Cheap Chinese Visa!

It's pretty rough being Americans in this unique historic era.

In the good old days, most of our ancestors toiled from before dawn until past dusk as serfs, servants or slaves, so they didn't have to worry about anything beyond scraping by on their meager earnings.

They only needed to worry about having enough food scraps for their family to make it through the week, assuming they didn't freeze to death or get randomly killed by savages before the sabbath day.



These days, we have the stress of far too many choices.

Should we go low carb or Supersize that fast food combo meal?

Then again, what are we, animals?  Maybe we should go to a sports bar for hot wings and beer or an upscale restaurant serving gourmet fare on china and crystal.

And that's just the paid lunch hour we stretch to an hour and a half!

Apple or HP?  Classic Vinyl or The Wave?  "Chicago PD" or Masterpiece Theater?  CNN or Fox News (and all that either choice entails!)?

We also have latitude to travel the world in almost any direction, unfettered by anything but our ability to obtain a passport and pay for a ticket.

But that means we have to keep going to that 8 to 5 job that pays for our comfortable lives and gives us two or three free weeks each year that we need to fill with vacations.

A handful of countries, however, require visas.  These tend to be historically despotic countries, either currently war-torn or at least until recently Communist with a Capital C.

China is one such place where American travel freedoms we take for granted are restricted.

Totally taboo when we were children, and so now a must-check box on our bucket lists.

We may visit the Forbidden City and other regions of the inscrutable land beyond the Great Wall of China, but first we must attain visas.

To get a visa, we must be hosted by a Chinese citizen, but a tour company or cruise line can take care of that requirement for us.  For a fee, they will refer us to a company that specializes in attaining visas for all of those less tourist-friendly and inevitably bureaucratic nations now open for tourists.



When we went to Russia with Princess Cruises, we avoided the hassles of attaining a visa by taking ship-sponsored shore excursions.

Cruises visiting the latest formerly-forbidden-and now-sizzling-hot-destination of Cuba simply charge guests $75 at the outset, avoiding any confusion, although passengers can choose to opt out and get their own visas.

In preparing for our upcoming trip to China, Julie and I decided to skip the easy way and instead take the do-it-yourself route, because our proximity to the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles would make that easy peasy.

The Chinese visas themselves run $140 per person, so they aren't cheap.  Adding another $119 to have the recommended passport/visa company handle it for us it seemed a little too expensive, especially if we added extra charges to rush them through with expedited shipping.

When we found $119 was the processing for both of us, a steep discount from the rate to process one at a time, that should have been good enough to sway me, especially because I had heard horror stories from two of our brilliant children about their struggles getting Chinese visas on their own.

Preparing to visit a college friend on his own, Jay had printed out his forms with dates as month/day/year instead of day/month/year, resulting in him being sent home the first time to re-do his application, but not before getting an expensive parking ticket in Los Angeles.  This led to inevitable chastising by his much wiser parents when he mistakenly mentioned the incident to us.




Preparing for a speaking engagement in China, Gina didn't have all of the precise itinerary information perfectly formatted.  She was sent to a Burger King down the street from the New York consulate office where some guy --- not Chinese himself --- had set up shop to help misguided Americans get their forms exactly right (for a modest fee).  She had to return another day with the info in the properly-typed format.  The consulate clerk told her to come back the next week to pick it up.  The scheduled returned day turned out to be a Chinese holiday, wasting all the time and effort of more cross-city subway rides.

Armed with knowledge of these challenges, we would be more prepared.  Our forms were perfect, triple checked before leaving home.

It would be a Yao Ming alley-oop slam dunk...only it wasn't.

We waited out the rush hour, because only a fool would get on a downtown L.A.-bound freeway between 7 and 9 AM, and we are not fools (as far as you know).

Mid-morning, the traffic still crawled along.  Where are all these people going all the time in Los Angeles?

Bumper-to-bumper traffic be damned, we still made it to Koreatown by 11 AM, and as an omen of good things to come, we found an open parking space with a two hour limit just a short walk from the Chinese Consulate, something of a miracle in itself.

At the door, we were searched, which of course required emptying our pockets and showing our passports, because we were essentially entering a foreign country.



"Take a number, and take a seat."

C197.

Seats were harder to come by.

There certainly weren't two together, and the handful of empty ones were being held for someone across the crowded room.

The monitor flashed that C110 was now being served...but also A84 and B322 and...

Over the next hour, I watched to see how long the average processing time was and estimated it to be about 3 to 5 minutes, but with multiple windows open.  At 12:30, we were at C142, and it no longer seemed likely we'd be able to meet Jay for lunch in Santa Monica.  It seemed increasingly less likely we would get through before their closing time of 2 PM.

2 PM?

I thought it was 5 O'Clock somewhere, but apparently that was just in Margaritaville.

We decided to shovel this first attempt under and come back the next day bright and early, salvaging a late lunch with Jay as consolation for the Consulate snafu.

As we came back to the car, we saw a meter maid sitting in her mini-car, and I told Julie, "It's lucky we left when we did, or we would have gotten a ticket."

When we reached our car, however, we found we already had a parking ticket on the windshield.

I went to the meter maid's car to ask about it, and she just rolled up her window, shook her head and pointed to the sign that we had read as allowing 2 Hours for our space, exactly the proof I intended to submit to her.

Looking at the confusing sign more carefully, however, there were some tiny arrows that made her point of that exact space being no parking at that exact time.  I thought about fighting the ticket in court, but that would involve returning through Los Angeles snarling traffic to go to traffic court where I would either pay for expensive parking for a day or risk getting another ticket.

Game, set and match to the city of Los Angeles.  $95 for the ticket plus another $10 for gas...not to mention the aggravation of the overall experience...and that $119 fee wasn't looking too bad.



However, we were now in it too deep to do it the easy way.

We went back on Monday by bus, on a course charted by Julie to take advantage of the commuter line and arrival at the Chinese Consulate as they opened in the morning to be sure we had time.

It worked.

After only a couple of hours in the crowded room, our number was called.  We went to the window with our thoughtfully and thoroughly completed forms, but they wanted some additional back-up information, plus photocopies of our passports.

Would we have to go back home?

No.  There was a Chinese travel agent down the hall that would make copies for 25 cents and print pages from a computer file for only $3 for the first page and a dollar a page thereafter.

This small office was even more crowded than the Consulate, because apparently everybody who went for their visas or to register their new babies --- I'm not exactly sure what was up with that --- had some problem with their paperwork that required them to print pages at this "travel agency."  I would guess that agency has no time to book travel, much less do any research on trips.

So, with a bit of pre-print editing, we were able to get everything we needed for another $12 and were even allowed to skip the line back at our original window where we would pay and wait for our passport...only they don't do same day service.  Communist efficiency.

Our bus ride home didn't go as smoothly as the ride up, because there wasn't a commuter bus at that time.  It took about four hours, including a couple of wrong stops in rough areas, but we made it home and lived to tell the tale.

A week later, we returned by commuter bus and found that it was not a Chinese holiday, as had been the case for Gina.

Arriving a couple of minutes after the Consulate opened,  we found about fifty people in the pick-up line.  It turned out that about every other customer was a visa servicing company that would do ten or twenty at a time, which slowed our progress considerably.

Still we made it through in a couple of hours, and our passports with newly added ten-year, multiple re-entry visa update, seemed perfect.

Add bus fares to the ticket and printing charges, and I'm pretty sure we paid a few dollars more than the "expensive" processing fee for the recommended visa company, but we had the fun of the experience.

And that was a good thirty hours of not having to worry what we would do with all our free time.