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Administrative changes

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

By now it was Thursday morning and still our one administration requirement lay uncompleted.  The border crossing into Russia had occurred entirely without incident or hinderance, getting out in the same fashion required registration of our visas within 24 hours of entering the country.  This was one of those official tasks where there is very little actual literature to give proper guidance and so the number of interpretations about what is actually required seem to equal the number of people you talk to about it with the only one who really matters being thousands of miles away in their little border post.  The application process for the visa itself was similar where a requirement would seemingly be easily able to be checked off the list only for something to come out of nowhere to hold the whole process up.  A prime example of this was the Russian embassy in New Zealand being the one that insists on a cover letter from a travel agent which would seem trivial except that we had not been using an agent at all (because they are generally useless) but on enquiry were happy to send a letter off on our behalf as long as we booked some accommodation with them.  The conversation went something like this, [read on]