Questions...waiting...more questions...

Wow do I feel like the biggest nagger in the world right now. I feel like all I'm doing is emailing or calling someone with a question. I'm then bugging people if I don't hear back from them quickly enough - I waited about a month for the Mongolian embassy to get back to me with the answer to a simple question. The travel agent we went to see two weeks ago still hasn't sent us the information regarding flights etc...TWO WEEKS!! Despite phone calls from us chasing it up. Aaarrrgghhh. That's so annoying. Well, they've lost their chance. We went to see another travel agent yesterday so hopefully they come through with the goods.

On a more positive note, there's been progression with our visas. We have been granted our Ukraine visas! Happy days! Graeme was at the Ukraine embassy doorstep spot on 9.30am when they opened (consular services for each embassy are generally within the hours of 9.30am - 12.30pm, not a very large window of time). He sent me a picture of my visa straight away and I whooped with joy and announced to everyone within earshot of my desk at work that we got granted our Ukraine visas. Only one person out of four was happy for me, haha oh well! I was absolutely stoked about the visa because that was the one I was a smidge worried about being declined for reasons I covered in a previous blog post.

Last Tuesday I couriered our passports and visa applications to the Kazakhstan embassy in Singapore. There is no Kazakhstan embassy in Australia and Singapore is the one that deals with Australia and New Zealand. That was a nervous moment. I was honestly shaking a little bit as I was writing out the address. Just all the time, effort and money that's been poured into our passports because they now contain two very important visas. I don't know what we can do if we lose them. We may have time to apply for another passport but I'd say we'd have a lot of difficulty trying to replace the Russian and Ukraine visas considering they only just got granted. It would look a bit suspect to them. Anyway, not worth thinking about because it's unlikely to happen.

I bought us awesome waterproof jackets and polar fleece jackets last weekend. Got them all for an amazing price because the store was having a sale which included 20% off already reduced prices. Well, everything I chose was already reduced so I got everything dirt cheap really. My timing was very fortunate. Here's a picture of what I bought us...

Graeme road testing one of his new jackets

Next things we really need to get sorted (apart from trying to book flights with another travel agent), are travel insurance, car registration, car inventory, traveller's cheques and foreign cash. It's all slowly coming together. I also need to buy some phrase books. Particularly a Russian phrase book because realistically, despite a crash course in Russian last year, my Russian vocabulary is about that of a three year old. Won't get us very far! I'll be lucky to order bread for dinner. And don't ask me to say "Where's a fuel station" in Russian - quite an important question I reckon. There's going to be a lot of hilarious charades going on during this trip, let me tell you. I was thinking of doing up cards with pictures on them for the key things that we'll need to ask in most areas like where's fuel, food, water, hotel - that sort of thing. I was thinking simple symbols like these:

 Image source: all-free-download.com 

Image source: startbreakingfree.com 

Don't know if I'll end up doing that or not. I've just never been to a country where I don't speak the language and it's likely none of the locals will speak English. Either way, we'll get by.