Chinese Visa Chicken

The first day of a long holiday is always one of waking up early, considering getting out of bed and getting ready to go to work, and then the sense of appreciation once you are actually awake enough to remember that no - it's the holidays silly, go back to sleep! So Anette did, but Joe took the long awaited opportunity to play some computer games (at £1 per disc, who wouldn't?). It's China's National Day tomorrow - and this year is the celebration of the 60th anniversary of New China. Make sure you watch the display from Beijing tomorrow. They've promised that it's going to be bigger than the Olympics last year! We have been invited home to Sean's (our Chinese flatmate) family to celebrate with them tomorrow, and we are looking forward to being included in the Chinese culture on such an intimite and personal level, and for such an auspicious occasion. We just hope that we won't make too many faux pas and upset anybody! Later in the holidays we will be travelling to Shanghai and then on to Ningbo in Zhejiang province. We can safely leave Jiangsu province and Suzhou now, as we have finally got another temporary visa, which allows us to stay here for another 30 days, giving the HR department a wee bit longer to sort out our real residence permit! Sunny, the dear HR assistant who is the one who enjoys this game of "Visa Chicken", told us to meet her on Thursday last week (5 days before Visa-Run-Out-Day) and she'd try to sort it out for us. She was unable to hide her nerves and anxieties however, so Anette didn't sleep so well on Wednesday night. When we met her on Thursday, it seemed that she too hadn't managed to calm her nerves, and that had manifested itself in a sudden inability to string more than a few words of English together, which rendered her unable to tell us where we were going and what was going to happen! The first stop we made was at a very run down police station in the middle of a building site, hidden away behind a few fences and mounds of dirt. We were taken to a shack, sat down in a dark room, where nobody spoke to us. After a while some uniforms came in, looked at us sternly, desperately trying to pronounce Anette's middle name - not giving up until he was completely satisfied with his effort - and then we got a red stamp, and before we knew it, we were back in the sunlight, and off we went to the Central Administration Centre. There we sat in a large cold, yet bright, hall waiting for 2 hours before they took our passports and a snapshot of us and then sent us on our way. Sunny was finally able to tell us that the Visa office would hold on to our passports until Monday (VRO-Day) and HOPEFULLY we'd get our new visa - a business visa, which we shouldn't even be able to get... But you can't go on worrying forever, so seeing that Sunny had finally managed to calm her nerves, we decided that we would do the same! We got our passports at 9:30pm on Monday night. Now we need to re-new our temporary residence permit so it's in line with our new temporary visas, and when we finally receive our Foreign Experts Certificates, it SHOULD (in theory), be time to get our work permit, employment visa, and permanent residence permit. We actually got our FE certificates yesterday, but poor Sunny has misspelled Joe's surname... Her face, when she saw it, went from horrified to almost crying. Oh dear, sometimes we wonder how things get done here! How she had managed to spell Anette's surname right and Joe's wrong is beyond us... We thought the Chinese were good at copying things! She promised to have it sorted out by the end of the hols, but we are not holding our breath, but just going with the flow, which seems to be what is needed here!

Sometimes you also get more than you hoped for here. Joe was in need of a haircut, which seems to be one of the things you can do here without needing a red stamp! We have a nice-looking uni-sex hairdresser close by, so we went there after a lovely dinner. Joe made the international sign for haircut with two fingers, and before he knew it, a bloke was shampooing his hair and then proceeded to give Joe a 45 minute upper-body and head massage! Joe had gone in with a sore neck, and left 1h and 15 minutes later lighter than he'd ever felt and looking well groomed! His comment was that he's never going to delay a haircut again while we are in China - all of a sudden he saw why going to the hairdressers can be such a fulfilling and wonderful experience! The best part was that this haircut and massage only cost him 33kr/£4! It was a very relaxed and happy man who left that salon! Anette thinks she will go there too soon, just for a shampoo!

These little luxuries will definitely come in handy when we get back from our holiday, and we start teaching our own classes. We were given our timetables yesterday, and to our horror we saw that we both have 8 year-one classes (totalling 20 classroom hours) and as Anette's timetable had a free peroid coinciding with an Advanced IELTS class, she will teach that as well, bringing her total to 21 hours of teaching, of which 7 are on a Monday!!! Mondays are also English Club nights, so we are going to be busy, busy, and very tired come Monday nights! Anette has been given 4 days of 8 o-clock starts and Joe has got 3 days with early starts. He's lucky though, because he's got a late start on Mondays and no classes at all on Fridays, oh and his classes have the best students on paper! We met some of our new students on Tuesday morning when we were part of an introduction team. We went in to a lecture hall of approx. 150 students, and before we knew it, the little buggers were snapping pictures of us on their camera phones! Anette is going to be running a Reading Circle, and based on the responses we got from them, the circle is going to be a big one - and of very mixed ability! This semester is truly going to be a baptism of fire, but we are looking forward to it, and we are convinced that we will have a lot of fun! But next semester we should have fewer classhours...!

Lee, the coordinator for our subject CET1 took us out for dinner on Friday night, and we had a really lovely thai/mexican/american meal at a resteraunt called "Mister Pizza". You just love the little breaks from the Chinese food - although we love it, it is nice to sometimes eat something that you are familiar with! After dinner we went to the bar district and met Mark and Weiwei in a Philipino-bar full of single Western men and Philipino working girls and a Philipino girl who was entertaining the crowd with ghastly renditions of old pop classics! The singing girl was joined by Mark, Lee, Phil and Joe for a quick karaoke session one by one, and Joe's rendition of Wonderwall was by far the best! We quickly left the bar afterwards so that Anette didn't have to sing too! That the night didn't end there however was evident on our livingroom floor the next morning. Phil had attempted to take a shower after we got home in the wee hours, because he had been sick out of the window of the taxi on the way back. We think he must have blacked out in the shower with his clothes on, and thereby causing the livingroom to be flooded the next morning. The floor has suffered from it, but we don't really care because we are finally getting our own apartment when we get back from Ningbo!

We got our first paychecks on Monday, so now we can finally start to live it up here in China. We survived the first month on just 4000RMB, and now we are off out to treat ourselves to an "Armani" or "Rolex" watch and a new handbag! See you after the hols!

Some pictures of the uni: