Ahead lay the search for a destination, mass unfollowing of people on VK from 5 different accounts due to the anti-people limit of 20 messages a day to non-friends, asking for advice, etc., useless emailing to employers and Skype calls to them as well. However, after a month of hearing about the lack of vacancies and shouting over Skype with a bad connection "Can you hear me???" we gave up and bought offers.

An early exam session crept up unnoticed. The plan to take it by attrition, as we realized later, was doomed from the start. Gathering our strength, we passed one exam, then another, tricked three more professors, entered the credit week, passed one, then another, and!!!! The retake demanded its sacrifice.) On its altar were laid a term paper in one faculty and two exams in another, with an obligation to pass by September 20th. Somewhere there, French courses and guitar were also put aside. Both are now only at night and rarely=)

It was time to buy tickets and we, to our misfortune, accidentally heard somewhere that in foggy England they let you out if you are flying in transit. Against the backdrop of this beautiful fairy tale, and not out of malice, 3 Helsinki-London-New York tickets were purchased with a 23-hour 55-minute layover in London on the way there and 22 hours on the way back. There was definitely nowhere to retreat now, unless into debt slavery, where we, taking the opportunity, also managed to get stuck. Then it was immediately discovered that, properly speaking, we needed three times as many visas as an ordinary Work and Travel USA participant.

The Finnish one was obtained relatively calmly. We only had to endure the question asked 20 times by the embassy employee, shaking the passport: "Why???". Sincerely not knowing what she wanted from us, our desire to answer caused even more persistence in the question, but, unfortunately, no deepening of its content. In the end, she was about to kick us out, and only childish fear and deep spiritual redemption in our eyes made her not do it. One visa in the pocket.

The second one, the American one, was obtained after standing for 2 hours in the cold. This was the day I was most happy about the surname Grishin and bowed before the greatest invention of humanity - alphabetical order. Romantsova and Timofeeva were much less lucky. About the American embassy - it, like the country where it is located, cannot be understood by mind or measured by a yardstick. There is a feeling that whether to take a participant or not is decided not by their language or anything else, but by a complex combination of Tarot cards and coffee grounds, which abound at the bottom of local plastic cups. Although in our year there were quite a few refusals. Here we must give credit to the guys from CMO, they organized everything, explained and supported us.

In general, the main thing in the embassy is to remember the legend: I love the country (Russia, don't mix it up) madly, the family is huge, no one is abroad, I'm going to look and admire, and after all this, if you can also name the city where you are going (according to the offer, not in reality=) and some feature of this city (a beautiful statue, killer waves, a Rastafarian mayor) - then you will be priceless=)

The third embassy is the British one. To be safe and still get out in London, we go to get a visa, it turns out that it can take a month, and we only have two weeks. It costs 5 thousand rubles, and in general, after a clash with a security guard, it is unlikely that we will be let in there anytime soon. We decide to lie down and rely only on the mercy of Her Majesty's customs officers. The rights were received only in mid-April, so the risks of not getting out in London are still trifles compared to, for example, the risks of my future driving)

And now there are 3 days left, nothing is packed, nothing is bought, the session is still being finished AAAAAAA!!! And two days, and here it is. Oh, everything is somehow chaotic. You leave the house, trying to remember if you are going to a credit test or where. No, not to a credit test, unless in a figurative sense)