Gao Jing is back. She went with Zeneta to Beijing in order to insure that Zeneta had less problems leaving China. While here, because the dorms were closed, she used the couch in our "den."
Gao Jing came a couple of days before Zeneta was due to leave in order to complete some final paperwork that was necessary for Wa Dou to leave the country. I was surprised at how well that went.
She and Zeneta also tried to mail back some of Zenetas clothing and personal affects, only to discover that the post offices are closed for the month in honor of the New Year. The result of that is that I still have a giant pile of stuff waiting to be shipped once the post offices open again. I am under the impression that they will open in a couple of weeks.
The first step was to take a cab to the bus station. She took a bus instead of a train fir two reasons. First, she had a tremendous amount of stuff, well over the weight limit for baggage on the train. The second reason was that, much like in America, dogs are not allowed on the train. She had hopped that the dog could sit on her lap on the trip, like he has done in the past when traveling to Zhengzhou; however, the driver insisted that he be in a cage. So, he sat in a cage, on her lap, to Zhengzhou.
In Zhengzhou they met with Sunny, one of my freshmen students who lives in that city. She then assisted them in finding their hotel and she also took Wa Dou for the night, as dogs are not allowed in any of the hotels that Zeneta contacted in Zhengzhou.
The next day they met with Sunny and went to the airport in Zhengzhou (cab from Zhengzhou to Zhengzhou International Airport is about 150? in order to fly to Beijing. It was necessary to fly form Zhengzhou both to reduce the length of the bus ride and because, having obtained his exit papers in Henan province, it was necessary for Wa Dou to leave China from Henan province.
It was at the airport in Zhengzhou that Zeneta ran into her first problem of the exit stage (which is different from the planning stage; or, the, still separate, pre-exit stage [the paperwork stage] ) Gao Jing's ticket was no good. Zeneta had purchased it from Expedia and, as such, her name was written as "Gao Jing" in pin yin (roman characters) instead of 高竟, and only Chinese characters are acceptable for Chinese nationals tickets. Instead of having her name in characters, it would have been acceptable to have her ID number on the ticket; but, that was not there either. As such, the ticket was, simply, not valid.
Zeneta ended up purchasing a ticket for her there, at the airport so that she could continue to accompany Zeneta to Beijing. Other than that, there were no big problems. She was permitted to check in her two large bags and her dishes as regular baggage. The rule is two pieces of baggage so she had taped the two large boxes of dishes together tin order to make them into one box instead of two. However, this still left her at three packages. She was still not charged for the excess baggage. This has given me some encouragement as to getting my bicycle back in June. She was charged extra for Wa Dou, we were prepared for that as the China Air website, clearly, says that animals are charged as excess baggage, even if there is no other baggage. The charge was 10? per Kilogram, or, 100? for Wa Dou and his crate.
They then flew to Beijing where they got their luggage and went through the process of checking it again, they do not transfer your luggage for you in China. You have to retrieve it and check it in at each transfer point. Here they charged the 200? that the China Air website said that it would cost for excess baggage to get Wa Dou on the plane. As before, there was no charge for the dishes, which constituted a third bag.
At that point Gao Jing left Zeneta to idle her time away as she waited to fly, non-stop from Beijing to San Francisco.
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