visa again

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I have had visiting visas in the past, Cambodia, Viet Nam, China (three times) and India. Other countries visited we did not need visas for: Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, The Netherlands [heaps as my wife is from there], do we count Canada?, Puerto Rico, All those British places [England, Scotland, Ireland], Germany, Italy, Korea, Greece, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Iceland, Vatican City, New Zealand, Fiji, France and I suppose the two countries I am citizens of, USA and Australia and several I no longer recall.

Where was I?

Yes, China.

So now it is a working visa, a two-year working visa. What a lot of paper work and preparation. So we have this pile of papers from China from our employer all set and ready to go but as there is no consulate in Adelaide we have to either post or front up somewhere with a consulate. The nearest is Melbourne and that is what our visa papers from Dalian say. But we are suppose to post them as there is no place in Adelaide but if we post then they have to go to Sydney but if they go to Sydney they won't take them because the employer's invitation says Melbourne and by the time we get the visa our plane would have left at the end of July. We decide one of us will deliver our passports to Melbourne and the other collect them a week later. Not so fast mate! An hour after we purchase Narda a ticket on Tiger airlines we get a phone call from the Chinese consulate in Melbourne wanting us to have a medical exam before filing. We had been told that we would get them in Dalian and not to do it here. They want x-rays too. So Narda cancels the flight and luckily Tiger lets us put it forward to the following week, in the meantime we rush around Adelaide seeing doctors and getting x-rays (something about seeing if we have TB) and by the end of the day we have everything in hand and get a ticket for the next day, Wednesday 29th June. We are up at 4 am and get Narda on the first flight out at 6 and she delivers our passports by ten AM. They want a Melbourne address, my son lives there so that works out, and we say we will pick them up a week later. Of course we are nervous for the rest of the week worried something might go wrong and we will never get to our jobs. The fact that we seem to worry too much and have a history of staying awake at night because of things that really work out well anyway is passed over and we worry some more. The Chinese had not rung us by Friday night which meant there was no problems with our visa request. Saturday morning I booked a flight on Qantas, for Tuesday 6th July. Saturday came the news that Tiger airlines was grounded for the next week because of safety issues. Luckily I was booked on Qantas.

To make a long story short, and the fact there is not much of a story except what we created as a worry in our head I collected our passports with work visas firmly pasted in, had lunch with my son, Sacha, and flew back to Adelaide. With 23 days left in Australia I will spend most of my spare time working onĀ integration of technology. A lot of time will be spent going through what we stored in our shed a decade ago when we went off to New York, what a night mare. We left Adelaide to look after my then 98 year-old father in 2002. (see Narda's blog on thisĀ http://blog.narda.us/) We had planned to be in New York for a couple of years. Now we leave behind three houses, all with some of our stuff in them and once again we are off to somewhere for two years. I really doubt we will spend a decade in China but who are we to predict the future? When do we retire?