I saw my wife and stepdaughter off last night from Houston Intercontinental Airport to Moscow. Four years and ten days after arriving in Houston in 2004 they are returning the same way they arrived. After arriving in Moscow they will take the train back to Baranovichi, Belarus. They are scheduled to return to Houston via Moscow in April a month from now.

It was a spur of the moment trip. My stepdaughter works at a travel agency in Houston and she got an insider deal on super cheap tickets only open to travel agents. Her round trip ticket was $350 and she was allowed to bring my wife along for an additional $450. They had no plans to travel until this popped up. Singapore Airlines just started nonstop service between Houston and Moscow on March 20 and are offering super cheap deals to kick off the new route. They have super deals on round trip tickets for $737 through May 22 for the general public on the Houston / Moscow route.

http://www.singaporeair.com/saa/en_UK/cont...ocal/US/iah.jsp

My wife's Belarusian passport expired in 2006 and she had to get a re-entry permit from the Belarus embassy in Washington DC to go back on an expired passport. She will be getting a new passport while in Belarus. It was one of the main reasons she wanted to go on this trip. From what little I know about such things, apparently it is a lot easier and more desirable to get a new passport over there than to get one through their embassy in the USA. The thing I don't like about the situation is that she is stranded until she gets a new passport. Hopefully it can be done before their return flight in a month from now.

I hope it all works out!

That's a risky time frame for getting a passport under normal circumstances. I hope the officers will take a bribe if the process is too slow.

Good luck.

Ohh she only left you temporary I hope

You don't have to answer this if you don't want to, peejay, but i'm interested in why your wife took belarusian citizenship instead of russian. I know things were bad in russia in the 90s, but i always thought of them as being worse in belarus--it was actually cheaper for my cousin to go the university of texas than a university in belarus because his family would have had to pay so much to the mafia.

Of course all things are relative to someone's own personal situation and experiences. My wife grew up and lived most of her adult life under Soviet communism just as I grew up remembering the Cold War while growing up in the USA in that era. She is 46 years old and I'm 51.

In my wife's case, the decision she made at that time she felt was best for herself at the time. My wife was born and raised in a small rural village in Siberia in the Soviet era. She got her university degree in English from a small regional institute in Siberia. After graduation she married a guy from her villiage that was in the Soviet military. He was posted to a Soviet military base in the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (now called Belarus) and she followed him there. She was working as a public school teacher when they divorced just as the Soviet Union was falling apart. He went back to Siberia and she stayed in Belarus with their daughter.

From the stories she has relayed to me, growing up in Russian Siberia was far worst than conditions she encountered when she moved to Belarus in the early 1980's. Belarus is relatively industrialized and consumer goods were a lot more abundant than the spartan life she lived in rural Siberia. Living in a medium sized city in Belarus was preferable to her memories of Siberia. Of course her memories of Russia would have been far different had she grown up in Moscow, Leningrad, etc., but she didn't.

I don't know exactly how the propiska residency system works, but I think she had to take Belarusian citizenship when they all had to turn in their old Soviet passports after the USSR imploded and dissolved. She wanted to stay where she was at (in Belarus) and the decision was pretty much automatic. From what she told me nobody gave her any other options at the time. She turned in her Soviet passport and they issued her a Belarusian passport because that was her residency.

As far as the question about the mafia controlling entrance to Belarusian universities. From what I have heard from my wife, there is a certain amount of corruption involved in some university admissions which probably involves bribes to varying degrees. Having connections higher up the food chain can also help gain an advantage to scarce and desirable admissions. I'm not quite sure if I would equate that to a real organized crime syndicate modeled after the Mafia.

However, at some point corruption and connections will only get a lazy and stupid person so far.

My cousin's daughter just finished the first step of her university education at a linguistic institute in Minsk after 4 years of study. They are neither wealthy or particularly well connected. She went through a rigorous vetting process to be admitted and she related to me that the curriculum is daunting. She is fluent in several languages in addition to Russian and English. As I said...money and connections can only get someone so far.

All in all I think a US university education would be economically impossible for a vast majority of Belarusians unless the US university gave them a full scholarship. The difference in earnings between the average American and Belarusian is huge. I think it would be far cheaper to study in Belarus.

This was right around the time of the fall, so things were different. They wanted 10,000 dollars. If he were applying today, he would have gone for free, no question. He never got below a five in his life and went to a school focusing in languages, so he spoke and wrote English really well. I believe he did get a full scholarship to U of T. i think my family might have helped out in obtaining it.

I thought many of the Belarusian universities were closed or in danger of it? We had about several students at my institute in spbgu who were studying there because their university in Belarus had been shut down.

Money and connections do get you far.. Anyone can be a fee-paying student and no one ever fails out, even when they fail their exams, because you can just retake them. Cheating is so rampant that your professors leave the room to give you a chance to cheat. As mainstreamed American students, we were actually told flat out that we were expected to set a good example for Russian students in our classes in regard to academic honesty.

I finally managed to talk to the wife today, but have been trading e-mails with her since they arrived to their final destination in Baranovichi, Belarus. She has been running around for several days registering the propiska, getting new photos, etc. needed to get her expired passport renewed. So far it looks like the passport situation will turn out OK. She paid extra for expedited processing, but I wouldn't quite call that "bribery" since the USA also offers the same deal if you want your passport pronto. As it is, they promised to have it ready on the 16th which is about 10 days before their scheduled departure.

Some might ask why she didn't just get her passport renewed at the Belarusian embassy in Washington DC. I know I asked the same question. My wife found out quickly that it is a bureaucratic nightmare to do it in the USA. The embassy lady even told her that she would be better off going back to Belarus to do it. It would have been too many forms, too many fees, and too many questions to do it in the USA. All that hassle for an ex-pat passport that is only good for 2 years. The one she is getting now will be valid well into her old age (but I can't recall the details). I do know that their passports must be renewed at age 25 and at age 45. I'm not sure how long this one is valid for, but I would assume 65.

Glad it seems to be working out!