Visa & Vaccinations

The journey has still not begun but I’m writing again since I’m having pretty much free time and there are so many things which need to be done before the plane takes off.. Well, I’d use this free time also by reading for my last exam which is in about two hours but I felt writing a new blog post is more useful. I might think otherwise in couple of hours :D Going to China for a long period of time means a lot of vaccinations as we are planning not only to hang around in Shanghai for the six months but also travelling around China and hopefully around Thailand and Malaysia etc. too. Necessary vaccinations are for example hepatitis, Japanese encephalitis, cholera, typhoid fever which are certainly not cheap. I’ve paid over 500 euros in total for all of these but I wanna travel a lot in the coming months without having to have any concerns about my health.   

Another not too easy mission is to get the Chinese Visa. The Embassy in Helsinki is open only 2,5 hours per day, so for people not living in Helsinki it's quite difficult to deliver the Visa application, especially as the embassy doesn’t accept mailed or e-mailed applications for some reason. Luckily for me, my mother was very helpful and not only was able to deliver my application but she’s also going to pick it up once I get the Visa approval. For some reason they don’t allow any Visas for multiple entries to China in Finland, so we have to continue dealing with our Visa affairs also in Shanghai before our first trips outside China. And by the way, we had the exam in our Chinese course on Friday - nailed it! Having studied Chinese for around 3 months now, I must admit that it's the most difficult language I've ever tried to learn :) but motivation is the key and I hope I'll be capable of speaking and understanding some simple sentences when we get to Shanghai..