so recently my life hasn’t been too interesting, just a whirlpool of fees, photocopies, documents, passport-sized photos, appointments, consulates, international phone calls, snail mail, seals and stamps. for those who don’t travel internationally often, your brush with governmental lines probably ends in airport customs control and reapplying for a new passport in some seedily located, smelly seventies style building in your hometown. however, for the people who travel often, for both leisure and residence purposes, you get used to the gov’t rigamarole quite quickly — or go back home.
see the picture to the left? that’s my travel documents cache, a file folder with everything needed for new visas and permits, stockpiled inside for anytime use. passport sized pictures in 2.5 centimeter widths, 3 centimeter widths and 3.5 centimeters widths? got ‘em. passport photocopies of the signature page, chinese visa pages, and most recent entry and exit stamps in b&w and in color? yep. glue and scissors just in case the consulate won’t let you use theirs? uh-huh.
however, i wasn’t always this organized. a quick stop by the corner photocopy man used to suffice for my visits to the us consulate or chinese public bureau of security, and a quick eight-hundred renminbi fee, about one-hundred and twenty US bucks, to a chinese visa agency for the procurement and submitting of (questionable) documents, helped me bypass the tedious chinese visa process. but now it’s an entirely different story, one of incredible thoroughness and lawfulness. now i’m doing something much, much more complicated. 
this week i’m in the process of submitting a swiss visa. the swiss higher education system boasts having some of the cheapest tuition rates in the world for both int’l and domestic students — only 4 to 500 francs total per semester — but what they don’t tally up for you is the costs that it takes just to get there. so far i’ve spent almost 900 us dollars on application fees, stamps, photocopies, int’l mail fees, appointments and documents for both my school and visa applications, which is about the cost of 1 academic year’s school tuition. here’s a graph that i’ve done to detail the expenses (scroll below to see).
of course i didn’t tally up the amount of time that these phone calls, emails, waiting in gov’t office lines picking up documents and filling out applications has taken me. if counted up the hours, and affixed to them my hourly salary for english teaching, 30 usd per hour, my ‘applications and visa costs’ pie graph would spiral up well-over 1,000 usd. but i’m not looking at that, i’m not even worrying about future additional fees, and undoubtedly there will be more; right now i’m just hoping that after all this work and money, that i get the visa and i get it on time.
