Randy W

From Wikepedia (the red area is primarily Cantonese) - Mandarin is taught in schools, but they still need Cantonese to be able to talk to parents and other people who didn't learn Mandarin. There are still TV stations that broadcast in Cantonese (these are Jiaying's favorites), and at least half of China's movie production is in Cantonese (from Hong-Kong). http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f7/Chi_ling3.png/300px-Chi_ling3.png

I disagree. While the Guangdong province is situated near Guanzhou and Hong Kong, Hong Kong remains the province whose primary language is Cantonese. Mandarin remains the predominent language of China, and the Guangdong province. However when one ventures outside the city limits there are many local and tribal languages that neither Cantonese nor Mandarin speakers will understand. 192583[/snapback] No - that whole area of China, including Guangdong and Guangxi, is Cantonese. Makes it easier to say "bai-bai".

Good News! Good Luck!

If you were able to successfully say good-bye - that is, hang up when both of you knew you were going to hang up - I would call that a successful phone call.

A region-free player that also converts PAL to NTSC. There were some links posted to these in a recent thread. Or, if you have a DVD burner on your PC, there is plenty of shareware that will do the conversion.

Jiaying pointed to the people in the posters, and said "Shagua!"

Mine shows no sales history either - they just show the tax appraisal values, which are lower than the sales figures. Kind of interesting to see these numbers for every house in my neighborhood.

Well, I WAS taking pictures . . . .

That's what they told us - that we would have to come back and wait in line to get the number after it had been entered. We waited the 10 days for it to come in the mail.

SMS is just e-mail, isn't it? I just sent an SMS message to my phone from a regular e-mail account by using <phone #>@tmomail.net (for T-Mobile). If you know the provier's domain, and her phone number, you might be able to figure out the SMS e-mail address, if she doesn't know.

How to Send SMS Worldwide

looks like VERY useful information - thanks, Tony

My experience has been that if 2 French people are in a room, they will speak French to each other and ignore everyone else. With Chinese people, however, you are at an advantage. In a room with only 1 English-speaking person, they will all speak English so you won't feel left out. If there's anyone who doesn't speak English, someone else will translate for you. You can correct anything that needs correcting. Best of all worlds here.

I think this came up in a thread once before that sending money to (supporting) your wife would be viewed favorably, but money exchanged by fiances could be viewed as somebody "buying" something. The receipts could open a door for the VO to question her motivation. Don't show them unless specifically asked.

Check out the polar pictures I put in the CFL gallery. They were taken on this flight last July. I flew that route twice - no complaints, except that the second one was delayed by 7 hours for an equipment malfunction. Either 2 or 3 meals.

It seems to me that the key to turning our spouses into REAL PEOPLE in the eyes of anyone who might look at their ID's is to get the Social Security card/EAD. Other ID's/bank accounts/some insurance companys require a number For K-1's, head to the SS office as soon as you can after arrival (well before the 90 days is up). If you don't have the Emplyment Autorization (K-1 comes with this), apply for it as soon as you can, and then head for the SS office. We got Jiaying's Texas ID today. They needed her passport, and an SS #. It all seems to hinge on Employment Authorization.

Congrats !! Good job!

If she were your K-1 fiance, they might look at whether you can reasonably afford to go trolling for brides in China, or whether you might just be in it for whatever kickback you might get. Undocumented deposits to your account are a sign of this. I had several when I transferred money from my brokerage account to my bank account, but they apparently didn't get any attention since I had plenty of money to cover my expenses. Just in case, I had prepared a document for Jiaying to take to the interview which connected the deposits to the brokerage withdrawals.

A doctor's visit is typically around $60-$100. A preferred provider agreement with your insurance company will get that down a little, and you would usually just pay the co-pay (say, $20). This is different than a HMO, because the PPO's do not work directly for the insurance company, and you usually have a much bigger choice of physicians.

Very informative!! Also, I am still laughing at your additional information, ie; "Save budget for one Nike and one Addidas". 189471[/snapback] Funny! I've got 2 pairs just like that! Also, I think that the money thing must be an important factor. Someone was blue-slipped recently for documentation on how they paid for the air travel. We hardly have any Nobel Prize candidates among us, but I think it goes without saying that it requires a pretty hefty budget. Someone who couldn't otherwise afford the expense, might catch some attention.

No English for my wife. The only person that I met in her home town who knew any English (let's see - "Nice to meet you" - 4 words) was her sister-in-law.

A valid Chinese passport is all she needs to enter China.

There is a dictionary button, and a translation button. You can input up to x hundred at a time. I am pretty sure you can input pinyin, but my wife doesn't do pinyin - she just uses the Chinese character recognition - so I'm not sure. There is an English language manual for it that you can download. We do one or more sentences at a time.

The Yishin 888/Langwen 8688 translates to either Chinese or pinyin and voice. For learning, just input the word(s) you want to learn, and translate. The contrast is similar to what pushbrk is complaining about (the same one??), but as of last year, the color ones were dictionaries (i.e., did not do whole sentences). We bought ours last year in China, where we were actually able to try the various models.