Kazan — summer 2012

• Le Méridien
• Many views
• Old harbor

Now I get to go through the process of applying for the visa. The consulate has now outsourced the processing of the visa, so the processing time now has an additional day added. It also has an online component. Guess that's what I'll be doing this evening.

Just sent off my visa app for Russia. Previous feedback about the new online part of the visa application process had been negative, mostly involving slow server times. As far as I could tell, it worked pretty well. Alas, the hint sheet provided by the document expediter had problems; I may have to put a better one together for our students.

Despite applying online, you still have to print out the app and send it to a document expediter. What this means is that we are populating a database for the Russians about our travel there, but they still haven't actually updated the physical process of issuing visas. This means I just sent off another FedEx package. Hm. I wonder if FedEx is in cahoots with the Russian consulate? Is the consulate getting kickbacks? And if they aren't, will the rest of the Russian bureaucracy make fun of them?

My Russian visa arrived today. Whew! The whole visa process is always a bit tense. Now just have to get all the work on my to-do list done before departure.

One of my friends in Russia asked me to bring her a few items. What, you may reasonably ask, does a Russian citizen who has previously been in the US want me to bring her? She wants:

• An iPad 3. iPads are significantly more expensive in Russia.
• Two packages of semi-sweet chocolate morsels — She got in the habit of making chocolate chip cookies in the US and wants to make some more. That's not a standard item on Russian grocery story shelves. Nor is peanut butter. The latter I never miss. I can't even think of the last time I ate peanut butter. It's like cilantro. Why the hell would I put that in mouth?
• A children's book in Spanish, purchased during my trip to Spain. She wants to expose her child early to foreign languages. Do you hear that, America? That's why the rest of the world is going to outpace us over the next 100 years, because we keep doing asinine things like the "English only" legislation in AZ. There is so much to be proud of in the US, but things like that simply make us look like assholes.

She doesn't know it yet, but I will also bring her a "Smart Cover" for her iPad, which allows you to put your iPad in a standing position either in landscape or portrait position. A new mother can use the things that free her hands when dealing with a newborn.

I will try to bring her as well either the book "On Beyond Zebra," my favorite Dr. Seuss Book, or "Amigo," the story of a boy's friendship with a prairie dog. I grew up on both of the books, and the Dr. Seuss' one I seriously think influenced my life toward studying languages.

I'm going to link Amazon on both of those books below. That probably seems really capitalist, but I snatched the images from there, so it only seems fair.