Into the East Part III

After our initial circuit of the city centre, we decided to have a drink somewhere. When planning the trip, I had been looking for a guidebook about Belarus, or at the very least Minsk, but I came up empty handed. Even Lonely Planet didn't have a guide on Belarus, which shows you what an out-of-the-way place it is. In the end, we found an In Your Pocket guide on Minsk online and printed that out. The guide mentioned a couple of promising bars and we were standing on front of one of them now. As most of you will know, I keep a list of every bar I've been to since 2005. The name on this bar was, ofcourse, in Cyrillic, which got me a "good luck putting THAT on your list!" 

I soon worked out, however, that the name translated to Gambrinus. Gambrinus is a Latin translation of Jan Primus, or John the First, in English. Which was a pretty cool coincidence because my favourite Dutch beer is named after this historic figure, a Dutch duke who ruled the Southern parts of Holland and the North of what is now Belgium, somewhere in the middle ages. According to legend, Duke John (or Hertog Jan, in Dutch) enjoyed his beer and would often ride into battle on horseback, clutching a sword in one hand and a mug of beer in the other. No wonder they named a brewery after him. Nowadays, he is still depicted on the label holding a sword and a mug of foaming beer.

                                                             

In any case, it was good old Jan who stared at me from the cover of the extensive beer menu, which was pretty cool to see in such a remote place. We ordered beers and contemplated our first impressions of Belarus. One of the first things you notice, obviously, is that the alphabet is different. Where in other countries you are normally able to deduct what is a bakery and what is an insurance office, here in Cyrillic territory I was more or less completely lost. Every streetsign, billboard or shopwindow was a big riddle. This is ofcourse sort of cool, but it also makes live a bit harder than normal because you have to consider everything you do because you don’t really know what is what.  I mistook the window of a funeral director for a flower shop and It took me a minute to figure out that what I took to be an information centre for tourists was actually an office of the national lottery.
You live and learn.

           

           I think this means 'AC/DC'


  Another thing that you notice straight away, is the ridiculous currency, the Belarussian Rouble. Where the Rouble in neighbouring Russia is around 35/1 against the Euro, in itself entertaining enough, the Belarussian version is a whopping 11.000/1 against the Euro. On paper, this looks comical enough, but when you actually get there it is so ridiculous that you just have to laugh. The 7 minute taxi ride to our hotel cost 100.000. A bus ticket was 1.700 for a single. A pint clocked in at around an impressive 40.000. I have a photo somewhere of me holding 2 million in cash. I felt like an early 90s rapper. I could only just resist the temptation to go and get a bottle of Dom Perignon to complete the picture.
It was after a day and a half that I figured out that the country doesnt even bother producing coins. It would be useless anyway, in a country where inviting your in-laws out for dinner would result in having to make a trip to the bank with a wheelbarrow. 

This is the amount of cash for a single on the bus. It's about 17 cents

Another thing I noticed, was the behaviour of the people. It's not that they're unfriendly as such, it's more that they're sort of paranoid or afraid of strangers, which is not that strange, really, after a century of oppression. Imagine how they must have felt:  After being ruled with an iron fist by the Soviet Union for 70 years, the countries around them cautiously started to declare independence after Gorbatsjov told them they could and that he basically didn't give a shit about the concept of the Soviet Union anymore. Then, while the Baltic states developed themselves into modern, tech-savvy countries (Skype, for example, is an Estonian invention) the Belarussians had to look on with tears in their eyes as the Kremlin rolled in a dictator to keep an eye on things. The same dictator is there still today.

                                                     The Kremlin is STILL watching you!!

This reflects in the behaviour of the people. We asked, or rather tried to ask, a woman in the street about the location of a certain building, but she simply pushed the map out of our hands and hastily moved on with a look in her eyes that you would expect to see on a lonely white girl who is approached at dusk in the South Bronx by 3 black guys carrying Uzis. On the bus, you are simply shoved out of the way if someone wants to pass. No people in the bus talked to each other. (On a side note, going back to the country's Monopoly money, the ticket inspector on the bus was carrying a wad of cash as thick as her wrist. I guess it was worth about 3 Euros).

Apart from the weird currency, another thing that you notice straight away, is the presence everywhere of soldiers and cops. If I deducted correctly, the police wear grey uniforms that, comically enough, have a batch on it saying “OMOH” and the army soldiers are dressed in green. They are literally everywhere. On every streetcorner were at least 2 or 3 soldiers, apparently keeping an eye on proceedings,  and I must say, I have never seen such a clean city. Not a single chocolate bar wrapper, piece of chewing gum or empty beer can could be found anywhere. Even the local winos dropped their empty cans in a bin.



