I can’t remember what I thought I was going to do today, but Judy called and I had to start hustling to get ahead of a possible problem. She had received an email from BISS HR two weeks ago, detailing info about Visa renewal for returning and leaving? teachers. We ignored it, thinking it was for leaving teachers whose visas expired before the school year ended. Our visas don’t expire until July, well after our departure from Beijing.

Judy saw the Head of School today, and he reminded her about turning in her stuff for visa renewal. She quizzed him on our need to deal with it since our visas were good into July. He assured her that we did need to turn in all the necessary paperwork (marriage certificate, birth certificates, temporary residence permits, passports, foreign expert certificates) so our visas could be “de-certified”. The deadline is today???

I start digging through all our paperwork, getting the necessary stuff collected and organized. After swimming, I taxied over to BISS and gave all the stuff to Judy. She’s planning on turning it in after school. Since I’m in the neighborhood, I grabbed lunch at the local Chinese restaurant. I like several of the dishes and it’s been months since I’ve had the chance to eat there. After lunch, I walked down the street to the State Electric Grid office to pay on our electricity account. We’re paid up for several months now, maybe until we leave.

When Judy gets home, after going by the HR office, she is slightly irritated. We were right. They don’t need any of the information from us. Our visas are good and don’t need de-certifying. The HR clerk told Judy she just cancels our “Foreign Expert Certificate” when we leave, and the visa expiration takes care of itself. All that rushing and scrambling for basically nothing. It’s something that’s all too common here. People try to do the right thing, but the communication is just garbled enough be confusing. It’s not like I had important things to do, but I sure wasted time and money getting the materials to Judy in a timely manner. As we near the end of our tenure here, I’m sure there will more issues like this that crop up.