This past weekend, my friend (who is from Kentucky) hosted a Kentucky Derby party. He served Southern food and mint juleps, and we used my TiVo and Slingbox to watch the race (I picked the 2nd and 3rd place finishers, so I came out about $5 ahead).
It seemed that half the conversations involved explanations of the Kentucky Derby, TiVo, and Slingbox, so that throughout the evening, you would hear snippets of conversation, “it’s the most important horse race in the U.S.,” “Have you heard of Secretariat?” or “it’s a box that streams live TV to your computer.” Strange to think that such an established event in the States is virtually unknown here – a German friend asked me if it involved chickens, which confused me until I realized his only point of reference was Kentucky Fried Chicken. A significant number of conversations also involved an explanation of grits, “Well, it’s sort of like polenta, I guess?”
Anyways, a friend and I are going to Helsinki and St. Petersburg next week. Well, at least we hope we’re going. It all depends on the Russian embassy. We tried repeatedly calling them in Bern, only to get busy signals every time. We had assumed that, since their website was in English, that someone in the office would speak English. When my friend finally got through to the office in Bern, the man only spoke Russian and German, no English, and he refused to answer any of her questions, asking her instead whether she had looked at the website. The official embassy website didn’t have the information we were looking for (although it did have choice sections like “What is Russian Visa”), but I guess there was no way for the man to know, since it was in English. I called their consulate in Geneva, and was able to get the necessary information in French.
With dubious hope, we wired money to the account she had specified, and mailed our passports, visa invitations (from the hotel), itineraries, pictures, and visa applications to them, and will just have to hope that they return them in time for our departure next week. The Russian visa application for Americans is quite extensive, asking, among other things, for a list of all countries visited in the last ten years, and the dates of the visits. For me, that’s 28 countries, and there’s no way it was going to fit in the space provided. They also asked whether we had any special training in explosives or nuclear devices. I’m guessing the right answers to those questions would be “No.”
This trip was planned to use up one of the Swiss holiday weekends, which are front-loaded, so that we have lots of vacations built into the first half of the year. Although I fully appreciate the abundance of long weekends, it does make travel planning a bit frantic, since this year, May has three long weekends. The first was spent in Strasbourg, the second will be spent in St. Petersburg (assuming we get our passports and visas back in time) and Helsinki, and the third was unplanned until recently. Decent fares are hard to come by on holiday weekends, since everyone scrambles to head out for a break.
But we found one. Vilnius, Lithuania.
We knew very little about the place before booking, other than the fact that we had never been there and the tickets were reasonably priced. Some quick research has turned up the fact that it is home to the only statue in the world honoring Frank Zappa. Not to be outdone, St. Petersburg boasts a collection of pickled babies in jars. This is going to be an interesting month.
It seemed that half the conversations involved explanations of the Kentucky Derby, TiVo, and Slingbox, so that throughout the evening, you would hear snippets of conversation, “it’s the most important horse race in the U.S.,” “Have you heard of Secretariat?” or “it’s a box that streams live TV to your computer.” Strange to think that such an established event in the States is virtually unknown here – a German friend asked me if it involved chickens, which confused me until I realized his only point of reference was Kentucky Fried Chicken. A significant number of conversations also involved an explanation of grits, “Well, it’s sort of like polenta, I guess?”
Anyways, a friend and I are going to Helsinki and St. Petersburg next week. Well, at least we hope we’re going. It all depends on the Russian embassy. We tried repeatedly calling them in Bern, only to get busy signals every time. We had assumed that, since their website was in English, that someone in the office would speak English. When my friend finally got through to the office in Bern, the man only spoke Russian and German, no English, and he refused to answer any of her questions, asking her instead whether she had looked at the website. The official embassy website didn’t have the information we were looking for (although it did have choice sections like “What is Russian Visa”), but I guess there was no way for the man to know, since it was in English. I called their consulate in Geneva, and was able to get the necessary information in French.
With dubious hope, we wired money to the account she had specified, and mailed our passports, visa invitations (from the hotel), itineraries, pictures, and visa applications to them, and will just have to hope that they return them in time for our departure next week. The Russian visa application for Americans is quite extensive, asking, among other things, for a list of all countries visited in the last ten years, and the dates of the visits. For me, that’s 28 countries, and there’s no way it was going to fit in the space provided. They also asked whether we had any special training in explosives or nuclear devices. I’m guessing the right answers to those questions would be “No.”
This trip was planned to use up one of the Swiss holiday weekends, which are front-loaded, so that we have lots of vacations built into the first half of the year. Although I fully appreciate the abundance of long weekends, it does make travel planning a bit frantic, since this year, May has three long weekends. The first was spent in Strasbourg, the second will be spent in St. Petersburg (assuming we get our passports and visas back in time) and Helsinki, and the third was unplanned until recently. Decent fares are hard to come by on holiday weekends, since everyone scrambles to head out for a break.
But we found one. Vilnius, Lithuania.
We knew very little about the place before booking, other than the fact that we had never been there and the tickets were reasonably priced. Some quick research has turned up the fact that it is home to the only statue in the world honoring Frank Zappa. Not to be outdone, St. Petersburg boasts a collection of pickled babies in jars. This is going to be an interesting month.
No comments:
Post a Comment