Getting my Russian shop set up

[jdurand]

Just an update on our adventures...

Ever since the SMO started business visas became very hard to renew in this region, so we had to switch to being tourists which meant living at home for a bit, then living abroad for a bit.

This summer we were finally granted "quota" which allowed us to apply for the equivalent of "green cards" and stay here as residents.

GREAT! We were about to head home to start the paperwork but... (there's always a but) a new law came into effect to put more oversight on who could actually apply for residency. You have to have entered the country with a special visa by invitation.

We applied for that and after a month, we were granted it through the consulate where we were currently staying (Armenia). We had 4 month visas which qualified us to use that consulate as temporary Armenia residents.

but wait... when we went to the consulate they told us there was another new law, not yet published but they were enforcing it, that we now needed SIX month Armenian visas before the consulate would see us. Unless... we provided the original copies of our "quota" paperwork.

That paperwork is only released to people IN PERSON. sigh. Ok, we flew home (glad it's not far or expensive), collected our paperwork and applied for visas to return to Armenia. My wife got one right away as expected, me... rejected. ???

After a trip to the Armenian embassy we found that someone I met in Armenia reported me as being too anti-American and got me black listed.

At this point the national TV news stepped in and after a bunch of help from them and others we were granted the special visa without having to leave the country. Our green card paperwork is in progress (it takes 6-8 weeks) and we're back to working on the house. Painting, tiles, and building our greenhouse.

We can't reopen our business until we're actually issued our residency paperwork so we're using the time to get other things done.

So far we've had 4 magazine interviews, 3 published, and one TV news interview. The immigration service also used some of the news footage to release their own short bit on us.

Hopefully I'll have interesting things to post here in the future. Mostly things are just on our blog.
https://t.me/Becoming_Russians/10