After talking with the various friendly legal authorities, the best plan concocted was to simply to take a trip to Hong Kong, pay the fine at the border, and get the visa taken care of, as usual, in Hong Kong. Xiao Ji took me to the ferry station in Shekou. I bought a ticket to Kowloon an hour in advance and then got in line to straighten out the Visa situation. Same sort of little dance again but this time I ended up in a room covered in wood on all sides. There were several computer terminals on the opposite end running Windows XP (were they legal? I’m sure they weren’t.) I took a seat and snuck a picture of the room (below). Wow, ain’t I clever and sneaky? This could be the opening scene in the next 007 movie. Aw yeah.

Unlike the officers at the main police station near the Di Wang building, these folks were pleasant. With my passport in hand, the lady sat down at one of the computers and started entering information (as in the above photo). “Dang, I’m being added to the system”, I thought. My only hope was that they were running MS InfoPath and that it would crash and I’d be safe. No such luck. She continued to fill out forms and print documents. By this time I was bored sitting at the sofa so I was up looking at a map on the wall. A male officer entered the room, approached me, and started asking me about the map. I understood bits and pieces but not everything. But, his English was good. He asked, “Are the maps the same in America?” Uh what? Are the maps the same? I had no idea what he meant. Maybe these were censored maps? I didn’t notice any countries or continents missing (haha), so with a perplexed look on my face, he followed up by asking if America was located in the center of US maps. OK, so he wanted to know how the map was oriented. This map was different; it had Europe and Asia on the left and the Americas on the far right. I let him know that we didn’t put North America in the dead center.

I tried to be as pleasant as possible telling them what a nice country they had (a universally nice compliment). Although I was sincere, I definitely had alterior motives for telling them. No such luck, the forms were already printed and it was time to fork over my 5000 RMB. Well not quite yet; I had to sign documents. Finally, I pulled out the thick wad of pink 100 RMB bills and started counting them in groups of ten. For fun, the officer now actually had me count in Chinese. “Yi, Er, San, Si, Wu, Liu, Chi, Ban, Jiu, Shi”. OK, well, at least I was getting an expensive Chinese lesson. To return the favor, with a tiny tiny hint of surliness, I asked him to count in English.

A ferry docked in Shekou:

After everything was wrapped up, the officer showed me to the empty waiting area for the ferry. He said to me, “Uh, next time, uh uh next…no next time.” OK, fine. I hung out here for about 20 minutes and typed up this report.