Looking Back to China
Dear Mark,It is always marvellous it was to receive any news from you, old fellow, but I think that you have been a bit busy recently and so you have not been able to write a proper and detailed account of your latest foreign adventures. Well, we have also been rather preoccupied with all of our problems recently, so it was great to read your comments on FB the other day. And at last I have your e-mail address!
I was amused when I first thought that you might be going to the same school that I was at a few years ago, the British School of Al Rehab. Yes, it is true that Al Rehab is a long way from Tahrir Square and for most Egyptians life just goes on as normal. Perhaps that is a bit optimistic, as the truth of the matter is that all of the political troubles have had a very serious impact on the Egyptian economy. Egyptian parents cannot pay their school fees if their businesses have gone bust.As for Irena and yours truly, you probably know that we have some good news and some not so good news. Let us start with the good news first. We flew into Hong Kong airport on the 3rd of August (remember that the school year starts earlier in China and we also needed time to find an apartment to rent). Anyway, it all went very well. The school is great, with many pleasant colleagues and a lovely lady, Anne Marie, who is the head of primary.I had heard all kinds of stories about Shenzhen being a horrible industrial city, with lots of pollution, crime and crowded streets. In fact, these stories are just completely untrue. Shenzhen is a beautiful city, with amazingly impressive modern buildings, a superbly cheap and efficient and clean metro system (far superior to the London Underground!) and there are loads of large and well-maintained parks, with lakes and fountains and flowers and everything you could wish for. As for crowds, I did not see any. Yes, of course there are some people who live in Shenzhen (14 million in fact), but I have seen more crowds and traffic jams in Southampton and London.Shenzhen seems to be a very safe city and that is partly because the Chinese are, on the whole, a very decent and law-abiding nation, but also it might be because there are special laws (and particularly nasty punishments) for anyone doing anything bad to foreigners. It’s not allowed. On top of that, the Chinese police are very numerous and noticeable. They have a reputation for dealing very firmly with anyone who steps out of line. (The Chinese authorities do not believe in this “innocent until proven guilty” nonsense and of course criminals do not have any civil rights.)As for our apartment, it is costing us 5,800RMB a month and the school pays us a rental allowance of 5,000RMB and so we only have to pay 800RMB out of our own pocket. Our apartment is a pleasant two-bedroomed affair, right in the centre of Shenzhen and next to a big park and two metro stations. It is about twenty minutes’ walk from our apartment to the school. Our apartment block is one of a cluster of five or six blocks and the tiles or bricks are a dark pink or reddish colour. The apartment blocks were built in an area that was used for public executions, so the architects were worried that no one would want to live there. Therefore the pink is supposed to bring good luck. A very Chinese solution to the problem!As I mentioned before, our apartment is close to two metro stations and the nearest one is Lian Hua Cun. It’s about 500 metres from our apartment.
Just in case you are interested, Chinese girls are very sexy and lovely. Lots of them are very keen on marrying a laowai (a foreigner). Not surprisingly, loads of western guys go crazy for Chinese girls (expats jokingly refer to this as “yellow fever”). On the other hand, I did read about one Chinese girl who was fed up with her two-timing boyfriend and so she gave him a passionate kiss, at the same time pushing a capsule of poison into his mouth with her tongue. I think that is a very stylish way to murder someone! After her boyfriend died, the police caught her and she was executed. (The Chinese authorities are quite keen on executions. They execute more people in China than in the rest of the world put together.I had read that China is amazingly cheap and that the cost of living there is incredibly low. Perhaps this is true in some parts of China, but Shenzhen is not exactly bargain basement. Yes, it is cheap to eat out and transport is very cheap. However, western-style supermarkets are definitely not cheap at all. In some cases, imported goods are a lot more expensive than they would be in Bulgaria or in the UK. On the other hand, people have told me that Shenzhen is the most expensive city in mainland China, so maybe it is not so surprising that we managed to spend so much money!Another lot of nonsense that you hear from time to time is that every restaurant and food shop in China sells contaminated food and so you will get diarrhoea or food poisoning or botulism as soon as you eat a mouthful. This is rubbish. Ira and I ate in some cheapie restaurants, as well as takeaway places on the street, and we never had any problems. The important thing is never to ask what it is that you are eating. It will taste delicious and that is all that you need to know. If you see a place that is crowded with locals all stuffing their faces, then you will probably be okay. One place I want to take you to is a little place on the street where I had my first Chinese breakfast. Two helpings of baozi and a tea egg, plus all the tea you can drink, and together it cost less than £1. (Baozi are dumpling things and tea eggs are ordinary hen’s eggs that have been boiled in tea. The tea turns them brown and gives them a nutty flavour. I also had fried quail’s eggs on a stick.)The other little problem is that imported wine is expensive, but Chinese wine is fairly horrible (and a lot more expensive than Bulgarian wine). However, Chinese beer (e.g. Tsingtao) is cheap and very drinkable.Now it is time for the bad news. I was not planning on returning to the UK during the summer, as I am not