Day 17: You can check out any time you like, But you can never leave!'

Miles: 3
Countries: Romania
Stops: home -> coffee -> home -> park -> coffee -> home
Playlist: N/A

Not much to update this time as we continued to play the waiting game. But I'm definitely losing track of what day it is of the week, and what day into the rally, so these posts are really for me more than having any additional info. Also, it's for ranting.

Spent the morning calling various embassies trying to salvage visas but it is unbelievably ridiculous at the lack of tracking they have. We don't understand how we spent however long and $$ filling out application forms that they then have application numbers and are connected to our passport numbers. We have pictures of our "old" passports, hell, we even have some pictures OF the granted visas IN the passport, we then have a police report stating that passports were stolen and have matching pictures of us with temporary passports clearly identifying who we are. Why is it so bloody hard to just accept that as opposed to having to go through the charade of it all from scratch. Just pull our names up, our passport numbers, anything. You'd think it would all be in a system of sorts. 

The big question is Uzbekistan: it needs 2 pages in a passport and a temp passport only comes with 4. We also had to ship our passports off to get that visa. Same with Russian ones, so not sure what that means yet. We thought maybe sending it off in Istanbul, doing our 5-6 day track across the coast and meeting back up at Ankara to pick them up since both cities have an embassy, but apparently they also can't talk to each other and ship it elsewhere than where you applied. It's frigging 2017, get with it. It was, however, nice to see how much better my Russian was than I thought - I had no trouble whatsoever communicating with the embassies seeing as they didn't speak English.

We spent the day getting coffee, and killing time in a park. I got stuck in a kiddie swing, and justin just droned around. We walked some more, got caught in the rain, found another coffee shop, and killed some more time. Made dinner for our hosts, drank some wine, got into some heated debates, drank some more, and called it a night.