This is rapidly becoming the best thread on forumosa.
Thank you for posting these stories!
Guy
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I’d be shocked if they were that sophisticated.
This thread is 10/10, I’m on the edge of my seat.
We had our first child here in Yilan two weeks ago and my (American, Boston) mother is heartbroken that she can’t be here. She even called TECO to see if she could get one of those “special visas” and she’s willing to go through quarantine (the lady loves newborns, what can I say). Can’t wait til we get to the special visa part of all this to see what it’s all about and pass along a little intel.
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Alaska Air landed in Austin, with maybe five other passengers and myself on board, at just past 11am on Tuesday, March 24. The Alaska flight attendants were terrific, and while the flight was short they made multiple rounds dropping off bottles of water, soda, and snacks. Don’t think they had to do that, and their cheer and generosity were much appreciated.
Disembarked to the ghost town that is Austin-Bergstrom these days. At first glance I thought the airport was undergoing renovation, but looking closer it became obvious that all the plastic sheeting was there to cover kiosks and bars that in better circumstances are open and busy but were now shuttered. No masks worn anywhere.
A few of the hardier shops were still open, and I stopped by a BBQ place to watch Texas Gov. Abbott announce new restrictions on business (non-essential business to be shuttered temporarily) and to recommend social distancing for Texas residents who had to leave their homes for essential tasks.
There was an airport employee standing with me. I asked him if I’d missed anything important, he told me about sheltering in place at home. A few exchanges later I mentioned that I’d just flown in from Singapore. He took a half-step away, grinned, and then asked, “really?” Hahaha. Funny guy.
I chose Austin because of my hip, which will require surgical replacement some time soon. I spent two weeks in Austin last September scouting out surgeons, the city, the likelihood that I would be able to use its public transportation system rather than buying/renting a car, whether I liked it, etc.
I’m now eligible for Medicare, and if I’m not submitting FISA payments to Uncle Sam under my Social Security number (i.e., employed) then I have no choice but to shell out Medicare premiums to Uncle Sam no later than three months after I turn 65. Due to the inherent, clunky nature of Medicare and how one day it bolts itself onto the financial lives of all eligible Americans, it only makes sense to use it for this surgery. Austin and Texas will work for my purposes.
When I learned the US State Department was recommending that US citizens return, I figured I might as well kill two birds with one stone, return to Austin, and get my hip done.
Even though the airport was a ghost town, I nearly got lost walking to the taxi stand, which at AUS is shared with Uber and Lyft (both are excellent in Austin, btw). I just wasn’t used to finding my way to the taxi stand when the area is almost completely deserted. The landscape was just too alien.
My Lyft driver was the first Texan to inform me that non-emergency surgeries were not taking place in Austin. He’d had dental surgery scheduled for several months, but it had been postponed indefinitely. As I learned over the next week, unless I suffered a fracture my hip replacement wasn’t going to be done anytime soon in Austin, or anywhere else in Texas for that matter.
Back to square one.
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Wow, you really got pimp-slapped by fate this time around! 
Great story, by the way.
I was thinking bedbugs from the Travelodge was going to color this story. Lucky Bojack.
Oh I checked, believe you me. I also checked for small peepholes in the walls, and I thought about removing the shower curtain before using the shower, too. And I’m not dainty like Janet Leigh, either.
Yes, and unfortunately there’s more to come. You’ll see.
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That first week in Austin was spent doing many of the things I’d done in Singapore: sussing out the local public transportation, finding a grocery store, and buying many of the staples I’d purchased (and abandoned) in Singapore five days earlier. I also found Austin’s CapMetro app, re-downloaded it, and bought a 7-day Metro pass (public transportation).
At 8am on Wednesday (next morning after arriving), I walked to a small, local grocery store. The people working there were still unsure about how to do business under Abbott’s new rules. It was a learning curve for everybody.
