops Monday morning culminating with a visit to the International Medical Clinic for the required health check. One must arrive at the clinic before 10:30 AM to go through the health check procedure so we started out very early on Monday. We arrived at a small office in an undistinguished building at 8 AM where we collected some papers which remain a mystery to me. Our next stop was my "local" police station - aka the police station local to a colleague who lives in Tianjin and who has kindly allowed all of us to register as living in his apartment. In order to be eligible for the health check one must be registered with the police. My colleague met us there to show the police his registration papers. Unfortunately for us, the one officer capable of registering a foreigner had opted not to come to work that day, although my office had called Friday afternoon to be certain he would be there. That effectively ended our progress for the day. Since it was not yet 9 AM and we clearly had no hope of making more progress (steps must be done strictly in order) we returned to Beijing.
Tuesday my office called to confirm that the officer we needed to see would be present. We were assured he would be available in the afternoon so we returned to Tianjin for the second time. We did, eventually manage to complete the police registration and arrived at the Inbound Bureau just in the nick of time for me to have the "interview" required to obtain the paper authorizing the health check. The "interview" was a two minute affair during which I said not a word. The administrator my office sent to help me through the process appears to have done nothing more than tell the officer the address and phone number of our Tianjin office. He wrote something on a form (in triplicate), which we carried to a counter where we paid a fee. We then took the form and the receipt to another counter where the lady wrote something on another form. Since it was, by then, late afternoon (far past the 10:30 AM deadline for the health check) we returned once more to Beijing. Wednesday we caught a very early train to Tianjin to ensure we would arrive in plenty of time for the health check. As I recall we made one more stop at yet another office for yet another form before proceeding to the clinic. We arrived at a madhouse. It turned out to be just a few days before the local university started its fall session and they had bussed in all their foreign students to get their health checks. There must have been at least 100 people crammed into a room no more than 30 feet by 18. The first stop was a table at one end of the room to collect a form. I filled out the form and we handed it back to the lady at the table (one lady at one table serving all those people) who pasted on one of the requisite passport photos and returned the form to be taken to the registration window. Although I had already asked whether the health check paperwork that I had submitted for the visa application in Korea would be sufficient I decided to ask once more. My companion took the papers and disappeared to ask. At this point the story departs the realm of the merely aggravating and enters the land of the truly absurd. She came back and reported that the papers would, indeed, have been sufficient except that the clinic where the check had been performed had neglected to stamp the photo. Mind you, every page of the packet must have had at least a dozen stamps. The Chinese are inordinately fond of stamps and nothing is considered official unless it is stamped with the legal and official stamp of the authenticating authority. Knowing the fondness for stamps, I had asked the clinic (operated by the American embassy and therefore not precisely familiar with the vagaries of the Chinese requirements) to stamp every single location where they had entered any information. They were quite obliging and my paperwork had as many stamps as we could conceive of needing. Not, apparently, enough. I asked the obvious next question...instead of fighting the crowd (there is no such thing as an orderly line in China), couldn't I just take the forms back to the clinic and get the photo stamped. The answer..."no!" It was too late, I had filled out the form requesting the health check and now would be required to complete the health check at the Tianjin clinic (I wasn't even registered in the computer yet, but that didn't seem to matter). So it was that an hour and a half later I finally managed to battle my way to the front of the crowd, shove my form into the hands of the single registrar and get the swipe card that would carry me through the steps of the health check. Before proceeding, though, I had, of course, to pay the fee. The cashier's counter was to the right of the raging hoard, the relative calm of the clinic itself to the left. A massively dumb arrangement. I had first to fight my way out of the crowd to pay, then fight back through the crowd to go actually get checked out.
Visiting a Chinese clinic is not at all like visiting a US clinic. Health authorities in the US would have shut this clinic down in a heartbeat. The floors were filthy and gritty underfoot. Table coverings, etc. were unwashed and used repeatedly - no disposable paper here. Each station (blood draw, x-ray, height and weight, etc.) had its own room. There were no private exam rooms, the line of people waiting their turn at each station was right there with you in the room. Although the needle and test tubes used for the blood draw were sanitary, the holder used to hold the test tubes was reused from patient to patient and the little cups for urine samples were not hermetically sealed to avoid contamination (and, like most public bathrooms in China, no toilet paper was provided). Although I have, by choice, sought treatment in another Chinese clinic (more on that another time), I would not care to repeat this experience! Having finished the ordeal it was time to return to Beijing. Nothing further could be done until the results of the exam were complete.
We returned to Tianjin early the following week to collect the results of my health check. These we brought to another office where we applied for my work permit. We arrived at the application counter only to be informed that we needed two photocopies of some document, not one. My companion headed back downstairs to the copy center to have a second photocopy made while I waited at the counter. The lady piled my papers neatly together and left them sitting on the counter. When my companion returned with the photocopy the lady at the counter resumed processing the documents. She then spent nearly 30 minutes typing data into the computer. Don't ask me why she couldn't have gotten started while Judy ran down to make the other photocopy! Eventually, though, the data was duly entered, various forms were printed, photos affixed (I think I probably used about 15 passport photos in this process), and everything was thoroughly covered with the omnipotent red stamps.
