Immigration and Chinese Lessons

I walked into the immigration office terrified that one of my many forms would have some random error on it causing chaos and confusion between me and the employee. I was pleasantly surprised when the man looked at my passport and asked, “Georgia, that’s where Stone Mountain is right?”

I couldn’t believe it. What are the odds that the man who is determining whether or not I can stay in Taiwan has been to a park about twenty miles outside of Atlanta and around seven miles from where I grew up? From that moment I knew the rest of the process would be a breeze.

He began telling me of his trip to Atlanta and how much he loved it. He gave me advice on where to go wind surfing on the western shores of the island. The minor glitches that did occur went smoothly, and he even held my spot while I ran down the street to get new passport photos made (mine were too small). Good thing too, the line was atrocious and I wasn’t looking forward to waiting another hour for six people to go again. I now have a resident visa and in two weeks I will have my ARC and all official paperwork will be done. Yay!

Oh, and I got assigned my Chinese name (sorry I am unable to put it on the blog – no clue how to find or put the characters on here). Not a clue what it means, but it will be official in a week or so.

Monday marked the beginning of Chinese lessons. I’m officially excited to learn Mandarin. The class itself is two hours everyday, in the middle of the morning. Happy to say now I have something to do during the day before work. Note: I think I’m tone-deaf – making the class quite challenging.

I’ve been researching the cycling industry – scouring the internet, visiting local bike shops and reaching out to anyone I know who could be a help. The opportunity to work for this particular OEM in the cycling industry is huge. Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing or how to go about it. So for now, I am just trying to make it work.

Here is one of the temples I go by on the way to work in Longtan. When going to work the other day we saw two kids practicing their performance on the beams for the Dragon Boat Festival – cool stuff.

Temple at Longtan