Chinese Visas

This is a guest blog post.  I’m the husband that is grateful for my wife that keeps you all up to date with this blog on a regular basis.  She is phenomenal at doing each post and I’m good at proofreading if I’m around when she is about to post it – and that’s all I can take credit for.

I have had the pleasure of doing some of the immigration paperwork as well as the visa applications for our passports.  China is quite strict with accounting for who is coming and going and what is causing this movement. 

The Canadian immigration paperwork is done in two phases.  The first phase was completed almost a year ago (oops – I was supposed to do a guest post on that process).  The short version is that I filled out about 20 pages of online documents filling in all of our personal information from addresses to finances to family details and throughout those documents referred to our son as “unknown child” with ****-**-** as his birthdate.  This was all done with the help of women that has adopted two girls from China and has helped numerous families with this complicated paperwork. 

The second phase of that paperwork will be completed in Beijing during the second week of our trip after all of the official adoption paperwork has been completed.  Fingers crossed that all the immigration paperwork is done properly so that upon our return to the airport in Toronto, the immigration officers will simply say, “Welcome home” to us and “Welcome to Canada” to our son. 

Then there were the Chinese visas for our passports.  As I said, the Chinese government likes to closely monitor who is going in and out of their country.  We were warned that when filling out the application for our visas that we really needed to be meticulous in following the instructions and to be sure to include all the necessary documentation.  Each of our applications was four pages in length and included typical personal information, passport information, place of employment, family information on children, parents and spouse, reason for travel, flight details, hotel information for our stay in China and all the information about the Chinese adoption organization that we are working with. 

The closest visa office is in downtown Toronto (2 hours East of where we live) and because we needed all the specifics of our trip to apply, we really didn’t have the time to mail in our application.  With only three weeks until our trip, I drove the three applications down to the Toronto office.  My appointment was at 9:00am and I made it no problem.  By 10:00am I was finishing the third and final application.  All the supporting documentation was in order and the last thing to check were that the signatures on our applications matched the signatures on our passports.  One of the signatures (I won’t say which one to protect my wife’s identity) didn’t match enough to pass.  “So you won’t accept the applications because those signatures don’t match?” They needed an original document so there wasn’t another option aside from driving home to get another signature and driving back.  My lovely wife met me part way to save me some time to ensure I could make it back to Toronto in time to get it all sorted out.  I realized that day, that I’m not cut out to be in the driving business.  When I got home around 7:00pm, I was ready for bed.   I’m heading back to Toronto in a few days to pick up our passports and that is one of the final things off the list in preparation for our trip – aside from packing.