I know how much you guys enjoy looking at pictures so I’ve enclosed the web site address to pictures I’ve posted on Yahoo Photos. I’ll give the address at the end of this post. Well Angelica and I returned from a week in Poland on May 16th. She’s now been in the US for 11 days and she loves being here with me and she loves America. I’ve posted a few times on this board so I’ll just give a little background info and then talk about my adventure in Poland for Angie’s interview.
I met Angie a year ago April 2002. I found her on a small family run agency from Simferopol, Ukraine. Simferopol is the capital of the Crimea. I prefer the small family run agencies because in my experience they are usually very honest, friendly and helpful. We started off with 2 to 3 letters a week and a couple of phones calls per week. I went to see her in September 2002 (she was the only one I was going there to see) for about 8 days. After that we started talking daily on the phone and didn’t bother with the emails much. I then went back to see her for about 11 days over the Christmas holidays and officially asked her to marry me and gave her an engagement ring. Earlier in mid- October I had hired an agency out of Odessa to handle the fiancée visa process for me and I filed my petition with the INS Calif, Service Center (CSC) in early December.
When I first started writing her her English was maybe at about a low 2 on a scale of 1-5. About six weeks before our first meeting I decided to take the small risk (I was trusting her pretty well by then) of sending her about $60 bucks for private English lessons (3 hours per week for 6 weeks). I wanted us to be able to communicate as much as possible on our own when I got there in September. Her English did improve with those lessons over the 6 week period. Between October to May of this year I increased her lessons to 6 hours a week which ran me all of about $75 per month. Well worth the price for the woman you plan on marrying. Also in October I had her quit her job in the market place (it was very cold in the winter and she made very little money at this job.) and I supported her (again very little amount of money for this because of the prices over there) while she spent many hours each day studying her English and spending time with her parents and friends. Her English is very good at this point. I am an administrator at a community college and last week she took her ESL placement test. She scored “Advanced Intermediate” on her English and this week starts her ESL English 3 summer class which is 16 hours per week. This should keep her fairly busy.
So back to the INS…. the CSC took only about 3 months to approve her petition (early March) and with some communicating on my part with the American Embassy in Warsaw I had her interview scheduled within three weeks from INS approval. The interview was scheduled for May 12 which was about 2 months from the INS approval date. Our plan was for me to meet her in Warsaw, be with her for her interview and then fly back to our home in Buena Park (Orange County) together on May 14th.
With the exception of one problem which I will discuss in a bit the embassy experience was very pleasant. They are very professional, friendly, and very helpful. Her flight to Warsaw arrived from Kiev a couple of hours before my Swiss Air flight did. I’ve flown Swiss Air before and they are one of my favorite international airlines. She was waiting for me at the gate. The Warsaw airport is small and easy for Ukrainian girls to manage. It’s about the same size as Borisopol airport in Kiev. Don’t accept rides into town from anyone that approaches you within the arrival area of the airport. These guys charge about 180 Zloty (PLN) for the ride into town verses the taxi rate of about 30 PLN. (The exchange rate is 1 USD for 3.5 PLN). We stayed at a very nice hotel called Grand Hotel Warsaw. It’s in a good location and just a few blocks from the US Embassy and embassy row. It’s about a $3 USD taxi ride. The staff at this hotel speaks English and were extremely helpful. There is also a small travel agency at the hotel which turned out to be very useful. Also the hotel serves a great buffet breakfast that is included in your room rate. The rates I paid were about $90 per night which is good rate for Warsaw.
There is quite a bit to see and do in Warsaw/Poland. We ended up also taking the train to Krakow and stayed there for a couple of days. Krakow is a beautiful city and is also a couple of hours away from two large infamous Nazi concentration camps which we did visit. Also Polish and Ukrainian (not Russian) languages are very similar and between my English and her Ukrainian we had no problem communicating all over this country. They also like Americans very much (they had troops with the coalition in Iraq).
