Red tape

We've had a lot of red tape to deal with recently...

Let me see if I can remember some of the fun to share with you...

Currently, we're having to deal with getting visas for returning to China in September. Because Jay's passport expires like April 2010, we have to go to Shanghai to renew his passport before Zhejiang Normal can issue us new visas.

Also, ZUCC scheduled our current visa to expire on July 18th, even though all the foreign teachers will be completely done with their duties more than a month earlier. Apparently, there's some rule that stipulates we can't begin the next visa process until two weeks prior to the expiration of the current visa...which means that we get some extra time to tour Hangzhou and move into our new home in Jinhua! We were planning on staying a bit longer, but I don't know if we'd have chosen to stay a whole month. :)

We nearly 'lost' our return tickets home! We bought our tickets from some shady looking website that looks like a fly-by-night deal...not the first time we've taken a bit more of a risk in order to try and get rock-bottom prices on tickets. I think this was the second time in a row we've gone a bit riskier path to get tickets. This particular group (sponsored by some company named Trilix - I have found a couple of other shady looking websites also sponsored by Trilix) appears to no longer be in existence. The parent company, Trilix is seemingly impossible to find contact information for. We discussed when we purchased the tickets how we thought it was possible we might end up getting scammed. Everything seems to be in order now, but because our travel agent didn't exist any longer, it was a bit difficult to get our e-ticket numbers to give to the airline so they could find our reservation. :) We eventually had a tip from one of the airline representatives to call our credit card company, who were able to look up the ticket number in their system! We had the original e-mails from when we purchased the tickets, but they didn't have any of the information we needed....For a while there, it really did look like we were going to have to buy one-way tickets home! We still have to purchase Joseph's ticket, as well as reserve Audriana's - there was a slight hiccup in getting Audriana's ticket reservation as she had a paper ticket. Our flights home are scheduled for July 4th - which means we'll miss the festivities for Independence Day, but that was the earliest the officials at Zhejiang Normal thought they'd have time to get the visa process completed. Actually, we scheduled the tickets for one day earlier than the earliest day mentioned by our new school. They had even mentioned waiting until perhaps the 15th of July!

Fun fun. I wonder why they call it 'red tape' anyway?