My new family's exodus from Kazakhstan
My Midlife Adventure
In late February we received notification that Lyuba's interview at the Consulate was scheduled for March 31st. This was shockingly good news for us -- I was expecting something more in the May-June timeframe. This was the last major hurdle. Very exciting. Lyuba immediately scheduled their medical examinations.
But meanwhile, the Corona virus was continuing to spread. Airline travel was being affected. And I was terrified that Donald would use the situation to impose even more restrictions on legal immigration. So I wrote to the American Consulate in Kazakhstan and asked if they could reschedule our interview sooner. This was a ridiculous long-shot. Incredibly, they acquiesced and rescheduled the interview for Tuesday, March 10. Lyuba managed to get their medical exams rescheduled for the preceding Friday.
We had barely a week to prepare for the interview, and the Consulate needed hundreds of pages of paper documentation to prove that we're all who we say we are, to verify my income and ability to support the family, and to convince them that this was a bona fide legitimate marriage. We had a printer in Kazakhstan that we had used to prepare documents for previous phases of the immigration. Zarina (16 year old daughter) dug it out of the closet and eventually got her phone to talk to it, after discovering that printers need to be plugged in.
With Zarina's Print Shop open for business, we went to work. I already had everything we needed on my computer. I started sending her documents to print. Meanwhile, Lyuba set out to get fresh notarized translations of all their original Russian language documents (birth certificates, marriage license, divorce decree, police reports, ...). Five days and about 600 pages later, we were ready.
They arrived at the American Consulate on Tuesday at 8:00 AM. The children needed to be there, since technically there were four separate applications. The interview itself is a whole separate chapter, so I won't go into that here. Suffice it to say that, five hours later, the immigration applications were approved. Their visas would be ready for pickup on Thursday.
The moment I got the happy news (shortly after midnight Tuesday my time), I went to Aeroflot's website to book tickets. I knew packing would be a lot of work for my family, and I needed to say goodbye to Lyuba's parents, whom I love dearly. Plus I was worried about my family's processing through Customs and Immigration in America at the airport -- they speak practically no English. So I decided to buy a ticket for myself to fly to Kazakhstan via Moscow on Friday (March 13), and return on Monday with four happy immigrants in tow.
But the airline's website wouldn't cooperate. I managed to book my family's one-way tickets easily enough, but for my return trip, the same flight from Moscow to Dulles didn't seem to exist. And calling them on the phone just yielded a busy signal. I decided to go to bed and deal with it in the morning. But things were no better then. I've always had bad luck buying plane tickets online, but this was a much more serious problem than usual. It was Tuesday, and I was trying to buy a ticket for Friday. I didn't have time to screw around. So I canceled my meetings at work, jumped in my car and drove to the Aeroflot office in Washington DC. Success. Tickets booked, problem solved.
And then, on Wednesday night, I watched as Donald announced on television that all air travel from Europe was suspended, effective Friday at midnight. In 51 hours. Three days before our planned migration.
With Donald still talking, I got on Aeroflot's website and prepared to change the four one-way tickets from Monday next week to Friday this week, two days hence. I figured the immediate demand for tickets from Europe to the U.S. was about to skyrocket. There was no flight from Moscow to Dulles that day, but there was one to JFK. Good enough. But before clicking on the Big Blue Button, I called Lyuba to explain the situation.
At this moment it was already Thursday morning in Kazakhstan. I asked Lyuba if she and the girls could be packed and ready to leave in less than 24 hours, without any assistance from me. She had trouble understanding why, but finally said, "I trust you. Do it. Change the tickets. We will be ready."
I couldn't get to Kazakhstan in time to help, but as I mentioned, I was concerned about my family trying to get through Customs and Immigration by themselves upon their arrival in New York City. So I booked a round trip ticket for myself from JFK to Moscow, making sure I would be on the same flight back as my family. Then I booked an earlier flight to get from Washington DC to JFK.