Anyway back to the problem I had. I share this with the group just in case you have a similar problem on your documents. I didn’t catch it before I submitted my paperwork to the INS but I did notice it after the approval. As I said my agent in Odessa took care of all of the paperwork for me. However he put an incorrect birth date for her on my petition that I signed and he put the correct date on the form that she signed. So I called him to express my concern about this and he said in true Ukrainian/Russian fashion “it’s not a problem…don’t worry…. just tell the embassy when you’re there so that they will put the correct date on her visa.” Well my instinct told me it was a problem but he was supposed to be the professional so I let it go. Well it’s Monday the 12th and we’re at the embassy and the female American interviewer is telling us that they noticed she has two birth dates. I explain that I am aware of this error but that my agent told me not to worry about it that they, the embassy would correct it there. She then proceeds to tell me that it is a problem because they did the background check on the incorrect birth date. Well when I heard those words my heart dropped down to my shoes because I knew exactly what she was gonna say next. And she did, she tells me that they’ll have to do a new background on the correct date and that it takes about two weeks and to come back in two weeks. I just couldn’t believe this was happening to me. So in a very nice tone I explained that that was not an option. Angie did not have a ticket back to Ukraine, she had gotten rid of the apartment she was living in and we had return tickets to the US in just two days on the 14th. She then says “well sometimes they come back sooner so maybe you can check back in a week.” At this point I start to plead that there must be something we can do to solve this problem. She excuses herself and comes back in a couple of minutes to inform me that they can do a 48 hour expedited request for a background check to Washington. She asks me when our flight is and I tell her Wednesday at 7:00 AM. She says it will probably not be there until they open at 8 on Wednesday. I tell her no problem I’ll change my flight time to Friday and give Washington an extra 24 hours just to make sure. She tells me it’s almost guaranteed to be back in 48 hours.
Now this is where the hotel really came through for us. They called Swiss Air for us and explained that we needed to change our flight from Wednesday to Friday. They faxed things back and forth for us and made all of the arrangements. Swiss Air only charged me $150 to change my ticket and didn’t charge me at all to change Angie’s one-way ticket. You can bet I gave that front desk clerk a nice tip. I then walked across the reception area to the travel agency were the woman working there spoke English and she arranged train tickets to Krakow for the next day. I picked out a hotel which I just paid for right there and also paid for the tour to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Everything was taken care of right there. I told Angie we’ll just consider this trip our honeymoon before the wedding and we continued to have a great vacation.
We arrived back at the Embassy on Thursday morning. We only had to wait about 15 minutes and the same woman called us to her window. She told us that the background check had come back and everything was fine and Angie would have her visa by 3:00 PM that afternoon. You can imagine how relieved and excited we were to hear those words. I asked her when the information had come back from Wash D.C. and she said it was the most amazing thing. It came back within 24 hours. It was there on Tuesday.
So now Angie’s been here since the 16th. She is so excited about everything. She loves the food and she thinks Americans are so nice and they are always smiling at her and saying hello to her (No kidding she’s so damn cute). She’s been to dinner a few times with friends of mine and my secretary who is a good friend has spent a whole day with her taking her shopping and to the Marina in Long Beach. Angie is the most loving and sweet woman I have ever known and we are having a fantastic time together. She tells me she will never miss her country but she does miss her parents and friends a little bit. I let her call home when she wants to but she is very concerned about how much I am spending on clothes for her, etc and she’s pretty conservative about the phone calls. She even informed me that she wants to actually become a citizen and this has really thrilled me.
So this is my story and I just want to say to you guys who have not yet made the trip “over there” that it is well worth the blood, sweat, and tears, to go through with this. I was very picky in making my selection with Angie. I wrote a lot of girls, had one form or another of varying relationships with them. I watched for all the standard red and yellow flags and summarily dismissed women where I saw any sort of red flags or too many yellow ones. I was not gonna make another mistake and I was determine to take all the time I needed to find the best woman for me. Well I did. So hang in there guys. Don’t settle, find the best for yourselves. There are just too many good women out there to settle for someone that may not meet all of your criteria.
The photos of Angelica and some of the two of us together are at: http://photos.yahoo.com/markevanfisher
Take care,
Mark
