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Nicole writes:
We arrived in Berlin in the early morning of October 15 and headed straight to the Russian embassy. This is not listed in the tour books as a recommended first stop, but we had business there. US citizens who want to visit Russia need to secure a visa to enter the country. This is a process that one does from the US, and which costs a couple hundred dollars and involves filling out a long form and sending it away with your passport for a couple of weeks, but is generally not a problem. Bonnie had secured her visa several weeks ahead of our departure.
Then a very naughty puppy let herself into Bonnie’s closed office, grabbed Bonnie’s passport off of her desk, and proceeded to chew it thoroughly enough to damage the passport. All this with ONE BUSINESS DAY before we were scheduled to leave the US. The Russian visa still lives inside of the damaged passport, and Bonnie spent the day in downtown Chicago getting an emergency passport.
But unless we transfer or replace the visa, Bonnie will not be allowed to enter Russia. It’s her first visit to Russia! Nicole has been there many times but Bonnie was really excited to visit for the first time.
So we spent the day schlepping between the Russian consulate and the Russian visa service folks and just when we thought our multi-hour wait for Russian visa support was going to end in frustration, a last minute flurry of activity was whipped up by heroic Russian travel agent Nina, who overheard Nicole explaining our plight and stepped in to make an invitation letter manifest and cajoled the visa services staff into helping us hustle up a new application in record time. Once again we have handed over Bonnie’s passport and we hope it will be returned with a Russian visa inside!
This whole series of events makes Nicole really aware of borders and papers and laws concerning movement of humans, especially in light of the concentration camps and detention centers in the US filled with people whose crime was literally not having the right papers, or daring to assert their right to apply for asylum. How easy it is for people holding US passports to move around the world…we are taken off guard when a country says, NO you may not enter without that paper. Of course we are not desperately trying to enter Russia to escape violence and hardship somewhere else. We are trying to hug Nicole’s friends and see great theater, but before that can happen we need to be enmeshed in cold war bureaucracy and astounding layers of administrative infrastructure.
And then we checked into our apartment, had a lovely German dinner, and spent the rest of our evening planning the adventures of the next couple weeks. After Bonnie went to bed, Nicole pushed through jet lag and took herself out to Dyke Night at Möbel Olfe and connected with rad former Chicago artists Christa Holka and Liz Rosenfeld. We danced!