Pre-Closure

Countdown to departure: 14 days?
Countdown to culture shock: 199 days?

I cannot enumerate all of the various ups-and-downs in my preparations that have happened since my last post. Suffice it to say, the statement, "every day I wake up, my life gets more complicated," has continued to ring true. I'm holding a conference call with my boss and some of my Chinese friends tomorrow night to try to get things cleared up once and for all.

The aspect of the complications relevant to the question marks above is thus: the delays in my visa application have introduced the possibility that I will have to change my flight to a later date. Unfortunately, the super-cheap ticket I found was at the very tail end of the off-season; consequently, the fee for changing it would run in the order of $500 (which, if you recall, was the cost of the ticket itself). There are plenty of pros to changing my ticket, but it would be nice to just have this over with as-is.

By tomorrow I'll probably have an idea of how things are going to play out.