Preparing your home for a teacher exchange probably doesn’t need to be as enormous an undertaking as we’re making it, but we are taking the opportunity to really cull through our belongings and clean out every drawer, cupboard, closet, and corner. We have likened it to preparing your house for sale: staging it for viewings. We’ve been living in a tip for a few weeks now, and will for a few weeks more, I’m sure. Tackle a little bit each day and balance that work with the regular obligations and responsibilities of life and you’ve got a pretty full agenda.

We have also started packing the suitcases: summer shorts and shirts, and other bits and bobs we think we’ll need/want. Lots oof exchangees have advised not to over pack, just take some clothes, everything else you can get if you need it. Placing the things we think we’ll need by the suitcases helps us visualize how much stuff we may actually take. Seeing it there day after day we sometimes ask ourselves… do we REALLY need to bring that with us?

My wife loves baking and talked about packing her measuring cups and spoons, Australia being more Metric-ified than Canada overall. Decided against it – seemed like a good opportunity to learn conversions and become more comfortable with the Metric equivalents of those Imperial measures that have been harder to shake.

I woke up in the dark of night last night in a panic. I was scheduled to fly the next day to EdCampChicago. Very exciting. If you haven’t been to an EdCamp yet, you really must find one near you and go.

In case you haven’t read any of the other posts on this blog, my family and I are spending 2014 in Australia on an International Teaching Fellowship and have planned a layover in China for 5 days. As you can well imagine, there is all sorts of paperwork, and a couple of visa applications requiring a lot of documents: original and certified copies. Therein lay the problem. In 14 hours I was to be on a plane from Winnipeg to Chicago and it suddenly occurs to me that I mailed my passport to Ottawa to process my transit visa through China in December en route to Australia and I don’t yet have it back in my hands.

crap

Armed with every passport I’ve ever held and every piece of government issue photo ID in my possession, both current and expired, I proceed, optimistically, to the airport check-in counter. The staff were wonderful, polite, understanding, sympathetic, and, ultimately, faithful to the letter of the law.

“I’m sorry, sir. Without a current valid passport, you cannot board the flight.”

crap

You do a lot of stuff with your passport when preparing for a teaching exchange: numbers here, certified copies there, couriering hither and yon, and this was one occasion when I kind of lost track of it. Fortunately Delta credited me the value of the flight, and Expedia negotiated a full refund for a non-refundable hotel stay at a Howard Johnson in Chicago (thank-you, thank-you, thank-you). Net cost: $0,  anxiety: priceless.

Now I get to spend the weekend with my beautiful wife and entertaining son. Not a bad consolation.

First World Problems, for sure.

Enjoy your day, #EdCampChicago! Would love to have been there in person to meet you all. For the record, I would have submitted to a cavity search to attend #EdCampChicago, but they didn’t even give me the option!

1) Get all of your paper work in order as soon as you can i.e. visa application forms and the info that goes with it basically once you have confirmation get going on it.

2) Make sure you have sought approval from the school board and a letter of writing gets to them stating your intentions etc.

3) Bring as many resources with you on flash drive, as you never know what will be available when you get there.

4) Save lots of money; everything will run you approximately 25% higher give or take the exchange rate.

5) Save all your receipts you can use them next year to claim travel expenses for the following year. (have heard conflicting information about this – if anyone has experience and details, would love to hear it!)

6) travel light if you can depending on where you are located. We brought way too many clothes, bring your favourites leave the rest at home.

7) I highly recommend breaking up the trip by spending a few days somewhere along the way.

Fiji, Tahiti, Hawaii, the Cook Islands. All these places were on the table for a layover on the way to Australia for our teaching exchange experience. Taking advantage of flight layovers adds opportunities we might not otherwise have on a trip when we have the luxure of time. It is one of the advantages of exchange timing that we leave late December and enjoy a southern hemisphere summer holiday in January.

So what did we decide for the layover? Beijing, China.

To tell you the truth, it scares us a little. Such a big place and a completely foreign language and writing system are very disorienting not to mention exotic food and squat toilets. I guess that’s how we knew it was the right choice. After all, we have pretty easy access to beaches and resorts from home, but China will be completely unique – a place we wouldn’t likely visit on its own.

We’re playing it safe with our risk-taking and have booked bus tours for a few days to cram in some sight-seeing. Yes, I know it is an inauthentic experience and spending a day or two just wandering The Great Wall pondering history would be ideal, but we also want to mitigate the anxiety that might come in that environment.