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SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
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JANUARY
FEBRUARY
MARCH
TITLE: VISA EXTENDING
LOCATION: 兴隆镇 (XINGLONG ZHEN)
MISSION: ENJOY SOME CHINESE BUREAUCRACY
DATE: 2011-10-25
Today I went to the police station together with Liu Lili (刘丽丽) from Boji Electric to extend my visa. Foreigners are quite rare in this part of China and this local little police station had never filled out the required paperwork before. Combined with the police's rather cumbersome internal system handling these forms, we were in for a REALLY slow morning. After a confused hour or so consulting various manuals and handbooks and more than a few phonecalls, it turned out that I was expected to bring a passport photo with me. The town of Xinglong is both rural and tiny, but luckily there was a shop not even 50m down the road from the police station where you could get passport photos. After the photo was taken care of, a new problem arose: my address. Apparently the Wanxingda Group cannot be found in the system, which is a problem since "applicant address" cannot be left empty. Someone higher up in the hierarchy indicated that the address of a manager would do instead. The problem was that it HAD to be a local address and I dare say that you will never find a manager willing to live in a town/village as small as Xinglong. It took Liu Lili more than an hour of frantic phonecalling to find some guy working in one of the factories who is registered as living in Xinglong whos address we could use. Then, finally, we could leave after only another half hour of administration. This was just the first half of the bureaucratic process; next we went to the police station in Liaoyang to register there as well. After waiting in line and asking several clerks, it turned out that it is too early; this step of the process can be completed no earlier than one week before the visa expires. Great. When I got back to the office it was just about time to go home. Dinner at Heping of course. It just so happened that I had to go to the toilet when I was waiting for my food. No problem, Mrs. Liu told me that the toilet is in the alley around the corner, just outside the restaurant. A very open-minded definition of a restroom indeed.