Tony went off to St Petersburg on Wednesday. On Tuesday he went all the way to Copenhagen to the Russian embassy to get his visa. He had to do it in person because he has been using his passport so much lately that he could not afford to send it through the post. Having been to the embassy he feels that he has aready had a taste of Russia. He was frisked on entry and relieved of his penknife. The staff would only talk to him through a glass window. They were upset that the passport number on his application did not tally with the number on the passport he presented and so they made him wait another hour while they cleared that up and decided finally that they would give him the visa anyway. Tony isn’t sure but suspects that they got in touch with the British embassy to confirm his story. His story was that he was forced to get a new passport because he is due to go to the USA in November and they have already let him in with his non-machine readable passport once in January and they wouldn’t let him in again without either a new passport or the old passport with a visa.
Anne was going to a one day conference in Copenhagen on Wednesday (a little mix up of dates). So she ended up going on one plane to the capital while Tony took the next one. Anne had to spend two hours in the air because there was fog at Copenhagen and they were on the brink of turning the plane round back to Aarhus. She wasn’t really bothered about that especially as the conference turned out not to be as relevant as it had been made out to be. But she did wonder what happened to Tony who was on the next plane.
Tony decided not to take the mobile phone to avoid being killed if someone wanted to rob it and also he wasn’t sure it would work there anyway. And so Anne got a short email from him the next day confirming that he had arrived safely but with no other details as he said he was only allowed one minute on the Internet.
So a long day for everybody as the girls were picked up by the parents of one of Mia’s friends from school and were picked up by Anne at 7.45. It would have been 6.30 but SAS cancelled the booked plane probably because of the chaos earlier in the morning.