Adventures By Design

As our four or five loyal readers should already know, we are moving to Suzhou, China in a couple of days. Moving across the planet entails quite a lot of planning and preparation, something the LB’s (LaMonte-Bird’s) are not really known for. This is our second time making such a move (the first time was to Seoul, South Korea) so you’d think we’d be better at it this time. Not so much. Having no fixed address for six months before the move hasn’t really helped the situation, plus this time we have to arrange for Inca (our furry companion) to make the move with us. (Aren’t we full of excuses?)

One of the most important prerequisites to making this move happen is the Chinese government letting us into their country. Before they’ll let us in we need employment visas fixed securely in our passports, which has been a bit of an adventure.

The first roadblock came up way back in March when we realized that the school in China wanted us to have passports with loads of empty pages and at least two years before expiry. We found this out when we were in Chatham, Ontario, and only had a couple days before our flight left for Bangkok. This led to a few fruitless phone calls to the passport office followed by several trips to the office in Toronto, and the payment of exorbitant fees to rush a new passport. Things worked out, although we’re still considering giving the bill to the school.

So off to southeast Asia we went, initially without plans to return to Canada before moving to China. The school told us that we could apply for our visas from anywhere so we figured we would do it somewhere with a Chinese embassy while traveling. After a couple of months though we were getting a little homesick and wanted to get back for a visit with family and friends before we went to China. We also missed Inca far more than we thought we would and wanted to go back to see her and bring her to China ourselves. After going through a lot of trouble getting our visas in Canada we are so glad that we decided to do it in a country where we are citizens and speak the language!!

We arrived back in Vancouver on July 16th, but decided to apply for our visas at the Chinese consulate in Calgary, since we would be spending the most time there. A couple days after arriving in Calgary we thought we had all our papers in order so we headed down to the consulate. We were pleasantly surprised by the small line-up inside, and soon it was our turn at the counter. Unfortunately, the man on the other side of the glass gave our papers only a cursory glance before passing everything back to us along with a medical form to be completed by a doctor… blast!

We left the consulate discouraged and headed out the next day to get the medical forms completed. Sadly, since we aren’t Canadian residents, we no longer have any provincial health coverage and had to pay all the costs of the extensive check-up ourselves. The basic physical was simple (and fairly cheap) but the blood tests for AIDS, syphilis, and Hepatitis, as well as the chest x-rays and EKGs added up! We also had to go to a couple of different labs to get everything done. Once again we are considering giving the bill to the school!

Though the tests were a pain to get done (sometimes literally) the biggest problem was that some of the results could take up to two weeks to come back. We didn’t have two weeks. At this point we were getting pretty stressed, but there was nothing we could to do to speed up the process. We checked in at the clinic every couple of days (I’m sure they were as sick of seeing us as we were of going).

All our results finally came back on Tuesday, the day before we were supposed to leave Calgary. Luckily for us though some of our plans got changed and we could leave two days later without missing anyone. We went into the consulate on Wednesday morning, with all our papers in order (hopefully). By this time it was two days before the Olympics were starting and the place was packed. We waited for over an hour until it was finally our turn at the counter. With bated breath we handed over all our documents and waited while the man silently looked them over. He flipped through them, changed the order of a few, stapled some stuff together, and finally started writing out a receipt that we could use to reclaim our passports the next day. He handed over the receipt, still without a word. He only spoke to answer our question confirming that our visas would be ready the next morning… gotta love bureaucrats!

With receipt in hand we headed back to the consulate the next day, still nervous that something was going to go wrong. The place was packed again, but this time we got to wait in the short line! After only 30 minutes or so we gave our receipt to the man behind the glass, he rummaged around for a while, and finally handed over our passports without any trouble. He asked for $170 for the visas, including $70 for a one-day rush (yet another bill for the school), but Gin had thought it would cost $400 and had that much ready. In her excitement she handed over way too much money. The man behind the counter jokingly thanked Gin for her generous donation before giving it back, wow, some bureaucrats do have senses of humor!! Before leaving the building Gin stopped to check her passport, not confident until she had visual confirmation of the visa’s presence… whew, it was there!

With 11 days to go before we left for China and visas in passports we headed back to Gin’s brother’s house to pack since we were leaving Calgary the next day for Kamloops and Vancouver. Now we just have to ship our worldly possessions across the Pacific, and arrange for Inca to come with us too… nearly ready to go!!