Zhenya (a representative of the Tennessie International Culture Connection Programm agency) turned out to be a young man between 26 and 27 years old, with a pleasant appearance and non-Russian manners of speech and behavior. Later, it turned out that he himself had been to the States for work many times, and his stories gave the impression of potential pleasant financial gains that could be made in just one summer by working hard and honestly for the benefit of the USA. The prospect of easy money, travel, and the long-awaited solitude for 4 months made our young heads spin. And we became ready for anything for the sake of our cherished goal.

The first stage, as expected, had to go through thorny bureaucratic paths. However, there were surprisingly few of them: only the long and tedious process of obtaining international passports. We faced long and, as it seemed then, countless fillings of electronic documents and questionnaires. We were the first to do all this and began to wait anxiously for the second stage, the most terrible and nerve-wracking one...

The Embassy. A necessary condition on the way to the States. Each of us who dared had to face the most important exam in life - an interview with the US ambassador in English. Before the trip to Yekaterinburg (the nearest city with an American embassy), my spoken English remained somewhere between the eighth and ninth grades. Kiryushin, on the contrary, was progressing rapidly in accordance with his chosen specialty. I will remember the winter of 2007-2008 forever, for I could not have imagined such an accelerated and difficult English course for me, taught by my better half. We drilled the hateful tenses until we were dizzy, listened to audio exercises, and memorized words. But my faith in getting a visa did not grow from this. On the contrary, it became less and less due to the hyperbolic dependence on the amount of nerves spent. There was only one road ahead, and it was no longer possible to turn off it.