Well I've finally given in and accepted a teaching position here in Baoding.
It's a local Technical collage and they have been perusing me for about 2 and a half months now. I was given a tour and introduced to the students. It looks to be fairly affluent with a good size indoor pool and lot of sporting facilitates and for teaching 5 classes a week of 16 students per class. I get 7000 yuan per month,paid in any currency I wish. The school year is 10 months and I get a months paid holiday during that time and an 8000 yuan travelling allowance every summer. They will provide accommodation as well ,but as I have a nice house here anyway, I won't take them up on that one.
I'm going through the process of getting my Z visa now. They require lots of nonsense paperwork that quite frankly you could just make up! I went for my medical yesterday at the local hospital. They took a blood sample, a couple of chest x-rays and my blood pressure, it was all over in about an hour and I will go back today for the results and to get my "Foreigners Health Certificate" The whole thing cost 100 yuan. I've been told that if you are coming over here to teach not to get your health check done in your home country as they will only make you do it again over here and its probably cheaper here anyway.
The first stage of getting the work visa was to send off my resume and any qualification I had to the foreign experts office in Beijing. The school did this for me. They asked for a tefl type certificate so I told them I was taking the course online at the moment.:angel: They where more than happy with that! My resume stated that I had not taught any English for about 10 years so they sent it back and asked me to put some more recent experience down,err so I did. Next day I received a message saying I had past the test.
So now they want:-
1.Resume.
2. Copies of academic diplomas and degrees.
3. Health certificates issued by the health and quarantine dept.
4.Two recommendation letters from my teachers, colleagues or friends.
5. Copy of the first page of my passport.
6. Initially signed contract
All translated into Chinese, which the school is taking care of. Well, one of the teachers is doing the translation!
From my understanding they will then give me an invitation letter that I have to take to a travel agency in Hong Kong along with some other stuff to get my Z visa issued. The idea I have is to get my work visa through the school and as I'm only teaching 5 hours a week that will leave me more than enough time to take on some more lucrative private teaching work. With the right stamp in my passport there's no fear that the authorities will jump all over me and hopefully it will be the best of both worlds. I won't start until March and to tell you the truth if it all fails to get off the ground I won't be too disappointed. Well we will see what happens.........
