Five Days until Departure
6/23/08
Here we are, five days until we're supposed to leave for China. For those of you who don't know our background, we volunteered to take teaching positions with Concordia Language Village to teach at English immersion camps in China for children of IBM employees. We just have one minor problem at this point... no visas!!!
We were originally supposed to be in Shanghai and Guangzhou for a total of 36 days. Because we are going to be there this amount of time, we had to apply for business visas as "guest lecturers". Unfortunately, the Chinese Consulate informed us that we had to get tourist visas and the maximum amount of time that we could be there on a tourist visa is 30 days. As a result, we had to cancel the camp in Guangzhou, which means there are at least 60 very disappointed Chinese children who will not be going to summer camp this year as a result. More stressful for us was that we now all have to change our flights.
Today, Monday, was spent trying to get that done. Unfortunately, only 2/3 of our team were able to get that done and send our visa applications off. (Not only is this process time consuming, it's rather expensive as well.) The positive of not going to Guangzhou is that now we will get to spend some time in Beijing and Xi'an taking in some of the many historical sites that China has to offer.
We're incredibly excited about this opportunity before us. The only stressful part, for now, is actually getting there. We should get our visas expedited and in our hands by Friday. We're both the type of people who like to have things planned well in advance, so to not have this done yet is really weighing on us, yet we're rather optimistic things will all work out.
We have an amazing team that has a lot of wonderful strengths. We've already been working very closely with two team members (Jessica and Venisha) to write the curriculum and themes for the entire camp (centering on different American cities and holidays/celebrations).
We're not sure how much email access we'll have in China, but we hope to keep this updated with news about our happenings in China and, hopefully, many pictures as well. (Otherwise, we'll just find random pictures of Chinese kids playing and photoshop us into them!)
Keep checking back in the future for more updates!!!
