Coming to teach in China was more or less a spur of the moment decision. A good friend had tried to help me get a teaching job in Korea, but my lack of a BS made it impossible (or difficult) to get the appropriate visa. Because of my experience getting deported from México in high school because I had the wrong visa, I decided not to fiddle around with it.
I was offered a quite comfy sounding job in Changchun, China, which, after researching the school to the best of my ability, I accepted. The only catch? I needed to get to China in about a week.
China requires that travelers from America have a visa before they get to the country. The visas can only be issued by the five Chinese consulates in US, which are located in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and New York. Since the majority of the country isn’t in any of those five cities, the Chinese government offers a visa-by-mail application process. In most cases, this is fine, but since the turnaround time using this method is 2-3 weeks, it wouldn’t have worked for me. I had to enlist the aid of a visa courier service. What visa couriers do is physically take your passport and application paperwork to a consulate to get it done in person, and then mail it back to you. Through a visa courier service and overnight mail I could have my passport with brand-new Chinese visa back in as little as two business days.
I only found out later that the Chinese Embassy has a list of “legitimately registered travel/visa agents” online, so my choice of Houston’s BestVisaService.com as my visa courier wasn’t as informed as it could have been. To make matters even more sketchy, I chose them almost entirely because they were the cheapest courier service I could find through Google. This was, probably, a bad decision; when it comes to something like a passport and desperately-needed visa, the least expensive option on the block may not always be the best choice. However, at the time I felt (a) cheap (though with me that isn’t really a condition that comes and goes) and (b) irritated at the thought that any housewife in Houston could call herself a visa service and charge someone like me $80 for driving down to a consulate in the morning, dropping off and picking up a passport with paperwork, and then dropping it off at the post office. So off to BestVisaService.com by UPS overnight went my application. I sent it on Thursday, expecting to have it back Saturday or Monday. I didn’t hear anything from them at all by Monday and got extremely nervous. After looking up their address on Google Maps and seeing an empty field, I was ready to report the passport stolen and get a new one issued. I called them Tuesday, and I was assured that the passport would arrive Wednesday. Because of Enumclaw’s rural location, “overnight” Express Mail via USPS takes two days, delaying the delivery of the passport from Tuesday to Wednesday, something that wasn’t BestVisaService.com’s fault. However, it wouldn’t have killed them to send me an email to let me know what they’re doing with my oh-so-precious passport.
I used FlyChina for my last minute ticket. Even though there’s the hassle of having to send in payment information by fax, they were a great company to do business with. Doris, the lady I worked with, went above and beyond correcting an error they’d made in my itinerary, and doing everything possible to get me my tickets (ordered on Wednesday) to me in time for my Friday evening flight. She pretty much bent over backwards to save me $15 on the cost of overnight shipping (which, as mentioned above, tends not to really be “overnight” to Enumclaw), which made a deep, lasting impression on me. I really, really appreciate someone else going out of their way to help me to be cheap.
The tickets arrived Friday morning, I spent the day sorting and packing, and that night I was off…to Los Angeles, where there was a five hour layover. Ari, Brian, and Randy met up with me and we had a FEAST at Canter’s on Fairfax. I got an “I [heart] Canter’s” shirt to wear in China–I plan to have my picture taken in it on the Great Wall.
After the FEAST it was off to LAX for my flight to Beijing, and then a short flight up north to Changchun…and excitement ensued.
Technorati Tags: China, visa courier, Changchun
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
OMG CANTERS. OMG
I hope youre having fun!! I am excited to hear more about your experiences in china!
I hope you’ve got indigestion!!
Hi Luke, what a wonderful opportunity you have, traveling abroad makes for well rounded education.
Of course you had quite a bit of stress getting off. But now as you look back you can see what you could have done better. Hind sight is always better than foresight. Now, starts the fun, I know you are up to the chalanges that will come while you are there.
Don is much the same, sleeping a lot. the girls come every weekend and sometimes during the week. I will keep in touch with you through this web site. Take care and know you are well loved.
Don & Sylvia