visas

We got back from Korea on Friday night, making our trip a total of 8 days in Korea, a day longer than we were planning. On the whole our trip was good, though getting our visas changed did take longer than we expected (hence the extra day). We went to the Chinese embassy on Monday morning, which turned out to be in the middle of nowhere in Seoul. After walking from the subway stop for about 15 minutes, we arrived at the embassy and saw a big gate. Realizing that we weren't going to be able to waltz in, we went to the side where a guard was stationed. Unfortunately, the guard didn't speak any Chinese or English, but luckily he did understand visa. After we said visa, he said something that sounded vaguely like "Pisa? No no" this was a little alarming, but then he pointed to my map, and somehow communicated that we needed to go somewhere else to get our visa changed. Finally after a subway ride and some wandering around (though surprisingly little wandering around, given that we didn't really know where we were going), we found the Chinese consulate (well, first we found a visa service, where we submitted Dan's visa). They weren't able to change my visa, because I wanted a business visa. At the Chinese consulate you really could just walk in, and so I went in to change my visa. I applied for a business visa, but it turns out the business visa would require me to leave the country every month, which was exactly I was trying to avoid. Instead, I ended up getting a three month tourist visa, which is basically what I wanted. I picked my visa up with no problem, but when we went on Wednesday to get Dan's visa, there was no new visa in it. Finally, it turns out they couldn't give Dan a new visa because he had no pages in his passport. A visa has to be placed on a new page, and when we entered korea, they stamped on his last page. Luckily, the people at the consulate were quite friendly, and they gave us the number of the American embassy and told us to go there and add pages. We called the embassy, but by some weird twist of bad luck, it turns out the American embassy is closed on Wednesdays (we started to think poorly of American bureaucracy). At that point we decided that there would be no way to add pages to Dan's passport and get a new visa all on thursday before 2 pm, so we got our plane tickets changed until Friday. Thursday morning, we went to the American embassy, which also had a big enormous gate with barbed wire. It also had a squad of riot police standing at attention. (Well, half of them were standing at attention, the other half were shivering and looking really bored. I guess the American embassy in South Korea is not a hotbed of excitement). We had to wait in a long ling outside, as the police let us in in groups of fives. After proving we were American citizens, we had to go through a security search, and put all electronic devices into a little locker. Finally, we could go into the consulate itself. There we gave the passport to the woman, and she told us to come back at 11:30 (it was about 9:20 am). We told her we had to be at the Chinese consulate by 11, and she told us to wait. Amazingly, by 10 his passport was ready (we began to think more highly of American bureaucracy). We went back to the Chinese consulate, and the next day we picked up Dan's passport with visa.