Back Home…For A Day

All in all our trip to Budapest was a success. We received our visas and only had to spend five days away. However, since the visa laws recently changed, there are all sorts of unknowns right now as we attempt to navigate these new waters.

For example, religious working visas no longer exist. To live here now we must apply for a temporary residency visa, which on the surface sounded much better than it actually turned out to be. Because of this new change, all temporary residency applications are given only a 45-day visa to be in the country. Within that time period we must register ourselves in the country and, theoretically, we will be able to live here for much longer than the month and a half our visas give. This is what they’re telling us, but we have yet to see the timeframe these new visas produce, though we have reason to believe we will only be able to stay one year at a time (which happens to be the same setup we have now, except before we didn’t have to register and the visas were cheaper).

Because the holiday season is coming up and our 45-day period falls uncomfortably around several business holidays, we have been advised to go to Donetsk and register this week. As in, leave on the train tonight. As in, leave the day after we got home.

So we’ll be spending the next couple of days filling out paper work in Donetsk. Then, after that, we’ll have about a month or so before we need to go back down there and pick it up (unless we can find someone traveling to Kharkov to bring it for us). Dealing with these new changes is frustrating because everyone seems to have a different understanding of what is going on. And, no matter how hard you try to do things the right way, you’re pretty much at the mercy of the knowledge of whichever passport control officer you get when leaving or entering the country (and these guys are often not up to speed). And of course, laws like this frequently change here so everything we’re doing now could end up being void a few months from now.

I’m pretty mentally drained from all the traveling we’ve done over the last month, and I’ve begun to feel pretty disconnected from things going on here in Kharkov. I am looking forward to getting back into a daily routine and to getting back to our regular work here. Almost there.

Almost there.