too keen on high prices and rain, so I got our Chinese visas from the Chinese Embassy in Doha. This was a big mistake. Instead of a work visa (the Z visa), I was given an L visa (a tourist visa) and when I complained I was told that it would be sorted out when I got to China. Of course when I arrived in Shenzhen, after a few days the HR people told me what had happened and how the school was not able to do anything to sort out the problem. The head of primary, Anne Marie, at first suggested that we should return to the UK to get this sorted out, but of course we could not do that because we have no home in the UK, no money in the UK and no transport. (I did think of crashing at your place for a day or two, but that simply was not practical.) After this bombshell, we were then told that Ira’s application for a visa extension had been rejected and she would have to leave the country too. After the Chinese Embassy in Doha had wasted two pages of her passport, the authorities in Shenzhen told us that there were not enough spare pages in her passport and so she would have to get a new one!On the Monday morning we arrived back in Sofia, after a long and tiring flight from Hong Kong, and we started on the business of applying for Bulgarian residency. (The Chinese Embassy in Sofia had told the school’s HR people that they would not consider visa applications from British citizens who were not resident in Bulgaria.) Anyway, the process of getting Bulgarian residency was a lot more frustrating and drawn out than we had imagined it would be! Even though we own a Bulgarian-registered company and we have two properties in this country, we still had all kinds of difficulties getting our Bulgarian residency cards, even though we have been coming to Bulgaria for more than ten years! Finally on Friday morning we were given our residency cards and so we were able to apply for Ira’s British new passport. My guess is that it will take at least another two or possibly three weeks for the paperwork regarding our work permits to arrive from China and maybe a month for Ira’s new passport to come back from the UK.
Then there is a problem with our marriage certificate. The Chinese authorities in Shenzhen want our marriage certificate to be stamped by the Chinese embassy in the country where our marriage certificate was made, namely in the Ukraine. This probably means that we will have to go to Kiev, just so that we can get this stupid certificate officially stamped.
And how much is our extended holiday in Bulgaria going to cost us? I have no idea of the total cost, but it is going to be expensive. We have to pay for our apartment in Shenzhen, even though we are not using it, and the school will not pay anything towards the cost of the apartment until I start working. Then there is the salary that I am not being paid (and won’t be paid) until our return to China, which probably won’t be before the end of September. As if all of this were not bad enough, we also have four cubic metres of freight that is held up in Shanghai and they won’t let us have it until we have been given our Chinese residency permits and that is not going to happen until October. Meanwhile, the storage charges for our freight just get bigger by the day! Yes, I did leave Qatar with a tidy pile of cash, but a lot of it has been spent on our move to China.Well, in many ways it is nice to be back in Kalotina and we just have to get this visa business sorted out and then we can fly back to China. Thank the Lord we are financially solvent, with money put by for a rainy day, and we do not have any debts or any kind of loan or mortgage on either of our two properties here in Bulgaria. In fact we are planning to use the next few weeks to get our new central heating system installed.I am sending you a few photos of our misadventures in Shenzhen and a couple of photos of our apartment. We are sorry not to be there right now, but maybe we shall be back in China by the end of September.
As for you, I honestly think you would go absolutely love in China. Yes, old chap, you would really like it. There are more than enough things to see and do in Shenzhen, without bothering with Hong Kong. Shenzhen is an amazing place. However, there are a couple of things that might cause some problems.
Firstly, you will just have to learn how to use chopsticks. They are everywhere in China and lots of restaurants do not have normal cutlery. Start practising. It is not that difficult.
Secondly, our flight from Istanbul to HK took eleven hours. Have you ever been on a plane for such a long flight? (My guess is that it would be about twelve hours from Heathrow.) Well, it is not so bad if you get a night flight and then you can sleep for at least some of the way. Take a good book to read on the plane, as well as some sleeping pills. (I find a glass or two of wine puts me to sleep quite quickly!) One day you will have to come and visit us. When you finally arrive in Hong Kong, you will be exhausted, disoriented and jetlagged, with a two-hour journey still ahead of you in order to get to Shenzhen. I bet you just can’t wait, but you will have to, old fellow, because we will not be back in China for at least another month. In the meantime, I hope that you will find the photos interesting and don’t forget to start practising with those chopsticks.
Thirdly, you do not really want to stay in Qatar, surely? You have already tried to leave once! Yes, I can understand why you may want to go back to the UK, but maybe that will not be possible. Therefore what alternative is there, if you do not want to stay in the Middle East? Well, maybe you could go to my old school in Romania, the British School of Bucharest! Anyway, it looks as though the mess with the passports and visas will be sorted out eventually and then my guess is that China is going to be great! If you really want a change from the Middle East, then China will definitely be a change.
Please give my best wishes to anyone at Newton British School who still remembers me!
Simon
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