Eric's Beijing Diary

Made my annual pilgrimage to the visa office at the police station in Yonghegong to turn in my paperwork. Jut picked up my passport today. Getting a Z (work) visa is a real hassle the first time, but renewing it is not much trouble. Well, not for me anyway. It's still a bit of a nuisance, but it's not my nuisance. The FAO (Foreign Affairs Officer) at the University takes care of it. He gets all the paperwork ready, and I just carry it down there and turn it in. The first time you get a work visa, you must have a physical, and you have to be outside of China. Since I live here, I prefer to do things from within the country. But you'd be surprised how many foreigners will go out of the way to do things in their own country, because they feel more comfortable with it. I remember reading on one of the teacher lists http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TEFLChinaLife/ one time about a guy from the UK whose passport was expiring, so he went back to the UK to renew it because he thought it would be "safer." He was thinking backwards. He went back to the UK, renewed his passport, and then he couldn't get back to China, because his China visa was on a cancelled passport. When my passport expired in 2008, I went to the US embassy in Beijing, got a new passport, and then took the old cancelled passport and the new passport to the visa office in Yonghegong, and they cancelled the old visa, and put a new duplicate sticker on my new passport. Really simple.