Let the visa story begin and may the force be with you...

Just before we start – some official information :)

Kharkiv – the city where we live. Second largest city in Ukraine with population of 2 million people . Scientific, transport and educational center of the Eastern Ukraine, located 40 km from the Russian border. In the beginning of the century – the capital of Ukraine for several years

Kiev – a lovely, old city. The capital of Ukraine situated on the Dniepr river. Administrative center of the country therefore all the embassies, consular missions and diplomatic institutions are located there. The Spanish embassy is not an exception.
The distance between the 2 cities is about 600 km, there are numerous trains and buses that connect them. The train ride takes about from 8 to 12 hours ( we don’t have TGVs in Ukraine : )
So each time you will see “ we went to Kiev” implies that we had a 10 hour train ride with more or less comfort over night, arriving to the capital at 5 a.m.

So after a happy summer full of adventures, both of us finally met in Ukraine in September. It was time to get the visa ready. After reading numerous times all the information that the Spanish embassy has on their site, and endless calls to their consular sections, we still didn’t know what kind of visa we should get, because no one could give us an exact answer. So we collected about a ton of papers, and were just waiting for the invitations from Ruth. We scheduled an appointment for the 19th of September, and we got the invitations only on the 18th in the morning. After having picked up the invitations, and buying tickets for a train that was leaving in 3 hours, we started getting ready to go to Kiev. However after a quick read through the invitation papers we discover an awful fact. Given that we have same names, there was a copy/paste error. My invitation was ok, however Lena had hers correct in the beginning, but in the middle of it my last name wasn’t erased. So it was kind of an invitation for 2 people at the same time :) So after calling Ruth, whose creativity was just stunning, we printed the page with the mistake on a color printer, and then discovered another mistake, already on both of the invitations – the project started on 1st of October, and ended on 30th of June and all in 2008 :)) So after reprinting another 4 copies, we rushed to catch a train and actually made it. Next morning started at 5 a.m. in the Kiev Railway station by de-stapling, re-stapling, and well, actually frauding our invitations… Kiev greeted us with cold rain and 8 degrees. The documents had to be submitted to the visa section of the embassy, the address of which we had printed out, but had no idea where it was, even though both of us now the capital very well. The visa section is located in the industrial zone, with quite picturesque sites…However we managed to find it. The girl who took the documents has ever heard of an evs or volunteering at all, so just put “trabajo” on our documents and turned them in telling – we’ll have an answer in a week. After that we had to pay a consular fee of $55. but in the embassy, which is on another end of town, and don’t forget the rain :) Another interesting fact, don’t know why, but the Spanish embassy accepts all the payments only in American dollars, why the embassy of a European country in Ukraine has a rule like that? No explanation, just why not? So having bought 110 USD we went to the embassy, since for security reasons they didn’t let both of us in, I was waiting for Lena outside, she came out, and I was ready to go home, however… She said that they didn’t accept the payment. Why? Because one of the bills was folded. Another interesting fact , Spanish embassy accepts the dollars that are NEW, NOT FOLDED, WITH NO STAINS or MARKS on them..so Lena for her question – so this bill isn’t good, got an answer from a girl with a smile - Of course it is a good bill, you can use it anywhere, just we will not take it here. So we had to look for a currency exchange and ask them if they had any pretty dollars we could buy, and after choosing with the bank workers the prettiest ones, returned to the embassy. This time the appearance of the American president was satisfactory for the girl to accept kindly our money. So we spent the rest of the day in a train returning home, drying our feet and hoping that in a week we will have an answer.
However Tuesday next week both of us got a call from the embassy : “ Your case is quite unusual, so the embassy asks you to come for an interview with the Chief of a visa section during next 10 working days…” Who knew that it was just the beginning