Meanwhile, still Thursday morning in Kazakhstan, Lyuba got a call from the Consulate informing her that their visas wouldn't be ready until the following week because they hadn't received the medical reports from the clinic. So Lyuba called the clinic. They said they had sent the reports electronically. Lyuba called the Consulate back. They said they hadn't received anything. Lyuba called me, and I called the clinic. The receptionist quickly figured out who I was and reassured me that the doctor was trying frantically to determine what went wrong and to resend the reports to the Consulate. Lyuba called the Consulate again and explained that they had plane tickets for the following morning. For this she was severely reprimanded. (When I heard about this later, I told Lyuba, "Of course they scolded you. That's their job. We're not the first idiots they've had to deal with.")
At this point it was nearly midnight here (10 AM Thursday morning in Almaty), and there really wasn't anything more I could do to help. So I went to bed. When I woke up the next morning there were photos of four bright new shiny visas on my phone. I found out later that Lyuba had spent virtually the entire day (her last day in Kazakhstan) working with the medical clinic and the Consulate, eventually hand-carrying hard copies of the medical reports from the former to the latter herself.
So now she had less than twelve hours to pack all their worldly possessions. And I had to get to the airport myself. In the airplane at Washington DC, while we were still on the ground, the pilot announced that the weather had closed in on JFK and they needed to taxi back to the vicinity of the gate to get enough fuel to fly to an alternate destination. Great, I thought. Now I would be late to the wrong airport. Obviously I would miss my flight to Moscow.
But apparently the weather cleared, and we landed at JFK with time to spare. I went to check in at the Aeroflot ticket counter. The lady there looked at my passport and said, "You don't have a visa?" I said no, I wouldn't be exiting the international zone at the airport in Moscow. I wouldn't be going through Passport Control. "What is your final destination?" she asked. "JFK," I responded. "No no no no no," she said. "You're at JFK. Where are you flying to?" "Well, I'm flying to Moscow where I'm going to meet my wife and children in the airport's international zone. Then we're flying back here together. So I guess my final destination is right here. JFK." Her eyes narrowed. "I'm going to have to make a phone call," she said.
She walked off somewhere, then reappeared a few minutes later. She handed me my passport and announced, "You are not flying today. You need a visa. You don't have a visa." "Noooooo!" I feigned shock. I tried to cry. I pleaded. Then I told her the story of my Midlife Adventure. The three minute version, with special emphasis on the romance. Her stern demeanor melted away. Her eyes got misty. I guess she thought there's something romantic about a new husband flying halfway around the world just to hold his wife's hand on the way to a new life in America.
She conferred with her colleague at the next counter. They both kept glancing at me. Finally she said to me, "Let me make another phone call."
While waiting, I asked the colleague, "Hey, what will they do in Moscow if they don't like the fact that I don't have a visa? Put me on the next flight back?" I tried not to smirk. "Not immediately," she replied with a friendly smile. "First they will arrest you. It could take hours. Maybe days."
But this encounter eventually had a happy ending. Two more phone calls and a third teary eyed colleague later, I was cleared for takeoff. They even bumped me up to the best ComfortPlus seat on the plane, one notch below First Class. "Goodbye! Good luck!" they chorused as I left them for the gate.
An hour later, while I was standing in line at the gate to board the Moscow flight, the first ticket counter lady appeared. "Here," she said, handing me another boarding pass. "This may be helpful at the airport in Moscow." It was my boarding pass for the return flight, which had just effectively become the second leg of my international journey. My connecting flight to JFK. I was all set.
The flight to Moscow was very comfortable, but otherwise uneventful. I would have a three hour layover (plenty of time to determine the departure gate and its location), but Lyuba and the girls would arrive two hours later than me. A one hour layover for them. Very tight. My return flight boarding pass indicated that the flight would depart from Terminal D, but the gate was still unknown. I told this to Lyuba (my flight had WiFi) as she sat in the airport in Almaty, and we selected a random coffee shop advertised on the airport's website in Terminal D as a rendezvous point. Their phones would not work in Moscow, so we had to have an old-fashioned plan. And the contingency plan was to meet at the departure gate. I was concerned about their ability to determine and then find the correct gate -- hence the rendezvous point.
