Done!

I'm sitting here writing instead of packing now, I should have written this long time ago but it has been procrastinated over and over again until finally I only have a few hours until I have to leave.

I have finished all my classes at Star Point now since last Friday, and even though it wasn't very many hours I was still completely exhausted and I still haven't really recovered I think. And I never really had that accomplishment feeling that you usually get when you are about to finish something, I was just tired and sick of it, the last day was with the two worst kindergartens I have and as many as seven classes in one day and once I got home and wanted to celebrate my new found freedom I just didn't have any energy for it. I went out with Aaron and Jane on Saturday evening instead, first some cooking at home and then Aaron and I went around to a few bars (that I told you about already).

Thursday was kind of interesting though, the seemingly rich kindergarten had had some snow brought from a mountain or something and hand placed it in the playground so the kids could play with it, when the kids we were teaching saw it they went all crazy though (not my class luckily) so that was kind of a bother.

The last few days I've tried to finish up things around her, I've tried to fix my visa but there are so many stupid issues about that here that it's just crazy; the only visa I can actually get in China is a renewal of my current business visa, to get this I need to get a new invitation from a company (any company as long as it's in Chengdu, or whatever city I'm applying in, it doesn't really matter where I will be staying only where I apply) and then 5 working days to process it, and you will still only get 3 months more. I was actually considering to change my flight to be able to do all this but that meant losing some money and missing Mei before she gets married (which I will anyway because she is leaving Beijing 2 days earlier than she had told me). So it is not possible to change to a tourist visa without actually leaving China, all changes are actually impossible, I had considered for a while to sign up for some university course to get a student visa but since that doesn't work either I had to skip that idea. So the only other way to do it is to go outside China and apply for a new visa, preferably to Hong Kong where I'm luckily going already, but (of course there is a but), the Hong Kong visa is also a 4 day business and even though they have express services, there is no express service in China, it is really expensive, a 6 months multiple entry visa on express is HK$1400, but I will be there for only 4 days, probably, and that is during the national holidays, apparently they do have holiday service too though with an additional fee, and I will only get a 3 months dual entry visa so I'm hoping to get away with less than HK$800 instead.

Now here is the most stupid part of it all: all of these visa option are actually a bit less than legal to work on, and this is stupid because it is nearly impossible to get a working visa unless you are native speaker and have some university degree. I can understand the reasons for this, they are trying to get the quality of teacher higher but the problem for this is that there are not enough native speakers with a university degree available and wanting to go to China and teach to meet the demand of foreign teacher they have here, so they are preventing about 75-90% of everybody willing to help meeting this demand but still really needing them, us (since I'm one of those teachers now).

I've also been trying to finish my TEFL course and I made a pretty nice schedule that I kept to for about a week, then I had a module that wasn't corrected before a weekend and I couldn't even open the next module so I started looking at the endorsement modules and they are really really big so I figured I must change the schedule and start them earlier but it was really boring so I just put it off. When I finally could continue with the normal modules I was already 3 days behind schedule and then there was some connection problem so the site didn't register one of my mini quizzes and I couldn't finish the module and didn't understand why, it took a few days more to find out what was the problem with that and from there I just haven't done anything.