I took Marina to the local INS support center to get her fingerprints done. What a surprise! No more ink, cards, or long lines! We got there 30 minutes early, walked in the door and within 5 minutes she was being fingerprinted.
What's really interesting is that they now use an electronic fingerprint machine instead of the old ink and paper, out here in California. Marina simply had to put her fingers on a scanner plate and her fingerprints are read directly into a digitized format. A quality assurance guy verified the prints, zoomed in on them and and noted that that one of them wasn't clear enough. The technician deleted that particular fingerprint, rescanned her finger and after another round of verifying, we were out of there. Total time: a little over 10 minutes. Now that's efficient!
Marina is starting to teach me "survival Russian" to prepare me for the next trip over. One thing that's odd is how you count money. Let me try to lay it out for you:
First, one hrivna is counted as "ahd-NAH HREEV-nah"
Two, three and four hrivnas are counted as:
"Dvyeh HREEV-nee"
"Tree HREEV-nee"
"chih-TEER-ee HREEV-nee"
Five and up are counted as
"PYAHT HREEV-yehn"
Now it gets a little more interesting, once you go back to 21, 31, 41, etc. it reverts back to HREEV-nah. 22, 33, 44, etc. revert back to HREEV-nee. 25 through 30, 35 through 40, etc. revert back to HREEV-yehn.
It also affects rubles, but I don't remember the ruble conjugations.
And here I thought that learning numbers was easy...