Time to head back the Inbound Bureau. There I had more photos taken, some printed and a copy even provided on floppy disc (yes, really, floppy disk!). I completed the application for a residence permit, waited in a long line and, eventually, deposited the paperwork, my passport, photographs (less the apparently irrelevant although mandatory floppy disc copy), work permit, health documents and all with a visa officer. So much for trip four.
I had another week to wait before making my final trip to Tianjin to collect my completed residence permit. After more than two hours of travel, it took all of about five minutes to collect my documents. I was thrilled to have them back and know the endless back-and-forth was over. The thrill lasted just until I opened my passport to confirm the visa was in order. To my horror I discovered that although the work permit office had given me a one-year work permit, the Inbound Bureau only saw fit to issue my a six-month residence permit. My stomach dropped as I realized I would have to face the process again in March.
Frustrated in Beijing...bye for now.
In the meantime, my company opened a "representative office" in Tianjin. Visas are controlled at a local or regional level, not at the national level here. Consequently a restriction on visas in Beijing does not mean that its neighbor, Tianjin, is not issuing visas. Since Beijing has not lifted its restrictions (it currently allocates five work permits to my employer, although we have around a dozen expat employees) I (along with two other foreigners hired this summer) had to apply for my permanent work permit in Tianjin. The process went like this...
First my company had to do a bunch of paperwork which resulted in an official letter of invitation. I had to take that invitation letter (within three days of the date of issuance) to a Chinese embassy. Yes, that's right...an embassy. That means I had to leave the country to apply for the new visa. Seoul is the nearest option so that's where I went.
We flew in Sunday evening. First thing Monday morning we headed for the embassy. Thirty minutes later the taxi dropped us outside a drab doorway in the pouring rain. A guard blocked our way as moved to enter and pointed at a tiny sign posted high on the wall. Although we were at the address given on the website for the visa section of the Embassy, the sign informed us that visa applications were to be done at the consular section located elsewhere. We carefully copied the address and hailed another cab. We headed back the way we had come and were deposited no more than five minutes from our hotel. At the top of the steep driveway down to the building we were accosted by a lady offering visa agent services. We declined and proceeded to the gate. The guard pointed us to another tiny sign "All visa applications must be handled by an agent." Now soaked to the skin we returned to the agent at the top of the driveway. As she led us down the street to her office she informed us that the application would take three to four months. Obviously not acceptable! My office told me I should be able to get it processed in 24 hours or, at worst, 48. The agent left us sitting on a tiny couch in her office while her colleague made some phone calls. A quarter of an hour later she informed us that the embassy was only processing applications from Korean citizens. There was nothing she could do. Cold, wet and thoroughly frustrated we decided to have one more go at handling the application ourselves. We returned to the gate and vigorously waved our US passports in the guard's face. When he couldn't dissuade us, he reluctantly let us pass. Once we actually made it into the visa office things couldn't have been easier. The requirement that visas applications be handled by agents meant there were very few people in the office (although those that were there all had huge stacks of passports). We located a form (which by now I am expert in filling out in just the right way), and deposited it and my passport at the drop-off window. Sure enough, within two days my new visa was ready to go.
Application for a "Z" visa, the type needed for long-term work in China, results in a single-entry, 30-day visa. Once back in China you must apply for a work permit and residence permit. Since my visa was issued by Tianjin I had to go through the process there. If all had gone according to plan this could have been accomplished with three trips to Tianjin over the course of about a week and a half. Of course, all did not go according to plan.
The Sunday evening after I returned from Korea I left, accompanied by an administrator from my office, for Tianjin. Until recently Tianjin was a two-hour train ride from Beijing. Thanks to the bullet train which began operation at the beginning of August, it is now about 30 minutes (excluding, of course, the 45+ minutes it takes to get from my apartment to the train station or the 30+ minutes of driving time at the other end to get to wherever we are going). The plan was to make a series of stops Monday morning culminating with a visit to the International Medical Clinic for the required health check. One must arrive at the clinic before 10:30 AM to go through the health check procedure so we started out very early on Monday. We arrived at a small office in an undistinguished building at 8 AM where we collected some papers which remain a mystery to me. Our next stop was my "local" police station - aka the police station local to a colleague who lives in Tianjin and who has kindly allowed all of us to register as living in his apartment. In order to be eligible for the health check one must be registered with the police. My colleague met us there to show the police his registration papers. Unfortunately for us, the one officer capable of registering a foreigner had opted not to come to work that day, although my office had called Friday afternoon to be certain he would be there. That effectively ended our progress for the day. Since it was not yet 9 AM and we clearly had no hope of making more progress (steps must be done strictly in order) we returned to Beijing.
