An Embarrased Experience with 2 Forein Friends in Police Office

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    Hey, guys, how's everything going? This is Jack from Shanghai. Last three days, I have accompanied with 2 foreign friends as a interpreter in GuangZhou, for a business trip. That was really a facinating trip full of memories. Today, I am going to share you one of those stories.  

    This stories is about the happening of "arrested" by police officer  and sent to the police office. 

    At the time we arrived at the Marriot Hotel in Guangzhou, we went to the reception counter, doing the normoal check-in. But the server there said there was something strange for Alex and Megan's visa. They could not find a valid visa, because it looked like it was expired. Alex told me that they visited TaiWan in the Chinese New Year holiday. For their original visa, they were allowed to stay in China for 6 months(180 days). But it only allowed  for one time inport and one time export. So they needed another visa for their trip back to the mainland. But it seemed the staff from the immigration office in Shanghai did some mistakes. Their second visa was written the expired time with "Feburary 15th" while they got their second visa at January.

   Because their second visa looked the expired date was Feburary 15th, so it means Alex and Megan cannot stay in China anymore, let alone for check-in. I was asking the guy in the hotel how to solve the problem. They told us only police could do that. So I called the police. Fifteen minutes later, the police officer arrived. I told him those details, and also , told him that Alex and Megan met the same problem when they came back to the mainland after Feburary 15th the other day. But at that time, they called the immigration office in Shanghai, and got the problem solved. But the police officer did not know a lot about the immigration stuff. So he just took us back to the police office. Then we were on that police car for criminals with bars in the back seats.  

   To make the atmosphere easy, I made some jokes, said "This was my first time to be arrested by the police and sit a police car like this. We should take a selfie to record this unique moments." Hahaha, it seemed it works. All of us started to laugh and made jokes. We tread this happening as part of this trip, and agreed that, those normal exchange friends like Eric back in Shanghai, would never have such experience like that. We took a trip in police office in Guanghzou for free!

   Now we arrived at the police office. Alex told me more detials about that mistake on visa. After some discussion and logic analysis, we got a clue. Their visa is legal, for the remarks bellow the expired date. "Expired rate is above, but after next time, each time they came back to the mainland  they would have another 105 days ".  They got the visa in January in Shanghai, so it means after their trip when the back to Shanghai, they are in the period of "next time", so they have 105 days for more. That means, for now, they are in the process of the 105 days.  We explained this to the officer, and thankfully, he got our idea. And started to confirm this on the police computer system for us. We feeled safe the moment he got our idea. And after about 40 minutes, we were released, safe and sound.

   We were happy that we were set free, and took a taxi back to hotel with only 10 yuan. After that, erythings went so easy. 

 

That's the experience in police office. Wish you could enjoy it. Wish my english skills is good enough to let you guys understand it. 

Thank you, and good luck!

Jack 

From Shanghai