I was looking at my options for coffee when a young lady turned into my aisle, hesitated, then turned around and went somewhere else. This happened over and over, and sometimes it was I who turned back. A manager helped me find fingernail clippers, then moved away a few feet when a co-worker reminded her of social distancing. No ambient music, nobody was talking, and there was obviously forced cheerfulness from the store’s workers. Many of the shelves were nearly bare. Acetaminophen and NSAIDs were completely stocked out, as were toilet paper, paper napkins, tissue, etc.
Shopping that morning felt like the staff were hiding the fact that somebody was being held against their will in the back, and were doing their best to convince everybody that everything was normal and fine, just move along folks. Bizarre.
I never went back.
That weekend I found a bus route to a huge H-E-B, and some normalcy returned to grocery shopping. They had restricted entry to one door only, where staff washed the handles of grocery carts with disinfectant and pushed one out to anybody who wanted one. There was also a stand just inside the door for washing hands with more disinfectant. There was toilet paper, there were no empty shelves, and there was ambient muzak-y music playing. There was no ibuprofen, but there was acetaminophen and naproxen (Alleve). Yay H-E-B.
H-E-B was emphasizing its curbside and delivery services over physical shopping. I went online and filled out an order, but soon noticed that the soonest time I could reserve was mid-April, more than two weeks away. Ok, forget that.
Maybe my biggest task of the first week in Austin was overcoming a severe case of jet lag. Every day by 4pm I had to stand and walk around my Airbnb apartment. If I didn’t, if I sat down after 4pm (6am in Taiwan), my eyes would shut on their own and I’d awake four or five hours later in the same position. By the time that first weekend was over I was able to stay awake until almost 7pm.
Over the weekend the city of Austin announced that public transportation would be free of charge throughout the month of April, but please residents keep in mind it’s for essential travel only. A similar “essential travel only” phrase was now added to the LED crawl message displayed alongside the bus number on the outside of every bus.
By late Tuesday afternoon, March 31, I had found a suitable apartment just outside the UT campus, a few blocks from the Texas statehouse and in the heart of Austin, available for sublet. Although the contract would run through the end of July 2020, I had submitted credit and background applications and was about two signatures from subletting it.
Later on Tuesday evening, March 31, my wife LINEd me to say that Taiwan had created a new special-entry visa. She had already talked to somebody at the Bureau of Consular Affairs in Taipei about it. She told me to call the Houston branch of Taipei Economic and Cultural Office the next morning, and ask about the application. If I got no response, I should call the TECO office in Chicago.
First thing Wednesday morning, April 1, I called TECO in Houston. No answer, but I left a voicemail. Well, that’s discouraging, I thought. I called Chicago, same thing. No answer, but I left a voicemail.
At about 9:30am, my phone rang. It was an officer from TECO in Houston.
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Damn, what a cliffhanger!
The officer knew my name and she was aware of my situation: that was the good news. Also, she spoke very good English.
The bad news was that just that week TECO had shut down all its US offices except the two in Washington, D.C., and Houston. This was in response to the Federal government’s CDC findings. The officer said there were now thousands of applications that had been re-assigned to Houston, overnight, including half of all new applications.
To make things worse, effective Monday, April 6, TECO in Houston was moving to a two-day workweek: Tuesdays and Fridays. This was due to Gov. Abbott’s new rules about “essential” business. Also, they would take calls only during the hours of 9am-noon those days.
The officer was obviously frazzled. She asked me to find a paper and pencil, quickly, so I could write down what was required from my wife and me for the special visa. I fished a pen out of my backpack and grabbed the first piece of blank paper I could find, the back of the little note pad I’d lifted from my Travelodge stay in San Francisco.
Everything was to be placed in an overnight UPS or USPS envelope (not FedEX! she emphasized) along with a return envelope addressed to me in Austin.
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A letter from me explaining why I needed to return to Taiwan, including a proposed landing date and the names and addresses of two quarantine hotels in Taiwan.
