How we ended up in Hong Kong

here is the brief story of how we came to find ourselves in Hong Kong: 

We clearly knew what day our visas/resident cards were set to expire and that date was September 5th.  However, from the late spring/early summer we had planned on working for the hotel where I previously worked.  We had been on a student visa and would need to switch to a work visa.  Switching visa types requires a trip out of country to reprocess.  When the hotel confirmed this, our deal with them fell through.  We knew we (James) could continue his study at the university and renew our visa that way (which would not require a trip out of country), but we were hoping for another option and hadn't felt right about starting that process.

Then, we (James) got a job offer from a local university to teach English.  We felt like it was a great solution, especially since the school would pay for all our travel costs and visa renewal fees.  During James first meeting with the school representative she offered him a job teaching some oral English classes.  We moved forward with submitting all our documents, and they were approved.  When James went back to finalize the details of the contract, the school now wanted him to teach a more-than-maximum number of hours of Academic Writing.  Aside from the fact that it wasn't what we had agreed on AT ALL, that number of hours of class time, plus prep, plus grading hundreds of poorly written English papers a week wasn't a very feasible option for our family.  At this point we have about a week left on our current visa.  We still don't feel like it's the right thing to renew our student visa and we may not even have time for that to come through in time now, anyway.

And the situation is further complicated by the fact that China's visa policies and types changed on September 1st and ours are due for renewal on September 5th. So even when one calls the police department or visa processing center their answers are different and uncertain and the truth is that no one is quite sure how to apply all the new changes yet. 

We thought and prayed and reasoned and argued about where we go when we needed to leave the country.  North to Mongolia or south to Hong Kong?  We decided on Hong Kong for many reasons including the fact that the place we choose to stay included 2 meals a day (less to worry about for us) and the reliability of the postal/FedEx service for sending our documents to America if necessary.  (and it was indeed necessary). 

So, Hong Kong is where we find ourselves for these two-ish weeks while we wait for our new business visa to process.  We last heard from the service company it should be ready to mail back our direction on the 18th.