Hi,
I have heard several Chinese speakers who want to present at the
ApacheCon EU 2012 are having problems with getting their visa in time.
Indeed, the recent situation was very bad because the German embassy
doesn't have the resources to handle the strong demand for German visas
in China, e.g. they have only two telephone lines to make appointments
for submitting visa applications.
Just last week the German embassy started to outsource the visa
application process to a private agency which will certainly make
everything easier, e.g. they are checking each application for
completeness and correctness while previously visa applications were
declined deliberately without giving any information about what went wrong.
The website of the visa agency can be found here:
https://cn.tlscontact.com/cnBJS2de/splash.php
The service is available in English, Chinese and German.
Additional information from the German embassy (in Chinese) can be found
here:
http://www.china.diplo.de/Vertretung/china/zh/01-service/visa/tls/0-s.html
Hope it's not to late.
Peter
