It's been a really frustrating/stressful past couple of days. Last weekend I told Tony that my visa expires next week and him giving me my passport back would be great. I was hoping he would get me a work visa, but on Sunday he gave me my passport, saying I need to get my visa renewed. In order to do that, among other things, I need to have a Chinese bank account in my name with 20,000 yuan ($3,000) in it to prove that I can live in China without working (since I'm not supposed to be working with a tourist visa), and the latest I can get that done is Tuesday, since the couple days after that are holidays (another story for farther down in the post) and after that my visa will be expired. Getting $3,000 into a bank account in 2 days is not fun, nor easy. We had to go to multiple ATMS, since we didn't want to risk trying it with a 3rd party and having it take longer, and on the day I went to get it renewed the ATMs wouldn't work with our bank cards until after 12pm (midnight your time, which makes sense since we can only withdraw a certain amount each day), but I didn't think about that at first and I was freaking out. I did turn it in on time, so with $130 I'm buying another 30 days here, hopefully I'll have a work visa soon, I think we're still waiting on the school (who should've said last week) to decide if they want to keep me. It's been really frustrating. The other thing is I had to prove I have 20,000 Yuan, it also has to be frozen in the account for two weeks, so now we have all this money, but we can't use it for two weeks and neither of us get our first paycheck until October 15th.
I have two random things that I don't like about China.
1. The subway. I know it's crowded and people love to travel on it, but I don't see why China rigs it so both trains come at practically the same time, especially at transfer stations when everyone is trying to run up the stairs to the next train. It would be a lot better if they came about a minute apart, so there will be less people running at one time. I think the reason is that there are soooo many trains, they come very frequently, so that they all just happen to come at the same time, but it still makes me sad.
2. Holidays. China is so weird. Today (Wednesday) is the moon cake festival. Since it's not close to a weekend the government decided that it should change what days the weekends are, which means we have Wednesday-Friday off. Normally that would be a good thing, except now I have to go to work Saturday - Thursday. I went into work last Sunday and it was soooo confusing, threw off my whole week. But, China likes to change weekends, they do it multiple times.
Other than my ranting above (which is pretty significant, since I want to stay in China and not go back to the U.S.), we're doing pretty well. We had our first first-try successful dinner last week, pork and mushrooms, red pepper, onions, and rice, which was really good. A guy moved in upstairs today and he seems pretty cool, it'll be interesting. I took pictures of dinner, so you can see.
Please keep praying for us, we really want this job to work out and I need a work visa. Dan's studies are going well, but you can continue to pray for that too. :) We miss you all!
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