If only I’d known what I was getting myself into.Read the rest here.
It was early April when my 29-year-old son, who lives in Boston, told me that he and five friends were planning a trip to Russia this summer and asked if I’d go to the consulate in Washington to apply for their visas.
Russia has five consulates in the United States — in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Seattle and Houston — and they don’t accept mail or electronic visa applications from residents of the continental United States. They require each would-be visitor to fill out an application online, print out a copy and have someone (not necessarily the applicant himself) hand-deliver it.
Checking the Russian Embassy Web site, I learned that as of April 10, the visa processing duties would be transferred from the consulate to a contractor called Invisa Logistics Service (ILS), which would charge $30 per application on top of the consulate’s $140 fee for processing, which was supposed to take about two weeks, or one week with rush service (for an extra payment, of course).
The Devil is in the Details
23 hours ago
2 comments:
As much as I love the Russian culture and the Russian Orthodox Church, their government is still extremely xenophobic and uninviting to non-Russians. On the other hand, Ukraine has opened its doors to the West and you don't even need a visa to go their, as if you were traveling to western Europe. Guess which country is going to thrive and succeed? So, if you need your Russian Orthodoxy tourism fix, head to the old heart of the Rus: Kiev.
"In Mother Russia, bureaucracy screws you!"
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