Chinese Red-Tape

Anyone out there know how to get a Chinese tourist visa? Anyone? Anyone?

I've spent the past hour in the company of the friendly recorded voices who answer the phone at the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco. I kept telling them I'd already checked out their website and could I pretty please talk to a real person? but they kept insisting that everything I needed to know was on their website. Which is not pretty. Or informative. Or helpful. Or any of the things an Official Consulate website should be. Go see for yourself.

Because Phillip and I, proving that we have completely lost our minds, are planning to spend three weeks in Xi'an around the end of August and beginning of September and we need that visa! We also need plane tickets and maybe some shots and I am definitely going to need some Valium to get me all the way across the Pacific Ocean.

A month or two ago our English teacher friends in China proposed that Phil and I take some time off to hang with a fellow teacher friend of theirs who is moving to Xi'an. Let's call this friend Blondie, because that was pretty much all I knew about her- she's the blond chick who works with our English teacher friends. Okay, so Blondie was going to move and teach in Xi'an, but she'd be there alone for six weeks before her new colleagues would show up. What was Blondie to do? Did we want to go to Xi'an and be her Substitute Friends?

My reaction, upon reading this email from my English teacher friend, was along the lines of, "She has GOT to be kidding me, right?" What was oh-so-serendipitous was the fact that Phillip happened to be in my office fixing computers when I read the email. And when I read it to him, he was all, "That could be cool..."

Fast forward to today, where I am feverishly trying to figure out if I can mail my visa application to the consulate or NOT. I am tempted to believe the friendly recorded voices who tell me to go on ahead and mail my application and my photo and my gajillion dollars for a tourist visa. But then there's the aforementioned un-pretty and un-helpful website that says in big red letters: ALL MAILED APPLICATIONS WILL BE RETURNED. And then gives you the link to download the application should you care to fly yourself down to San Francisco and turn it in yourself.

Comments

[matt]

my teapot (well, your teapot) made the blog!
sweet.