I mean everything. You think, oh well, everyone says that, but your mistaken. Everything in China comes down to money. In fact I would suffice to say everything in the entire world comes down to money. What has sparks this little blog today. Well, a week of being subpar and a grand lighter. Let me tell you how things work here.
To come to China you need a visa. No big deal. Tourist, business, student, marriage, and um, Z. What I have done for the last year or 8 months is get a business visa. To get a legit or proper-channeled business you have to have a company say your coming here to do blah blah. To counter this you just go to Hong Kong and get one super easy and a little shady. The catch, you must leave every thirty days. So 6 months you have to leave five times. Now you can live where ever but remember you must leave every thirty days. In the past month I have moved to a new city. Which is a two hour flight from HK. So what used to take me a half-day and say, 30 USD would now take me, 200 USD with the flight. Well, that’s not good. So I had to get a new business visa that would allow me to stay for a long period of time. Here comes the kicker, I still don’t have a company here to invite me per say. So I got to do it the shady route again.
I ship the passport off to a company in Shanghai who then somehow gets me a visa and ships it back to the tune of 1000USD.
When it comes to money, Chinese are the smartest in the world. Let me elaborate. The cost of the visa from Hong Kong: 300 USD. Every month to leave and come back, 33 x 6 = 198. x2 = 996USD. To get a year long visa where you don’t have to leave: 1000USD. Hrmm. Seems a little interesting.
I just deposited the cash in the specified account. I hope to god they send me my passport back. Don’t think that it will be a problem. They seem the least shady of what I’ve been told. At least I didn’t have a random dude roll in and pick up my passport and magically have it back a week later. You laugh but I’ve heard stories.
Well, back to whatever I was doing.
Peace.
*Edit: I forgot to mention that I needed my passport to deposit money in someone’s account. Of course to get my passport I needed to deposit it. Interesting. Well, I told them what was going on and they said, well, you don’t have your passport then you have to give us your name and passport number, and pay us 50 yuan…. Like I said, everything comes down to money and with money you can do anything.