         The tv show 'COPS' never really took off in Belarus


Ofcourse, Belarus being a communist state, there is, on paper at least, no unemployment. This, in turn, means that an awful lot of people are employed by the state. We walked by a church and found a dozen soldiers keeping an eye on the ceremony, hardly the number you would need at a Sunday morning church service. Every park we walked by had at least 4 or 5 employees of the Parks Department standing there, most of them leaning on shovels or broomsticks. We walked by another immense building, most likely a state department of some sort, and as soon as we took a couple of pictures of the building, the soldiers that were ‘guarding’ every corner started moving towards us, so we beat a hasty retreat. 


The Belarussian Department of Important Decisions

We then realised it was about time to get some dinner. It was, after all, a special day. My friend Renae had now officially visited every single country in Europe and this called for a special celebration. Fortunately, our research had revealed that there was in fact  a microbrewery in Minsk that had a restaurant attached to it. Being both fans of microbreweries, we set off to find it and despite the trouble with the Cyrillic alphabet and the black-and-white photocopied guide book, we found it at the first try. (I must admit though that we first approached the building from the wrong direction, but with the uttering of the word ‘Brovar’ (my first word in Belarussian, meaning brewery) we were set on the right path and about  a minute later we entered a surprisingly large establishment. I really had no idea about the size of the place, but it was big. It even had 2 floors.  Another thing that you will notice as a Westerner in Belarus, is that it is still allowed everywhere to smoke. Bars, restaurants, public buildings, you can puff away as much as you want. This is, ofcourse, brilliant if you smoke yourself, but if you don’t it can be quite annoying. We asked to be seated in the non-smoking section, and found that every table had an ashtray on it. 10 years ago, I would have welcomed this, but now, having given up smoking myself over 7 years ago, and accompanied by someone who hates smoke, I was less than happy with the arrangement. Fortunately, nobody in our immediate vincinity smoked so all was well. The place looked really cool, with a lot of wood and a tiled floor. Towards the back of the ground floor was a sports corner where, this being Belarus, most of the merchandise on display had to do with hockey. The brew tanks stood behind the bar and further decorations of interest were a fish tank that appeared to be filled with baracudas and a huge bear skin that hung from the fence on the first floor. It all looked really cool. The beer was good as well, and the food was really nice. We both had a stew of pork and mushrooms and, ofcourse, the ubiquitous potatoe pancakes, but it was really nice.


Brewing in action

After we left the restaurant, we decided to go back to the hotel. Even though it was only around 8 in the evening, we were exhausted. We’d been up since about 5AM, had been through all that shit at the border and we’d been walking around through a thick pack of snow, and everyone who has ever gone through a semi-serious episode of snowfall will tell you that it is hard going. We bought a couple of beers to drink back in the hotel and got on the bus back home. We somehow got off at the wrong stop which wasn’t that much of a problem, as we had a nice 10 minute walk back to the hotel and had a cool photo opportunity at a sign saying “Welcome to Minsk” with a train and a plane on it. Near the hotel we walked past a bar called Beer Nora. We decided to go in and have one for the road, even though the remaining bit of road was about 30 yards. It was a nice, subterranean place that seemed to be just as much in use as a restaurant as a bar. We had a local beer and went back to the hotel. We didn’t get to meet Nora though.
After a long day, and one more beer in the hotel, I was glad to go to bed and put my head down. I watched some CNBC and was asleep in 10 minutes.

Into the East Part II

                                                                         Snow in Minsk

5.30AM is never a great time for having to get out of bed. Knowing that you have to leave your warm bed and trudge out into the snow in subzero temperatures, to sit on a ramshackle bus for hours on your way to the last dictatorship still standing in Europe doesn’t improve the situation a whole lot.  The bus drove out of Vilnius and into the early morning darkness on its way to the Belarussian border. As soon as we left Vilnius, the landscape changed from city to patches of woods and farmland, seperated by stretches of snowy fields. After about an hour and a half, we appeared to be approaching the border. This resulted in a flurry of activity among the other passengers who, by the look of it, were all locals who had been through this routine many times before. 

I had no idea what to expect, so I watched with interest as the rest of the passengers scuttered out of the bus and into the border patrol office.  When we started out at planning this trip, it occurred to me that entering Belarus requires a visa from the powers that be in the country. We downloaded forms from the embassy website, completed them, and inserted our passports and about 200 Euros worth of international money orders into the registered mail enveloppe.  This is one thing I don’t get. Why do all those countries that are allegedly poor and backwards make it nearly impossible to enter them? If I was in charge of a poor country, I would throw every border crossing wide open for every rich Western tourist who was planning to throw around hard currency like Dollars and Euros to boost the local economy. As it stands, Belarus holds 63^rd position in the world when it comes to income per head of the population, which is only just outside the top third of the world, but behind every other European country except for notoriously poor Moldova(130) and Bulgaria, which follows it in 64^th spot.  The embassy in London had informed us that it would take about a week and a half to process the visa request, so we waited in patience. After about 2 weeks, we received an enveloppe with all our paperwork. Our visa request had been rejected because we had used “Incorrect forms” as the accompanying card informed us. They sent us new forms which, upon closer inspection, were EXACTLY THE SAME, to the last letter. This was an early indication on how Soviet bureacracy works. We compared the forms for about half an hour and could not find any difference. In the end, it dawned on us that when we had printed off the forms, about 1/8 of an inch of the top of the frame lining the questions had not been printed out, but that was all we could find. We sent the forms off again and, 3 days before we were about to leave, finally received back our passports with the coveted Belarus visa stickers in them.   