Tuesday my office called to confirm that the officer we needed to see would be present. We were assured he would be available in the afternoon so we returned to Tianjin for the second time. We did, eventually manage to complete the police registration and arrived at the Inbound Bureau just in the nick of time for me to have the "interview" required to obtain the paper authorizing the health check. The "interview" was a two minute affair during which I said not a word. The administrator my office sent to help me through the process appears to have done nothing more than tell the officer the address and phone number of our Tianjin office. He wrote something on a form (in triplicate), which we carried to a counter where we paid a fee. We then took the form and the receipt to another counter where the lady wrote something on another form. Since it was, by then, late afternoon (far past the 10:30 AM deadline for the health check) we returned once more to Beijing. Wednesday we caught a very early train to Tianjin to ensure we would arrive in plenty of time for the health check. As I recall we made one more stop at yet another office for yet another form before proceeding to the clinic. We arrived at a madhouse. It turned out to be just a few days before the local university started its fall session and they had bussed in all their foreign students to get their health checks. There must have been at least 100 people crammed into a room no more than 30 feet by 18. The first stop was a table at one end of the room to collect a form. I filled out the form and we handed it back to the lady at the table (one lady at one table serving all those people) who pasted on one of the requisite passport photos and returned the form to be taken to the registration window. Although I had already asked whether the health check paperwork that I had submitted for the visa application in Korea would be sufficient I decided to ask once more. My companion took the papers and disappeared to ask. At this point the story departs the realm of the merely aggravating and enters the land of the truly absurd. She came back and reported that the papers would, indeed, have been sufficient except that the clinic where the check had been performed had neglected to stamp the photo. Mind you, every page of the packet must have had at least a dozen stamps. The Chinese are inordinately fond of stamps and nothing is considered official unless it is stamped with the legal and official stamp of the authenticating authority. Knowing the fondness for stamps, I had asked the clinic (operated by the American embassy and therefore not precisely familiar with the vagaries of the Chinese requirements) to stamp every single location where they had entered any information. They were quite obliging and my paperwork had as many stamps as we could conceive of needing. Not, apparently, enough. I asked the obvious next question...instead of fighting the crowd (there is no such thing as an orderly line in China), couldn't I just take the forms back to the clinic and get the photo stamped. The answer..."no!" It was too late, I had filled out the form requesting the health check and now would be required to complete the health check at the Tianjin clinic (I wasn't even registered in the computer yet, but that didn't seem to matter). So it was that an hour and a half later I finally managed to battle my way to the front of the crowd, shove my form into the hands of the single registrar and get the swipe card that would carry me through the steps of the health check. Before proceeding, though, I had, of course, to pay the fee. The cashier's counter was to the right of the raging hoard, the relative calm of the clinic itself to the left. A massively dumb arrangement. I had first to fight my way out of the crowd to pay, then fight back through the crowd to go actually get checked out.
Visiting a Chinese clinic is not at all like visiting a US clinic. Health authorities in the US would have shut this clinic down in a heartbeat. The floors were filthy and gritty underfoot. Table coverings, etc. were unwashed and used repeatedly - no disposable paper here. Each station (blood draw, x-ray, height and weight, etc.) had its own room. There were no private exam rooms, the line of people waiting their turn at each station was right there with you in the room. Although the needle and test tubes used for the blood draw were sanitary, the holder used to hold the test tubes was reused from patient to patient and the little cups for urine samples were not hermetically sealed to avoid contamination (and, like most public bathrooms in China, no toilet paper was provided). Although I have, by choice, sought treatment in another Chinese clinic (more on that another time), I would not care to repeat this experience! Having finished the ordeal it was time to return to Beijing. Nothing further could be done until the results of the exam were complete.
We returned to Tianjin early the following week to collect the results of my health check. These we brought to another office where we applied for my work permit. We arrived at the application counter only to be informed that we needed two photocopies of some document, not one. My companion headed back downstairs to the copy center to have a second photocopy made while I waited at the counter. The lady piled my papers neatly together and left them sitting on the counter. When my companion returned with the photocopy the lady at the counter resumed processing the documents. She then spent nearly 30 minutes typing data into the computer. Don't ask me why she couldn't have gotten started while Judy ran down to make the other photocopy! Eventually, though, the data was duly entered, various forms were printed, photos affixed (I think I probably used about 15 passport photos in this process), and everything was thoroughly covered with the omnipotent red stamps.
Time to head back the Inbound Bureau. There I had more photos taken, some printed and a copy even provided on floppy disc (yes, really, floppy disk!). I completed the application for a residence permit, waited in a long line and, eventually, deposited the paperwork, my passport, photographs (less the apparently irrelevant although mandatory floppy disc copy), work permit, health documents and all with a visa officer. So much for trip four.
I had another week to wait before making my final trip to Tianjin to collect my completed residence permit. After more than two hours of travel, it took all of about five minutes to collect my documents. I was thrilled to have them back and know the endless back-and-forth was over. The thrill lasted just until I opened my passport to confirm the visa was in order. To my horror I discovered that although the work permit office had given me a one-year work permit, the Inbound Bureau only saw fit to issue my a six-month residence permit. My stomach dropped as I realized I would have to face the process again in March.
Frustrated in Beijing...bye for now.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
