Deceit, Pettiness and some Honesty at the Ukrainian Consulate
The best way to get into the Ukraine is to lie. At least that is the current wisdom circulating around web sites for bandanna-wearing, backpack-toting bo-ho’s. They say that it’s best to get a personal visa instead of a tourist visa. You tell the authorities that you are simply going to Ukraine to visit your great-uncle Yaroslav and have no intention of hiking around Crimea. A fake address that looks reasonably authentic is all you need to put on your visa application. In the end, you get in and travel wherever you want because people on a personal visa don’t have to resister. Frankly, skipping any contact with post-Soviet bureaucracies in a mafia-controlled country is okay by me.
To lead a bit of credibility to our visa application, Martha and I dug up a great-uncle Yaroslav, who lives in a small town called Travneve, just north-east of Ternopil’. Armed with the address, we hit the Ukrainian consulate in Kraków.
As I was filling out the application form in the queue, a lady in front of me started pointing to the address I was copying onto the form. Her Polish was too fast, so I had no idea what she was saying. I’m not sure if the address was familiar or there was something about my grandmother’s hard-to-read Cyrillic that caught her eye. Her daughter waved her mother off of me with that eye-roll that only embarrassed teenagers can do.
The nice but nosy lady wasn’t the only one checking out my papers. Shortly after we arrived, a bug-eye little man came in. He jumped our stair-case queue and went right to the gate and tried to open it. He asked nosy some question in Ukrainian and somewhat resigned himself to waiting. He looked like version of Dr. Frankenstein’s s servant after corrective surgery on the hunch. Standing beside me, he whistled and fidgeted and looked over my shoulder. Mar saw what he was up to and gave him the look of death, which kept him at bay for a moment.
“So you are Canadian?”
It turns out he’s an Israeli journalist working in Kyiv. He speaks Ukrainian, Russian and apparently English. He covers culture and Jewish issues in the capital. The first thing I wanted to ask him is if he was at all nervous about being a journalist in Ukraine. I also wanted to ask about whatever the hell Kuchma is doing to the government. But I kept the conversation general and meaningless. It’s probably not proper to talk politics when you are trying to pave your way into a country with white-lies.
Another man came in. Like the journalist, he didn’t queue up properly. Instead, he stood beside the journalist, but on one step higher. The journalist, not to be out done, moved up to an even higher step. They leap-frogged like this until both men had pressed themselves up against the gate. I also went up to the gate; however, it was not to thank the Israeli for showing me exactly what qualities a minor journalist needs, but to secure our position in line. Queues in this part of the world are not always sensible things.
When we got to the lady behind the bullet-proof glass, we found her very helpful. She took one look at our visa applications and refused to process them on the grounds that February is not the time to get a June visa. Such advance planning does not jive with them. Better to be told such information right away as opposed to making the trip back to Kraków for no reason. She also said that we shouldn’t get a private visa. A tourist visa is cheaper, by $10 USD and you still don’t have to register. This was uncharacteristically helpful for consulate staff, but I didn’t want to tell my family about this information. I had just spent the previous two weeks e-harassing my mom and, by extension my aunt and my grandmother, for great-uncle Yaroslav’s address. Still, I’m going to hold onto that paper with all the funny Cyrillic. You never know, it might come in handy.