But that turned out to be a bad idea. The Terminal D coffee shop we had randomly selected turned out not to exist. And Lyuba's flight did not have WiFi, so I couldn't tell her this. I decided to camp just outside the incoming security checkpoint that I was pretty sure they would come through. But they didn't. With twenty minutes left, I gave up and sprinted to the gate. Everyone had boarded. No family, and there were only two minutes until they would close the aircraft door. They checked the names, and told me that my family had not boarded the plane. I rubbernecked in all directions. Five minutes later I saw them, running towards me. I spun around. "They're here!" I shouted. The lady responded, "Too late. The door has already closed. Sorry." I pleaded. I quickly launched into my three minute love story. But she would have none of my fairy tale. She was obviously from Siberia, with a heart to match. "I suggest you go to the Aeroflot counter and exchange your tickets for a later flight." Then she proceeded to ignore my continuing protestations completely, as if I wasn't there.
So I gave up and we walked dejectedly to the ticket counter. There we discovered that there was another flight to JFK in three hours! I think they had added this additional flight to accommodate the Donald surge, because it didn't exist when I had rebooked our tickets earlier. So we exchanged our tickets. "How much?" I asked. The old lady finished clicking her calculator, then showed it to me. 3164. Again, I feigned shock. She just smiled at me, then finally said, "Rubles." She obviously enjoys playing this little game with the Gringos. "Ok, how much in dollars?" I asked. More clicking. She showed me the updated display silently. "42 dollars? I'll take it."
And she gave me the same seat I had been given by my new friends at JFK. ComfortPlus. My family back in EconomyMinus would have to discover how to recline their seats without my assistance. Bummer for them...
And all this turned out fine. If we had caught our original flight, we would still have had to endure a six hour layover at JFK. Instead, we enjoyed a leisurely three-hour two-margarita layover in Moscow. (Leisurely except for eight-year-old Aisha asking every five minutes if it was time for us to go to our plane -- it seems she was traumatized when we had missed our earlier flight and she didn't want it to happen again.) Then we would have another three hour layover at JFK -- plenty of time to clear Customs. We could easily catch our final flight to Washington DC.
And that's exactly what happened. Actually getting through Customs and doing the final Real Immigration thing turned out to be a breeze. And this was one day before they started taking the temperatures of new arrivals (Corona virus), so we just barely avoided the hassle of standing in the four hour line which commenced the following day. (Lyuba and the girls' temperatures would have shocked the medical staff, because their temperatures are in Celsius. Joke! I make stupid joke.) But then I realized that in the ticket-exchanging flurry of Wednesday night I had neglected to buy a ticket back to Washington for myself, and the Delta website indicated that it was sold out, along with the next flight, which was the last flight of the day. Nevertheless, miraculously, we were able to purchase a ticket at the counter for the earlier flight. And Aruzhan left her phone on the plane, which, for an eleven year old girl, introduces trauma that far overwhelms the excitement of a once-in-a-lifetime immigration experience. Also two of our suitcases missed the flight. When I went to Baggage Services to inquire about the lost luggage, I asked if they knew who I should contact about a lost cellphone. They sprang into action. Twenty minutes later, Aruzhan and her lost phone were reunited. And the wayward suitcases were delivered to their new home the next day.
And we all lived happily ever after.
Postscript:
1) We later discovered that Donald had left the fine print out of his proclamation. It didn't apply to American citizens or their immediate families. So maybe all this scrambling was unnecessary. Except...
2) On Sunday, less than 24 hours after our successful immigration (factoring in the time difference), one day before our original planned immigration date, guess what happened. Give up? I'll tell you. On Sunday, Kazakhstan closed its borders and shuttered its airports indefinitely. Nobody in, nobody out. The virus.
If we hadn't asked for and been granted an earlier date for the interview, and then additionally compressed our schedule in response to Donald's edict, we would all have been stranded in Kazakhstan indefinitely, myself included. And the immigration visas expire after six months if they're not used, so if things were to drag on, the entire immigration itself would have been in jeopardy. After more than a year and a half of immigration paperwork, we made it with less than a day to spare.
