Thursday, August 30, 2007

Making it legal

Today we spent about 4 hours in the "visa office" (as it's unofficially known). Since we came into the country on tourist visas, we have to apply for residence visas and work permits in order to legally work at the college. Otherwise, we'll become official guests of the state, so to speak.

Anyway, after we completed our obligatory interview with the police at the visa office, the officer who questioned us handed us a brochure that welcomes newcomers to the city. Its main purpose is to dispense advice about staying safe in the city.

Some of the tips are pretty obvious:
"Watch out against pickpockets in crowded places".
Some of it is helpful:
"It is illegal to work without a working permit and residence permit. penalty for this could be very serious with possible deportation"
But some of the advice is just plain confusing:
"Do not follow strangers into fun places."
I haven't been able to decipher that one yet. Based on the drawing that accompanies the warning (in which one man directs another man's attention to an image of a busty woman), I'm assuming that this is some sort of warning against "houses of ill-repute." But it could just be a warning about avoiding Lingerie stores. Or breast augmentation clinics. Can't really say.


4 comments:

mryonker said...

LOL! Strangers into fun places. Can't. Resist. Fun. Places.!

Riotous.

Anonymous said...

I too, just spent multiple hours at the local Chinese consulate in SF obtaining a visa. Mine was an 'L' - the tourist visa. The wait was due to the giant human snake of a line, not because of interviews or anything. Once I made it to the speaker-modulated, lexan window the filing process was super fast. Looks like I'll have a 12 month, multi-entry visa, so visiting should be possible :)

It was funny, though. The Chinese famously have no concept of 'lines' (so I hear). Yet the consulate was almost overwhelmingly anal about making sure everyone was properly queued up. And when noon rolled around and the office shuttered the windows for lunchtime, all line-standers received a number so that they would be assured the same spot at 1pm.

Maybe once they arrive in the line-crazy west, the infection spreads?

Jonathan Benda said...

So can you follow strangers into boring places?

mryonker said...

Or, can you follow people you *know* into fun places?

Hey, do we need to get tourist visas to visit you?