Visas and Americans

09/26/2010

签证和美国人Well, this is where things stand right now: The purse issue has been sorted ^_^ Huzzah! I have a new card, have withdrawn the tuition fees and can start shoppi-- I mean studying normally... with money. hem.

This coming Saturday is the start of a national holiday for Chinese National Day *hip-hip-hooray* In short we have an entire week off to do with as we will ^^ A lot of the peeps from Edinburgh University went to study in Dalian 大连, on the peninsula to the north of Beijing - my friend from there, Ruth, is getting married next August and has decided she wants to get her dress from Suzhou 苏州, near Shanghai, which we now find is the wedding capital of Asia There's a street called Tiger Hill that is apparently dedicated entirely to wedding dresses, some of which you can buy good quality for the equivalent of £20 *dies* There are some crazy shops that do mad baroque-style dresses as well XD I might get one.

Because of that randomer stealing my purse I've only just been able to get the application for a residence permit through to processing stage... My tourist visa expires next week, so it's a bit of an urgent thing - I through enough tantrums, did everything everyone told me to, and eventually I got the application through in enough time to merit getting my passport back the day before we fly to Suzhou _< The only option I forsee is harassing the nice english-speaking girl in the visa office and getting her to yell at someone else so they process me faster >_< I'm not holding out hope the bureau will have taken the initiative and just left out the bloody apostrophe.

Classes are going ok. There's a problem with comprehension purely because some of the teachers talk way too fast, one of them seems to be an aerobics instructor trapped in a teacher's body -_- I'm also stuck in the corner with an American who seems to believe he's a compelte authority on Chinese. As he has told me many times: My Chinese is completely clouded by my thick English accent, and the Korean students are just straight-out terrible speakers. The main faillure of this analysis is that the Koreans and I can understand each other perfectly...