A Personal Invitation from the Russian Embassy?

Yesterday Iain and I arrived in London safely from Johannesburg, South Africa. We spent the day hanging out with his brother and enjoying a few English ales. I forgot how tasty British beer is.

We were trying to make a few flight bookings to Ireland, Scotland and Russia when we came across a snag. Apparently you need a personal invitation from the Russian Embassy to get a visa to travel into their country.

You’re supposed to apply for this ‘invitation’ about five months in advance. We were planning on going next week. You cannot get into the country without it (or at least if you don’t want to end up in jail or deported you need to have one). Because we’re so close to the date we were travelling there we had to change our itinerary.

So now we have changed our plan. We are heading from Edinburgh, Scotland to Oslo, Norway, then to Copenhagen, then to Stockholm instead. The sister company of Coastal Contacts (the company I used to work for) is located in Stockholm so I’d like to try and visit some of the people there. We’ll see if I can get in touch with anyone at such short notice.

Either way, we’re happy to be on the next leg of our trip. The weather is drastically colder than Africa since England is just coming out of winter. It’ll be cold for a while but should warm up by the time we get to Paris in two weeks.

We’re looking forward to seeing Ireland, Scotland and the Scandinavian countries over the next couple of weeks.