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…
Any other news going on in your lives you want to share?
No religious person would fly on Yom Kippur…
No trains, either. How will you get home?
And I notified of the Cleanup post instead of the correct one? twice…
Comment by Inbal | June 11, 2008
Sorry about that. Was doing some re-organization of my blog now.
Comment by epsalon | June 11, 2008