Visa Troubles
As many of you may know, I am in the US on a temporary exchange visitor visa (J-1), and my stay has been extended for an extra year. My visa, however, expires on Sep. 30th. This is usually not a big problem since I am formally allowed to stay in the US even after my visa is expired, as long as my fellowship is valid. However, without a valid visa I’m not allowed to return to the US.
Applying or extending a US visa has to be done outside the US, and requires leaving your passport at a US embassy for at least a few days while your visa is processed, so it is recommended to do so in your home country (in my case, Israel) to avoid being stuck at a foreign country with no passport at all.
No problem I thought, I will go to Israel for the High Holidays right at the end of September and extend my visa then. The problem began when I realized I have a conference in Beijing, China right at the same time (end of September till the beginning of October), which means I will not be able to return to the US after visiting China without a valid visa.
I checked the option of flying round-the-world SFO-NRT-PEK-AMS-TLV-AMS-SFO, however that was too expensive. The only option I had was to fly round-trip to China and then to Israel the long way through San Francisco. Due to my visa problems, I will make my stay in San Francisco only a few hours long and so I could use a transit visa instead of my expired J-1 visa, which will hopefully not terminate my J-1 status. My final itinerary will therefore be SFO-NRT-PEK-NRT-SFO-AMS-TLV-AMS-SFO, that’s 30,000 miles of flying, crossing two oceans twice, with the PEK-TLV part being almost 10,000 miles longer than the direct route, and 7,000 miles longer than the reasonable Amsterdam connection.
As far as booking is concerned, I have already changed my return flight to Israel and I will be arriving on Yom Kippur, October 10, 2008 at 1:10 AM. Hopefully, the flight won’t be full of religious folk…