My new family's exodus from Kazakhstan
("Lyuba" is pronounced "LOO-buh." The "y" is silent.)
But meanwhile, the Corona virus was continuing to spread. Airline travel was being affected. And I was terrified that Donald would use the situation to impose even more restrictions on legal immigration. So I wrote to the American Consulate in Kazakhstan and asked if they could reschedule our interview sooner. This was a ridiculous long-shot. Incredibly, they acquiesced and rescheduled the interview for Tuesday, March 10. Lyuba managed to get their medical exams rescheduled for the preceding Friday.
We had barely a week to prepare for the interview, and the Consulate needed hundreds of pages of paper documentation to prove that we're all who we say we are, to verify my income and ability to support the family, and to convince them that this was a bona fide legitimate marriage. We had a printer in Kazakhstan that we had used to prepare documents for previous phases of the immigration. Zarina (16 year old daughter) dug it out of the closet and eventually got her phone to talk to it, after discovering that printers need to be plugged in.
With Zarina's Print Shop open for business, we went to work. I already had everything we needed on my computer. I started sending her documents to print. Meanwhile, Lyuba set out to get fresh notarized translations of all their original Russian language documents (birth certificates, marriage license, divorce decree, police reports, ...). Five days and about 600 pages later, we were ready.
They arrived at the American Consulate on Tuesday at 8:00 AM. The children needed to be there, since technically there were four separate applications. The interview itself is a whole separate chapter, so I won't go into that here. Suffice it to say that, five hours later, the immigration applications were approved. Their visas would be ready for pickup on Thursday.
The moment I got the happy news (shortly after midnight Tuesday my time), I went to Aeroflot's website to book tickets. I knew packing would be a lot of work for my family, and I needed to say goodbye to Lyuba's parents, whom I love dearly. Plus I was worried about my family's processing through Customs and Immigration in America at the airport -- they speak practically no English. So I decided to buy a ticket for myself to fly to Kazakhstan via Moscow on Friday (March 13), and return on Monday with four happy immigrants in tow.
But the airline's website wouldn't cooperate. I managed to book my family's one-way tickets easily enough, but for my return trip, the same flight from Moscow to Dulles didn't seem to exist. And calling them on the phone just yielded a busy signal. I decided to go to bed and deal with it in the morning. But things were no better then. I've always had bad luck buying plane tickets online, but this was a much more serious problem than usual. It was Tuesday, and I was trying to buy a ticket for Friday. I didn't have time to screw around. So I canceled my meetings at work, jumped in my car and drove to the Aeroflot office in Washington DC. Success. Tickets booked, problem solved.
And then, on Wednesday night, I watched as Donald announced on television that all air travel from Europe was suspended, effective Friday at midnight. In 51 hours. Three days before our planned migration.
With Donald still talking, I got on Aeroflot's website and prepared to change the four one-way tickets from Monday next week to Friday this week, two days hence. I figured the immediate demand for tickets from Europe to the U.S. was about to skyrocket. There was no flight from Moscow to Dulles that day, but there was one to JFK. Good enough. But before clicking on the Big Blue Button, I called Lyuba to explain the situation.
At this moment it was already Thursday morning in Kazakhstan. I asked Lyuba if she and the girls could be packed and ready to leave in less than 24 hours, without any assistance from me. She had trouble understanding why, but finally said, "I trust you. Do it. Change the tickets. We will be ready."
I couldn't get to Kazakhstan in time to help, but as I mentioned, I was concerned about my family trying to get through Customs and Immigration by themselves upon their arrival in New York City. So I booked a round trip ticket for myself from JFK to Moscow, making sure I would be on the same flight back as my family. Then I booked an earlier flight to get from Washington DC to JFK.
