How To Write An Invitation Letter To A Friend: Fill & Download for Free

My name is BettyNunley and I'm from the United States of America and I would like to invite Alexander Osei Yaw to come here to visit with the possibility of getting married. Please let me know what else we or I need to do to make it possible

A friend of my Mum knew a parish priest who needed to raise some funds for his parish, and decided to organize a sponsored dog walking event. People would be sponsored to take their dogs on a walk through the park. He knew exactly how to get some good publicity. He sent a letter to Buckingham Palace, asking whether the Queen would be willing to send one of her corgis to participate. As expected, he received a very polite reply from one of her personal secretaries explaining that, unfortunately, Her Majesty’s corgis do not participate in any public events. “But”, the letter concluded “Her Majesty sends her best wishes, and hopes the event is a success.” So when the event was announced, the priest was sure to let everyone know that Her Majesty had sent her best wishes, and hoped that the event would be a success. How could any patriotic dog-owner refuse to participate in an event after hearing such a message?So I suggest that if you write a letter inviting the Queen to your wedding, you will receive a polite reply, and she will wish you well.

As soon as you crossed the border as a Soviet man, international travel went easy for you. Not least because the Soviet state covered your expenses, and our foreign stations were expected to help you along.Ahead of that, things weren’t necessarily as easy inside the perimeter.Rules of the gameCitizens of the Soviet Union were formally free to travel any time, anywhere. But there was a set of preconditions to that.To start with, you shouldn’t have any criminal or anti-Soviet record on your files. Neither you nor your closest relatives would work with anything remotely secret. You had to have a very solid explanation for why you made plans to travel internationally—and how on earth you could afford it.Private travelSimply buying a ticket to a foreign destination was an impossibility. We had a system of “exit visas”. You had to produce a valid exit visa at the ticket office. The border guards weren’t going to let you board a plane if you didn’t have one.Some people sometimes received invitations from someone abroad to visit them. If that happened privately (i.e not related to your internationally recognised work), it was bad news. An envelope with such an invitation to you inside merely crossing the border—international mail was supervised—would unleash an avalanche of investigations. You had to have good answers. Who were these people who wanted to lure you out of the country? How did you get to know them? What do you know about their contacts with foreign secret services and known centers of anti-Soviet activity?Unless you were a world-famous cellist or chess-player, or other celebrity, private travel wasn’t really an option.Available optionsOtherwise, you could do it in either of two ways.A tour arranged by your employer, or your trade union. Most of the time, to another country in the Soviet bloc or a friendly third-world country, e.g. India. Cruises on Soviet ships were big deal, as they made calls to ports in the West, and that was a B-I-G deal.A business trip. You got everything arranged by your employer, plus some per diem in hard (!) Western (!) currency (!). Big, big, big deal! Such trips were the stuff of legends. People who did it often (diplomats, trade reps, spies) were viewed as lottery winners.Outbound paperworkTo be able to cross the border with an “exit visa”, a protracted authorisation was required. We called it oformlénye na výezd (“outbound paperwork”)This involved a kind of resumé reviews at your working place. To get through it, a lot of people had to vouch for your good Soviet credentials. They wouldn’t do that unless your employer initiated the process. Then, secret police guys would go through the files with your life history. Their job was to uncover some oddities and inconsistencies you might try to cover. It would take weeks, most often months.Gates openingIf everyone was okay with you leaving the safe realms of Soviet rule, you would hand in your “internal” citizen’s passport and get another one, with your name written strangely in Latin letters. (That’s how I became “Vorobiev” instead of Воробьёв, which had been me prior to my first trip abroad, to Hungary, in the early 1980s.)We called it zagraníchnyi (“foreign”) passport, as opposed to a vnútrenniy (“internal”) one. This one would sport a square stamp inside certifying to the border control officers that you were allowed to leave the country for a determined period of time and one particular destination. A sour uniformed officer would piercingly look at you, stamp your pass—and you were free to leave the Soviet homeland.Steering clear of provocationsAs an exemplary Soviet citizen, I never let my guard down outside the realms of Real socialism. I was always aware that there could be provokátsiyi (i.e. hostile actions with the intent to make me and my Soviet Motherland look bad). But not everyone was as vigilant as me.If reports would come that you had a wild party at a foreign hotel, or badmouthed the Communist rule to the BBC, or (horror, horror, horror!) defected while abroad, it was bad news for people who vouched for you. They failed to detect a rotten egg in their midst. This was the reason why so many people were involved in the vouching process beforehand: pulverisation of responsibility.Strength in numbersTo be on the safe side, Soviet citizens were required to move around on the Capitalist ground in pairs, even better in groups. If you ventured to do things on your own, and were busted, you were expected to give an exact account of what you did, why, and what kind of contacts with foreign subjects you had, in writing.There were certain upsides to moving around in pairs. You had the company of someone speaking Russian in a sea of strangers that didn’t. You had an alibi in case someone tried to pin something bad on you after the fact. And if someone did, you knew who it probably was, and could reciprocate in kind.DocumentationThe requirement of documentation was enforced no matter if something untoward happened to you outside the perimeter or not. Everyone who returned from a foreign trip was required to write an account of how it went. It had no strict form, and few really read these beside the KGB guys who perused it just in case.The main purpose was to have some kind of hardcopy statement to pin you against in case there would come a signál (“report”, “intel”) that you did something you shouldn’t have while abroad. In that case someone with very advanced interrogative skills would call you on the carpet and ask a pointed question: “Why did you try to conceal this fact in your report about the trip?”, and progress from there.But as far as I know, this happened extremely rarely. An absolute majority of Soviet citizens who travelled abroad were fully aware of the luck and honor that befell them, and the great responsibility attached to it.Below, Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, visits the tomb of Karl Marx in Great Britain in the early 1960s. In my time, there was a joke about Soviet citizens visiting Britain: “How to find out if a Russian is KGB or not? — Meet him at the grave of Karl Marx. If he comes alone, he must be a spy.”