20250408 Tuesday, April 8, 2025. China Visa Mission Accomplished

20250408 Tuesday, April 8, 2025. China Visa Mission Accomplished

We headed back into San Francisco, leaving Eileen’s place at 9:15 a.m. and got to the Chinese Embassy around 10:30.  The traffic wasn’t too bad heading into the city, but it is a bit of a drive from the Hwy 101 exit through the surface streets to get to the embassy.  

Surprisingly, as we approached the embassy, we spotted a 2-hour street parking space about a block short of the embassy and were able to actually grab it.  It’s a good thing the Bronco has a short wheelbase for parallel parking.  

As we approached the Embassy entrance, it was immediately evident that there was a big line of people outside the entrance. As we got closer, we saw there were actually 2 lines.  One for visa pickups that was only one person long, and the other for applications that was probably 30 people deep.  We were sure glad that wasn’t the situation when we arrived last Thursday at 2 p.m., just a half hour before closing.  

Once inside the building, there were 4 or 5 people in the pick-up line.  You have to present your receipt at one window where a staffer digs through all the passports and pulls them out.  They give you a ticket to present to the payment window where you confirm the passports and make payment.  For some reason, some people were taking quite a long time at that window. But when we finally got to the window, it only took a couple of minutes for the woman inside the window to match up the receipt with each passport, show us each passport photo to confirm they were ours, and then process our credit card payment.  We were heading out the door by 11 a.m. with visas in hand.  

Since we had a 2-hour parking spot, we walked around the Japan Center Mall, which had a number of shops and restaurants.  The restaurant part reminded us a lot of the restaurant malls in Tokyo.  Most of the shops were just opening, and many of the restaurants were closed until dinner time.  There were other interesting Japanese gift shops and stores as well.  

We headed back to Los Altos with our Chinese visas and celebrated with lunch at the Mountainview In-n-Out.  This time we ordered our burgers “Animal Style,” which means instead of just fresh lettuce, tomato, and onion, they fry the patty with mustard, substitute grilled onions, and add pickles.  We’d have to say the pickles were a noticeable improvement over the basic burger.  

There was a Costco just across the street from the In-n-Out, as well as a beverage and wine store, so we had a walk-through.  Since we eventually determined the cost of beer and wine in California wasn’t any less than in Washington, Ben wanted to try to return the wines so we didn’t have to drive with all that cargo weight.  So we ran back to the RV, which was only 15 minutes from this Costco, and packed up the wines, only to learn at the door that the State of California does not allow any returns on alcohol purchases.  So we ended up unloading and reloading the wines for nothing.  

We hitched up the Bronco to the RV and made our way east to San Ramon.  The traffic was quite bad approaching the turn-off for Livermore.  It had slowed to little more than a crawl for about 5 miles, which took over a half hour to get through.  Once we got past the Livermore turn-off, things opened right up.  

We parked the RV on the sidewalk in front of Xiaowen’s house and unhitched the Bronco because it would have blocked a driveway.  We greeted Xiaowen, her husband Peng, and our other cousin, Xiaowen’s brother Daqing.  Xiaowen and Daqing’s mother was also there.  She is 92, but as cute as a bug and seemed very happy, despite arthritis and osteoporosis shrinking her to a tiny stature.

Ben’s nearly a year on Duolingo wasn’t nearly enough to carry a conversation, but it was enough to get a hint of the context of things Daqing wanted to say, but we really had to still rely on Xiaowen and Peng doing some translating.  The few Duolingo phrases Ben has learned seem only to be enough to instill a false impression that he can understand what is being said.  But family is family, and we did have a good time getting caught up on how Xiaowen and Daqing’s children were doing, and what our kids have been up to.  

Dave came up with Eileen and her sons Brevan and Coby to join us for dinner at a nearby Chinese restaurant.  We had a grand feast, and just when we thought we were about done, they brought out a roast duck.  We didn’t think we could eat any more, but the duck was too delicious to pass up at least a taste.  There were a couple of dishes that were a bit unusual but also Hunan specialties.  One was a clay pot fish soup with pickled vegetables.  It was very interesting because the pickled cabbage was essentially sauerkraut, which gave the soup a unique sour but savory taste.  The other was a beef with green peppers like mild jalapeños. Ben had ordered a Mongolian lamb, not knowing what to expect, but it was pretty much prepared like Mongolian beef (duh!). 

When the meal had wound down, Janet had tried to sneak up to the counter to intercept the check, but Xiaowen caught her and short of a true mud wrestling match, Xiaowen won out and refused to allow us to split the check.  We will just have to get them back on our turf.  

While we were at the restaurant, apparently someone had complained to the police that our RV’s slide was obstructing the sidewalk.  We had given Xiaowen’s family a tour of our RV, so we had the slide out and had forgotten to pull it back in before we left for dinner.  It was protruding about a foot over part of the sidewalk, but easily left over 30” unobstructed.  But after we got back to Xiaowen’s place, we repositioned the RV so that the edge of the extended slide was exactly at the curb.  We didn't think whoever had complained would be walking the sidewalk in the middle of the night, but we went to sleep hoping not to be awakened by knocking on the RV door.