I miss the simple time when I lived in Finland, studied in Finnish and for all practical purposes was considered a part of the masses. No one asked me about residency permits, work authorizations or eligibility for dual taxation.

My current project? Trying to get my Finnish passport and China residency permit renewed. I wanted to think it was going to be a simple two step process with an application and approval, yet I've come to long for those days when I didn't need to navigate the legal code of three very different countries.

I knew my 10-year passport was going to expire at the end of February so last September after returning from Helsinki, I inquired how many weeks it would actually take to get a new one. The Consular General here in Shanghai promised a new one in 3 weeks. So with all the known and unknown travel happening in November/December, I was left with January to get down to application business.  

I marched into the Consulate General with my current passport, a photo and enough Chinese money to fill a suitcase (the denomination on the largest bill is about $10 USD, which makes paying for anything expensive a comic act in itself. But that's a whole another chapter) in early January. First roadblock: the consular general wanted to know why my permanent address was listed as U.S. and not Finland.
"Because that's where we lived before coming to Shanghai."
"But now you are working and living in Shanghai?"
"Yes, that's right."
"So we need to change it to Shanghai then."
"God, no! (The U.S. border guards harrassed me about NOT living in the U.S. while holding a Green Card on my recent trip to Minneapolis. Don't I know that they can just take the card away from me if they think I am not in the U.S. on a permanent basis....Geesh. I can already see them having a field day with the new passport "Issued In: Shanghai". I don't need the Finnish authorities on my back now too. )

Finally I emerged from the consulate with promises of a new passport in three weeks and a print-out informing me my application had been "APPROVED" (Now hang on, did they have an option of NOT approving my passport application? Maybe I don't even want to know how close I came to being a person without a country).

Next, I attempted to make some arrangements to travel to Japan. Not so fast. The travel agent refused to sell me a ticket because my passport expiration was weeks, not months away. I called the Japanese Embassy in Helsinki and they said they didn't care as long as the passport was valid during the travel. I relayed the message to the agent who insisted on putting the number of the new passport on the ticket. My attempts to explain I certainly would travel with the new passport if I actually had it were unsuccessful. I'll spare you the detail but let's just say that when I finally got the ticket issued, I felt like I had just managed to tell ice to the Eskimos.

Now I'm safely back in Shanghai waiting for the last segment of the renewal process to unfold in the next ten days. Tomorrow I go to pick up the new passport from the Consulate and take it directly to the local police station to get a WHITE slip of paper (we have a PINK slip of paper from the local police that they gave us when we initially registered but apparently it will not do). Then, I will take the documents along with some papers from my work with large red chop stamps to the bigger police station where they will be processed for one week. If all goes well, I will be granted another residency and work permit until next June when the rest of the family's permits expire. And since that sounds way too simple, let's consider that Raili's U.S. passport expires in May, which means we will probably get to renew all residency permits already in April. 

And that's only two months away. Oh, the joy.