四海为家

Hainan was wonderful (more pictures to come soon), and I was expecting to work for a few more weeks before the whole country goes on break for Spring Festival. But Wuhan had other plans for me, and what I thought would be a simple application to extend my visa turned out to be not so simple after all. So now I’m in Hong Kong, waiting to pick up my brand-new double-entry tourist visa tomorrow morning.

The positive side of all of this is that I’ve seen a lot of China in the past five days. Our flight back from Hainan was first delayed and then, because of weather problems in Wuhan, made a bonus stop in Zhenzhou, Henan province, where we spent the night before boarding our rescheduled flight to Wuhan the following day. After two days of navigating through university and government bureaucracy in Wuhan (which went much more smoothly than the first time I had to go through this process when I first arrived in China, most likely because this time I brought Hainan coconut candy for the Wuda administrator who needed to connect me to all of the different signatures I needed for a visa extension), I was finally informed that I wouldn’t be able to extend my visa in Wuhan, and so I boarded an overnight train to Shenzhen. A short walk through the Shenzhen train station took me to the border control and then onto the Hong Kong subway system. I’ll take the afternoon train to Guangzhou tomorrow, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that despite Spring Festival travel madness, it will be possible to get a ticket from there back to Wuhan.

For now, I have the afternoon free, and so I’m sitting at a Starbucks overlooking the harbour, enjoying my unplanned mini-vacation. Hong Kong is also maybe my favourite city ever. It feels a bit like London, with more colours and better weather (the last time I was here, in June, it was sweltering hot, but right now the weather is perfect). The one drawback is the weird language they speak here — after a year and a half of studying Mandarin, it’s frustrating to have to start over almost from zero with Cantonese — but I’m feeling so positive about Hong Kong right now that it might just be worth it!