I Think We Are Legal Now

Well, we are legal, but poorer. It was a long day yesterday visiting the local police station and then the US embassy.  We were caught in a new law dated December, 2017, which the US embassy nor our university knew about. The embassy said they had not heard of anyone else being fined for not reregistering a new passport. A very nice young man at the embassy named Kevin, made the day a little brighter with his empathy and condolences. Sometimes that is not real evident.

Nothing was wrong at the local police department, but it was a long hour of them asking questions and typing up reports. The supportive young student from our university who accompanied us translated the 6+ page report before we signed it. One of the statements was that there was no need for us to contact our families! (That was a little odd and slightly scary.) We then had to go to the closest bank and deposit our fine, which was transferred to the police station. Our translator took a picture of the receipt and sent it to the police station. It was not acceptable though because she put both receipts on one document. She had already swiftly left because she needed to catch a train for an academic field trip she was due to leave on. When she sent us a social media message to try to take individual pictures, we were a bit beyond our depth. At this point we were walking down the street. We tried to place the receipts on the top of the garbage cans and take a picture, but the angle was too high for us, so we put it in a bed of petunias that was beside the street and took pictures. Never could get it right or clear. She ended up just cropping the picture she had taken earlier. I don’t know why pictures elude us so thoroughly, but they seem to. Also a little crazy taking pictures of pieces of paper in petunia beds beside a main Beijing street, but not the strangest thing we have done. We will go back to the visa granting place on Monday afternoon to try again to get our visas for next year. I pray this time, it is smooth sailing.

An added note is that after 3 months of my hip giving me absolutely no pain at all, it hurt with the miles walked yesterday. I hope it is a temporary glitch. Your prays are appreciated. I am up early now to start checking the 40 essays from my Thursday class that got put on hold yesterday as we ran around and hopefully resolved all of this.