Money

I decided to head back to the states over winter break, which in my school is from mid January to the beginning of February. The problem with traveling abroad is frustrating little problems always come up at the last minute.
Now that we have been in China for 5 months we have saved up a bit of money. I never really would have thought about it, but getting that money out of China and bringing it home is sort of a pain. Our account here doesn't let us write checks. We could do a wire transfer but that would be rather expensive. We decided to try getting traveler checks.
We tried to convert some money into travelers checks once about two months before I was set to return to the US but the section of my bank that did travelers checks was already closed for the day. We planned to go back to the bank sooner but we didn't manage until two days before I left China. I went with my full monthly salary in 100 yuan bills (bills worth roughly $15 dollar each) in hand. I'm still being paid in cash as are almost all the other teachers in my school. We were told it takes three days to process. Awesome.
The teller said another bank called China International could do it the same day. When we got there they told us they closed in a half hour and 50 people were ahead of us in line. We had no chance. We weren't going to be able to stop by in time the next day since I had work and Danny couldn't get them in my name and the day after we were leaving.
Danny then decided to try going to Carrefour to convert it to US dollars so I could just bring home a big stack of cash instead. Even better plan...
I ended up bringing more cash then I'm comfortable carrying around back in US dollars and planned to withdraw more cash at a bank in the us with a fee of 1% of the amount withdrawn. What a pain.