iG.STUDiO: Ilya I. Gerasimenko

There is no US Embassy in Minsk, Belarus. As a result, people who need to go through an interview for a green card, like my mother, need to go to the nearest city which has one. In good old communist times it would be Moscow, the capital of the whole USSR. The trip there would entail overnight train Minsk-Moscow, spending a day in a city, and overnight train back. No visa required, naturally. Today, despite the fact that old Soviet Union fell apart and old Soviet Republics are separate states, the trip to Moscow would go pretty much the same way. But the wizards at National Visa Center came up with a different plan. Everything my mom needs is done in Warsaw, Poland. Why? NO IDEA. May be it's closer. So my mother had to pay for Polish visa, go through the medical exam they require, wait for ten days to get the visa, go to Warsaw, and all this just to find out that the medical form for her green card is not in a correct format (which was never specified, by the way), and—this is my ...

Campaign Worker: "Is there anybody from 13th district who is voting republican?... we, err... have a 13th district machine stuck on "republican", so if you are, you can just go ahead of the line and pull the lever... may be it will unstuck..." There were actually two brave ones who responded to the call... Made my day =), even though they sent us registration confirmation letters marked "district 15", and we are, as we now know, district 19 (we had to stay in line twice to find that out). Whatever, I voted in a morning, Eva had to return after work to cast her ballot. We did what we could. If McCain wins, we most likely will have to move to Manitoba.