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A letter from my wife explaining why I was needed by her in Taiwan.
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A copy of our Virginia marriage certificate.
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A copy of my wife’s Taiwan ID card, front and back.
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A copy of my wife’s passport, photo page only.
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My original passport photo page and a copy of all stamps pages.
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Two recent passport-sized photos of me.
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A money order or cashier’s check for US$160.
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The results of a test for the presence of cv19 taken in the US and a medical affidavit stating I was free of cv19.
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A physical exam and a letter summarizing the results by the attending physician.
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The visa-declarations page from marine travel insurance policy, the terms of which should be no less than 180 days (health insurance).
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A color printout of the online visa application that I was to find, fill out, copy, and submit online to www.boca.gov.tw.
Her English was excellent, and several times I had to ask her to slow down so I could write it out clearly. Sorry, she said, but our caseload is now enormous and I have to work very quickly.
Did I have any questions? she asked. I said that I couldn’t think of any yet, but I was sure some would come up. Fine, she said, and she gave me her cell number and told to call if/when I had any. Get this to me as soon as possible, she said, because it will take at least three business days for TECO to process.
I couldn’t know it at the time, but I’d just signed on for an unnecessary, additional two weeks in Austin, and a constellation’s worth of additional stress.
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Going to take a quick break here to explain something.
Some people have asked about Taiwan’s special-entry visa and how to apply for it.
I’m going to move ahead in the story and share something now that I learned a few weeks ago. According to the person I worked with at TECO in Houston, each TECO office has at least one consular official.
You may be asking, why didn’t TECO simply send me an email with the visa requirements? Better yet, why are these requirements not shared online?
The answer, as I understand, is that the exact requirements are subject to each individual consular official. Each consular official is given the leeway to adjust requirements according to the situation in their region of the USA. These requirements, then, are not one-size-fits-all, and the requirements of, say, Houston may differ significantly from the requirements of the consular official(s) in, say Washington, D.C.
Hope that’s clear.
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Your explanation, yup, clear. The reasons for the policy completely and utterly unclear, but that’s not on you!
And wow, quite the odyssey, which I assume still has a ways to go. I’d have been curled up weeping in a fetal position a number of times if I’d had to deal with all this.
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Maybe better to have your wife join you in Austin ?
I was thinking the same thing myself. I’ve been through visa/residency hassles before, but nothing on this level. If a movie is ever made out of this story, they may have to reanimate John Wayne’s corpse to play @bojack.
Not an option. Wife is a manager for an American company in Hsinchu, loves it.
Not only that, we lived in the US for about a year, almost twenty years ago, and she hated it. Farm girl from the mountains west of Hualien, hard-core Taiwanese.
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I was sure that tests for Covid19 in the US were in extremely short supply, especially if you were asymptomatic. I figured this was not going to be easy, so it went straight to #1 in my list of twelve labors.
I called a local out-patient clinic to ask, but there was no answer (I later learned the clinic was temporarily closed while making changes to their building in reaction to the pandemic). I found a nearby general practitioner online and called their office. Voicemail; closed.
Finally I called a CVS pharmacy and managed to talk to someone. She told me that as far as she knew only one local hospital (Baylor Scott & White) was testing asymptomatic residents of Austin, and it was all being done by drive-through testing. This hospital had published an app that allowed one to schedule a time at a branch of their choosing (BW&S has multiple locations in Austin).
I downloaded the app, entered my personal information, and … the app froze. No response. And froze again. Etc etc. Great, I thought. I went to their website, re-entered my personal information, and got a message to the effect “check back later, your information has not been stored on our server.” Obviously they were swamped with requests. Fantastic.
Just after noon I finally contacted Austin Regional Clinic, who agreed to call me back with more information (just a callback was gold in early April in Austin). I got my call within 30 minutes, and the representative on the other end listened patiently to my story. They referred me to their medical insurance people, and after I confirmed my insurance status (none except my VISA card) they agreed to an appointment that afternoon. By 5pm I’d had my physical exam and I’d successfully walked through their own drive-through station, where I’d sat for a spectacularly unpleasant nasal swab.
