The Preface:
The book "Rushdesh-er Upokatha" was one of my childhood's most precious possession. It must be lying somewhere in book shelf even to this day carefully dusted by mother now and then. In my little heart I never ever thought that a day will come when I will visit the land of "Sivka-Burka" :) as the the prince was called.
The book "Rushdesh-er Upokatha" was one of my childhood's most precious possession. It must be lying somewhere in book shelf even to this day carefully dusted by mother now and then. In my little heart I never ever thought that a day will come when I will visit the land of "Sivka-Burka" :) as the the prince was called.
The key to the door of the folk land came to us one morning when Suva's paper got accepted in ISIT'2011. We were thrilled at the opportunity as ISIT'2011 was to be held in St.Petersburg,Russia this year.
The next part was the most difficult part of the entire trip- arranging visa to visit the land of Tsars. We fortunately did not waste much time and as according to the conference guidelines, started off with the preparation of arranging docs and sending it across. But the process was much slower than we had imagined. After we had requested with all docs and details the TELEX code(which is mandatory for the visa we were travelling on- HUMANITARIAN- god knows why its called so :P ) came from the authorities after around 15 business days.
However, since they had been taking time and we were not able to contain our excitement had started planning our itinerary. It so turned out that they gave VISA exactly for 8 days +/- 2 days of the conference. So we had to cut short Moscow by a day :( . That's how we were blessed with Riga :)
Meanwhile we had been trying to reach all 4 Russian Embassies around the corners of USA as we did not have one in Chicago with all our clarification questions but in none of the Embassies I was able to reach to a human voice. At the SFO Russian Embassy it did not matter that how many times I kept on pressing 1 to hear the options in English the automated voice kept on hurling undecipherable Russian sentences at me. That was when we knew we had to know the basics before we travel. And ohh!! it was such a wise decision.
We contacted a couple of travel agents to take upon the task of getting our visas done but to our dismay they suggested we do it on our own :P. Finally Suva found out an agent who took it upon themselves on assurance of some generous fee. So we were over with this episode.
We got back our passports in a couple of weeks and we had to apply for a Schengen Visa for our Baltic Trip. By the time we got back our passports from Sweden Consulate we just had a week left for our trip.
Suva left 4 days earlier to attend his conference on a Saturday morning as early as 3 am and I was supposed to leave by Wednesday morning. So those three days I just listened to Suva's stories from St. Petersburg and waiting to feel the imperial touch.
Finally Wednesday was here and I departed from SFO and made my journey towards the folk lore land.
However, since they had been taking time and we were not able to contain our excitement had started planning our itinerary. It so turned out that they gave VISA exactly for 8 days +/- 2 days of the conference. So we had to cut short Moscow by a day :( . That's how we were blessed with Riga :)
Meanwhile we had been trying to reach all 4 Russian Embassies around the corners of USA as we did not have one in Chicago with all our clarification questions but in none of the Embassies I was able to reach to a human voice. At the SFO Russian Embassy it did not matter that how many times I kept on pressing 1 to hear the options in English the automated voice kept on hurling undecipherable Russian sentences at me. That was when we knew we had to know the basics before we travel. And ohh!! it was such a wise decision.
We contacted a couple of travel agents to take upon the task of getting our visas done but to our dismay they suggested we do it on our own :P. Finally Suva found out an agent who took it upon themselves on assurance of some generous fee. So we were over with this episode.
We got back our passports in a couple of weeks and we had to apply for a Schengen Visa for our Baltic Trip. By the time we got back our passports from Sweden Consulate we just had a week left for our trip.
Suva left 4 days earlier to attend his conference on a Saturday morning as early as 3 am and I was supposed to leave by Wednesday morning. So those three days I just listened to Suva's stories from St. Petersburg and waiting to feel the imperial touch.
Finally Wednesday was here and I departed from SFO and made my journey towards the folk lore land.