Meanwhile, still Thursday morning in Kazakhstan, Lyuba got a call from the Consulate informing her that their visas wouldn't be ready until the following week because they hadn't received the medical reports from the clinic. So Lyuba called the clinic. They said they had sent the reports electronically. Lyuba called the Consulate back. They said they hadn't received anything. Lyuba called me, and I called the clinic. The receptionist quickly figured out who I was and reassured me that the doctor was trying frantically to determine what went wrong and to resend the reports to the Consulate. Lyuba called the Consulate again and explained that they had plane tickets for the following morning. For this she was severely reprimanded. (When I heard about this later, I told Lyuba, "Of course they scolded you. That's their job. We're not the first idiots they've had to deal with.")
At this point it was nearly midnight here (10 AM Thursday morning in Almaty), and there really wasn't anything more I could do to help. So I went to bed. When I woke up the next morning there were photos of four bright new shiny visas on my phone. I found out later that Lyuba had spent virtually the entire day (her last day in Kazakhstan) working with the medical clinic and the Consulate, eventually hand-carrying hard copies of the medical reports from the former to the latter herself.
So now she had less than twelve hours to pack all their worldly possessions. And I had to get to the airport myself. In the airplane at Washington DC, while we were still on the ground, the pilot announced that the weather had closed in on JFK and they needed to taxi back to the vicinity of the gate to get enough fuel to fly to an alternate destination. Great, I thought. Now I would be late to the wrong airport. Obviously I would miss my flight to Moscow.
But apparently the weather cleared, and we landed at JFK with time to spare. I went to check in at the Aeroflot ticket counter. The lady there looked at my passport and said, "You don't have a visa?" I said no, I wouldn't be exiting the international zone at the airport in Moscow. I wouldn't be going through Passport Control. "What is your final destination?" she asked. "JFK," I responded. "No no no no no," she said. "You're at JFK. Where are you flying to?" "Well, I'm flying to Moscow where I'm going to meet my wife and children in the airport's international zone. Then we're flying back here together. So I guess my final destination is right here. JFK." Her eyes narrowed. "I'm going to have to make a phone call," she said.
She walked off somewhere, then reappeared a few minutes later. She handed me my passport and announced, "You are not flying today. You need a visa. You don't have a visa." "Noooooo!" I feigned shock. I tried to cry. I pleaded. Then I told her the story of my Midlife Adventure. The three minute version, with special emphasis on the romance. Her stern demeanor melted away. Her eyes got misty. I guess she thought there's something romantic about a new husband flying halfway around the world just to hold his wife's hand on the way to a new life in America.
She conferred with her colleague at the next counter. They both kept glancing at me. Finally she said to me, "Let me make another phone call."
While waiting, I asked the colleague, "Hey, what will they do in Moscow if they don't like the fact that I don't have a visa? Put me on the next flight back?" I tried not to smirk. "Not immediately," she replied with a friendly smile. "First they will arrest you. It could take hours. Maybe days."
But this encounter eventually had a happy ending. Two more phone calls and a third teary eyed colleague later, I was cleared for takeoff. They even bumped me up to the best ComfortPlus seat on the plane, one notch below First Class. "Goodbye! Good luck!" they chorused as I left them for the gate.
An hour later, while I was standing in line at the gate to board the Moscow flight, the first ticket counter lady appeared. "Here," she said, handing me another boarding pass. "This may be helpful at the airport in Moscow." It was my boarding pass for the return flight, which had just effectively become the second leg of my international journey. My connecting flight to JFK. I was all set.
The flight to Moscow was very comfortable, but otherwise uneventful. I would have a three hour layover (plenty of time to determine the departure gate and its location), but Lyuba and the girls would arrive two hours later than me. A one hour layover for them. Very tight. My return flight boarding pass indicated that the flight would depart from Terminal D, but the gate was still unknown. I told this to Lyuba (my flight had WiFi) as she sat in the airport in Almaty, and we selected a random coffee shop advertised on the airport's website in Terminal D as a rendezvous point. Their phones would not work in Moscow, so we had to have an old-fashioned plan. And the contingency plan was to meet at the departure gate. I was concerned about their ability to determine and then find the correct gate -- hence the rendezvous point.
