Back in Odessa

My flight to JFK was short and sweet. The plane was very tiny: it only had a single row of seats on the left side and a double row on the right side. It didn’t even have enough room for carry-on in the overhead bins! Oh well, who cares about one hour flight, right? I’ve got my luggage in literally 5 minutes, took AirTran to the terminal 1, found Austrian Airlines counter, checked in and then enjoyed my Starbucks coffee while surfing the Internet. Most of the other patrons at Starbucks were speaking Russian :) How cool is that?

Both my Austrian Airlines flights from JFK to Vienna and from Vienna to Odessa were on time, my luggage made it intact, so overall my 22-hour journey (including flight from Rochester to JFK) was great. I really enjoyed flying Austrian Airlines – much better than Aerosvit :) The Vienna airport is very small and very easy to navigate - it took me about 5 minutes to go through security and find my gate! The only inconvenience was the time – my plane arrived at 2:00 a.m. EST (8:00 a.m. Vienna time), and my internal clock was still programmed for night, so I was literally falling asleep while trying to stay awake for 3 hours and not to miss my plane to Odessa :)

Passport control in Odessa was a piece of cake – I was done in 15 minutes (including customs), picked up my suitcase and was immediately taken to the Birth Certificates office. I was pretty sure we won’t have any problems getting the Birth Certificate, but boy was I wrong! The lady-bureaucrat in charge read the court decree for a long time. She really tried to find something amiss, and she succeeded! There are several parts in the court decree – one section explains all details of the case, the other allows us to be Raisa’s parents, and the final section instructs the Birth Certificate office to issue a new Birth Certificate and list us as the new parents. Here is the catch. Both first and second parts list our names, DOB, and citizenship. But the third one only lists our names. It doesn’t list our DOB and citizenship! So she can’t issue us a new birth certificate! We politely suggested to look at the other 2 parts of the court decree, or at the translation of our passports that I was required to supply. Or I could simply tell her that we are the citizens of United States (in case she didn’t know), and when we were born. But she was adamant – go and change the court decree so that it lists our DOB and citizenship in the third part! Just to make the record straight, we supplied all necessary paperwork, including something extra (you know what I mean). But apparently it was not enough! So we called the lawyer, who helped us to schedule a court date, asked her to help, and finally went to Raisa’s school to pick her up. She didn’t know I’m coming, so she was VERY happy to see me! I think the whole school heard her yell “MAMA!!!” It was great!

This morning we’ve got a call from the lawyer. Apparently she went to the boss of that lady-bureaucrat from the Birth Certificate office and said: if we don’t get the Birth Certificate today, we go to Kiev to the Ministry and file a complaint! Guess what? It worked! We have a Birth Certificate!!!!!!! Tomorrow we plan to legalize it, receive a new Tax Code, go to a Notary office (I brace myself…), get another paper, and then (knock on wood) apply for the passport!!! Please keep Raisa and I in your thoughts and prayers – we really need to apply for the passport tomorrow: Raisa wants to go home!