The letter and the test results wouldn’t be available for 48 hours, meaning that the soonest I could get my UPS package to TECO in Houston would be Tuesday, April 7. Of course I could have had it there by Saturday, April 5, but by now TECO in Houston was only working half-days, Tuesdays and Fridays.
The next day I had an equally difficult time finding any place in Austin that would allow customers inside to take passport photos or to sell me a money order. Finally I found yet another CVS pharmacy that would do both (on Guadalupe above MLK). I visited them late Friday morning, and for the first time I saw a red line painted on a floor marking a social-distancing boundary.
By late Friday afternoon I had Ubered back to Austin Regional Clinic, where after another interview at the front door and after donning a mask I had been allowed entry to pick up my test results and my physician’s letter. In the end my credit card wasn’t needed because the clinic did everything gratis. I thanked them profusely and walked out to wait under the clinic’s cupola for my Uber and for an old-fashioned hailstorm to pass. I was extremely fortunate to get this accomplished so quickly.
I just can’t say enough about the folks at Austin Regional Clinic. Just good people there.
By 5pm Friday I had gathered all of TECO’s requirements. All that remained was to gather digital images, convert to .pdf where necessary, and send the works to a printer. The goal was to pick up the printed copies on Monday morning, get to a UPS Store on Monday afternoon, and overnight to TECO in Houston for delivery Tuesday morning.
Which I did. And which promptly went sideways.
Let me explain. On Monday, April 6, the guy at the UPS Store (not wearing a mask but nervous and asking everybody to stay six feet away) asked me if I wanted early delivery (US$61 for delivery before 8am) or normal delivery ($31 for delivery by noon) to TECO in Houston. Hell, I’m thinking, TECO is swamped, they close at noon on Tuesday, they won’t work again until Friday, April 10, and the sooner I get this in their hands the better. Early delivery it is, my man.
Still jet-lagged, I’m up at 5am on Tuesday and promptly check UPS tracking. Arrived in Houston, check, and out for delivery, check. Perfect.
At 7:19 I get a text: one delivery attempt made, but UPS wasn’t able to deliver. Two more unsuccessful attempts and it goes to somewhere in Houston to wait five days for resolution. Shit.
At 8:24, I get a second text: second attempt made, but UPS wasn’t able to deliver. One more attempt before it goes to cold-storage, UPS purgatory. That attempt will be made on Wednesday, April 8. When TECO is closed. No further delivery attempts will be made on Tuesday. Motherfucker.
The UPS Store doesn’t open until 10am, I’m jet-lagged and a pot of coffee down, and my nerves are somewhat jangled.
I had managed to assume that, like normal business places in the USA TECO in Houston would be open for business by 8am. Somebody would be there to take delivery, or that TECO had a mailbox for UPS to use, something normal. Bad assumption.
After speaking with TECO I learn that no, 9am means 9am and there’s nobody available earlier - and no other options, either. I should have taken the counterintuitive, by-noon option. My best option is to have UPS return my package to Austin, and start over with the $31, late-morning option for delivery on Friday, April 10. No refund of my original $61 if I chose this option.
Welcome to doing even the most basic business tasks the new, Covid19 style.
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If that is not the classic fuckup I don’t know what is
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This story just keeps getting more and more convoluted. The Covid God is definitely of the Old Testament variety.
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Please describe this in extreme details.
All of the things I’ve read or seen describe it as no big deal. I don’t believe it. Pushing a long swab all the way back to the edge of of your brain has to suck ass!
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That’s pretty much what happened, and yeah it sucked. The swab they used had something on the end that stung a little, and it was pushed way up there. I sneezed three times, and a minute later an extremely unpleasant, metallic taste crept into my mouth.
Not pleasant at all.
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