But that turned out to be a bad idea. The Terminal D coffee shop we had randomly selected turned out not to exist. And Lyuba's flight did not have WiFi, so I couldn't tell her this. I decided to camp just outside the incoming security checkpoint that I was pretty sure they would come through. But they didn't. With twenty minutes left, I gave up and sprinted to the gate. Everyone had boarded. No family, and there were only two minutes until they would close the aircraft door. They checked the names, and told me that my family had not boarded the plane. I rubbernecked in all directions. Five minutes later I saw them, running towards me. I spun around. "They're here!" I shouted. The lady responded, "Too late. The door has already closed. Sorry." I pleaded. I quickly launched into my three minute love story. But she would have none of my fairy tale. She was obviously from Siberia, with a heart to match. "I suggest you go to the Aeroflot counter and exchange your tickets for a later flight." Then she proceeded to ignore my continuing protestations completely, as if I wasn't there.
So I gave up and we walked dejectedly to the ticket counter. There we discovered that there was another flight to JFK in three hours! I think they had added this additional flight to accommodate the Donald surge, because it didn't exist when I had rebooked our tickets earlier. So we exchanged our tickets. "How much?" I asked. The old lady finished clicking her calculator, then showed it to me. 3164. Again, I feigned shock. She just smiled at me, then finally said, "Rubles." She obviously enjoys playing this little game with the Gringos. "Ok, how much in dollars?" I asked. More clicking. She showed me the updated display silently. "42 dollars? I'll take it."
And she gave me the same seat I had been given by my new friends at JFK. ComfortPlus. My family back in EconomyMinus would have to discover how to recline their seats without my assistance. Bummer for them...
And all this turned out fine. If we had caught our original flight, we would still have had to endure a six hour layover at JFK. Instead, we enjoyed a leisurely three-hour two-margarita layover in Moscow. (Leisurely except for eight-year-old Aisha asking every five minutes if it was time for us to go to our plane -- it seems she was traumatized when we had missed our earlier flight and she didn't want it to happen again.) Then we would have another three hour layover at JFK -- plenty of time to clear Customs. We could easily catch our final flight to Washington DC.
And that's exactly what happened. Actually getting through Customs and doing the final Real Immigration thing turned out to be a breeze. And this was one day before they started taking the temperatures of new arrivals (Corona virus), so we just barely avoided the hassle of standing in the four hour line which commenced the following day. (Lyuba and the girls' temperatures would have shocked the medical staff, because their temperatures are in Celsius. Joke! I make stupid joke.) But then I realized that in the ticket-exchanging flurry of Wednesday night I had neglected to buy a ticket back to Washington for myself, and the Delta website indicated that it was sold out, along with the next flight, which was the last flight of the day. Nevertheless, miraculously, we were able to purchase a ticket at the counter for the earlier flight. And Aruzhan left her phone on the plane, which, for an eleven year old girl, introduces trauma that far overwhelms the excitement of a once-in-a-lifetime immigration experience. Also two of our suitcases missed the flight. When I went to Baggage Services to inquire about the lost luggage, I asked if they knew who I should contact about a lost cellphone. They sprang into action. Twenty minutes later, Aruzhan and her lost phone were reunited. And the wayward suitcases were delivered to their new home the next day.
And we all lived happily ever after.
Postscript:
1) We later discovered that Donald had left the fine print out of his proclamation. It didn't apply to American citizens or their immediate families. So maybe all this scrambling was unnecessary. Except...
2) On Sunday, less than 24 hours after our successful immigration (factoring in the time difference), one day before our original planned immigration date, guess what happened. Give up? I'll tell you. On Sunday, Kazakhstan closed its borders and shuttered its airports indefinitely. Nobody in, nobody out. The virus.
If we hadn't asked for and been granted an earlier date for the interview, and then additionally compressed our schedule in response to Donald's edict, we would all have been stranded in Kazakhstan indefinitely, myself included. And the immigration visas expire after six months if they're not used, so if things were to drag on, the entire immigration itself would have been in jeopardy. After more than a year and a half of immigration paperwork, we made it with less than a day to spare.
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