california

There have been a number of trip preparations going on as we now enter t-minus 30 days until we leave – however most of them have not been particularly photogenic, so our updates have been minimal, but the header basically says it all.

We have mailed our passports off (always frightening) to get our first round of Visas. As an American citizen there are an amazingly huge number of countries that we can visit, visa-free. I looked at our estimated course, and then went to the travel section of the US Department of State website where there is a very complete, very helpful list of every country and their visa requirements. It turns out that out of the 60 countries I looked up where there was even some remote chance of us potentially visiting, only 7 required Visas (that had to be obtained ahead of time). Those were: Russia, China, India, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Belarus. The only one there that we’re not planning on visiting is Belarus, although the fact that it’s described as a complete cold-war throwback of a country makes it appealing (for the cultural interest) while simultaneously unappealing. We’re using a processing service called itseasy.com to handle both the Chinese and Russian passports. For Russia, it’s actually required to have an invitation to visit the country. In practice it turns out that practically any hotel you book with with handle the official invitation documents. In our case, we’re going with a Russian Homestay, though in the documents that were sent to us after the reservations were made, the organization said that for ease of processing we should just include the following information, and then gave us the name of a hotel. Intriguing! We’ll see how all that works out at the border.

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