Stopped at the Laotian Border.

GOT STOPPED AT THE BORDER OF LAOS FOR AN HOUR TODAY. not entering laos, but exiting china. apparently multi-entry chinese visas are 60-DAYS-AT-A-TIME, which i exceeded by 7 days. thanks for the heads up, dad.

got let off with a warning, but the border patrol had me sign all these papers being like "yes sir, china sir, i understand that i exceeded the duration of stay sir, i promise to take it seriously and never do it again." all while the rest of the bus waited for me outside ... oops.

good thing i speak chinese, though, because i actually ended up just chatting with the border patrol guy while he waited for his department head to respond to him via walkie-talkie (on what to do with the situation). we chatted about politics, lifestyle, random culture, travel, chinese tourism ....

after about a half hour wait, i was brought into this room to sign the papers and lo and behold, there are 4 other border patrol in the BREAK ROOM watching a chinese tv drama. *facepalm*

red ink from fingerprint verifying that all my signatures were original and not forged

.... good thing we arbitrarily decided to hop over to Laos instead of discovering this at the airport back to the US?