I had to vote AGAIN!
This whole frigging voting thing! My absentee ballot never came, so I downloaded a supposedly official form off the Internet and mailed it out. Well, last Monday the government issued a new official ballot! I sent in an inquiry to the FVAP, and they said I did, indeed, have to vote again. Apparently my 186 RMB vote is useless. I called the American Consulate to ask if I could vote there, and complained to the guy who answered the phone about all the voting problems. He didn’t know anything about them, but said, “Wow! That’s stooopid!” So, I ended up hobbling to the school gate with my new form (a student was supposed to come help me, but she was late, so I went myself), hailed a cab, and went to Fed Ex, which is, mercifully, sending ballots from Asian countries to the US for free. I had to hustle to make the four o’clock shipment, so my ballot would get there on November 1st. On the way back to the u., the cab driver talked my ear off about how he didn’t like Bush. The total cost of the round-trip cab ride was 50 RMB, which raises my overall voting cost to 276 RMB, or about $32 US.
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