And closer...

In my last post, I said that I'd received my visa. Since then I actually picked it up at my parents' house (where I have all things important Fed Ex'd) and tore it open. I was pretty darn excited to see the visa, with its silver hologram, pasted on to one full page at the back of my passport. It looks all official, with it in Russian and English. I was pretty pleased with myself too that I could actually read some of the Russian without a lot of work. My full name was transliterated into Cyrillic characters and looks like this: ами сусан баттис Which of course sent me over the edge with excitement. Really! Today I received an email from Olga, my travel planner saying that the last payment went through and she'd be sending me the remaining materials shortly. Woo-hoo...it's coming! Now I just need to plow through all this reading!