Kazan — summer 2014

Good news today. All our summertime student invitations to Russia have been issued. They are now with the courier service on the way here. They should be here within a week's time.

Just FYI: before one can get a Russian visa, one has to have an invitation to Russia. Once you have the invitation, you can start the visa process.

You have no idea how pleased I am about this news. The US and Russia have a history of tit-for-tat reactions in issuing visas, so I had worried a bit that such a thing might happen at the invitation stage. It hasn't, so I expect the visa processing will proceed normally.

Excellent news: our invitations have arrived. We can now begin the visa application process. I'm so pleased with our Russian-side partners: they actually got the invitations to us three days before they were even supposed to be mailed.

Guess it's time for me to make my plane reservations.

Just talked to my travel agent about airplane reservations. I am *so* looking forward to being back in Kazan. I kinda wanna go to Bulgaria first. May try to do that.

Bulgarian is such an interesting language. Both it and Russian descend from Common Slavic, but via different paths. Common Slavic had complicated verbs as well as complicated nouns and adjectives. Russian simplified the verbs but kept the complicated nouns and adjectives. Bulgarian kept the complicated verbs, but simplified the nouns and adjectives.

Minor amusement. A lot more people do this in Russia than in the US. I've blogged about it in previous years.