And now we were approaching the border, and we could finally put them to use. When I approached the guard’s desk, she took out one of those square magnifying glasses that jewellers and watchmakers use. She inspected my entire passport ID page with this thing. Just for a moment, I expected her to kick up a shit storm about the US Border Patrol stamp on one of the first pages, but this was apparently no problem. She then asked me to present my travel insurance which, I realised then, was still in my back pack on the bus. So I hurried off back to bus and returned with my insurance cert. She looked at it for about 0.4 seconds and waved over a male colleague. And this brings us back, in a roundabout way, to the start of our story. As mentioned there, the guard told me that this insurance was not valid in their ‘Territory’, as they put it, and sent us off to the insurance booth across the street to purchase medical insurance suitable to life in the harsh territory of Belarus. It wasn’t expensive, only 3 Euros each for the week, but it just seemed weird to me that they would organise it this way. The boy working in the booth sat behind a computer (and I use this word in the broadest way possible) that was manufactured, I would guess, before the Soviet Union was disbanded. He typed in our information using 1 finger and constantly made mistakes which  necessitated him starting over again. When my form was finally done and he started on Renae’s papers, I noticed from the corner of my eyes that our busdriver was walking back to the bus that was parked about 30 yards beyond the border office. I walked outside to inform him that we were nearly done, but when I reached the bus, he started to drive off. I ran past the bus and started waving at him, indicating that he had forgotten 2 paying passengers.  When he opened the door, rather than apologising for his rude mistake, he started shouting at me that we were delaying his schedule and he had no intention of waiting any longer. This asshole had clearly learned customer care from a Siberian camp guard, but after a lot of shouting and delaying, we could finally get aboard the bus with the correct papers and continue our trip. What a start to the day. 

                                           Pictured: a Belarussian border patrol computer

                                                    

As soon as we passed the general clutter that you find in border areas, like empty freight containers, old buses with wheels missing, and the seemingly never ending line of trucks that you will find at nearly every border crossing east of Munich, the landscape changed noticeably. Where in Lithuania it had been mostly woodland and farms, the scenery on the Belarussian side of the border was one of utter wintery emptiness. There was nothing but snow, at some points blown up to 5 feet high, as far as the eye could see. Once every mile or so, the white nothingness was offset by a clutch of dead birch trees or a lone farm house. This always makes me wonder. Who lives in places like that? When (WHY?)did they decide to go live in a crumbling farm in the middle of fukcing nowhere in a place that is covered in shoulder high snow for most of the year? I can't even begin to understand. For hours we drove through the frozen wasteland. We passed nothing. There was only snow. At one point, I got the idea that it somehow looked familiar, but I couldn't quite put my finger on why it did. I realised later that it looked as if we were driving across Hoth. I expected to see Han Solo riding a Tauntaun any minute. ( if you don't know what Hoth is, you have a severe lack of movie education and you should go watch the Starwars trilogy. Now! Or read this link: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoth )
 

                                                 Belarussians on their way to work

Being rather bored with the snow, I amused myself by reading Bill Bryson's excellent book "A walk in the woods". In it, he describes his 2000 mile hike along the Appalachian Trail, a footpath through the wilderness of the Appalachian mountain range that runs from Northern Georgia to the Canadian border. Incidentally, Bill was caught in a snow storm himself in the chapter I was reading while we approached Minsk. After hours of snow, I noticed that the scenery started to change. We were clearly approaching a city, as the roadside started to get populated with signs indicating highway exits, gas stations and other amenities you would expect to find near a sizeable city. 

After a while we entered the city proper and the first building I saw was an enormous apartment block. It was HUGE. It went on for about a quarter of a mile. And that's the thing that baffles you when you get to Minsk, the scale. I don't mean the size of the city itself, Minsk has about 1.8 million inhabitants which puts it somewhere halfway between Manchester and Birmingham, just to give you an idea. No, it's the size of everything in it that is the amazing thing. They don't build to small scale in Minsk. When we had checked into our hotel, we went out to explore the city. Being the great adventurers that we are, we had lunch at TGI Friday's, the reasoning behind this being that they would have a Wifi signal(they didn't). 

After lunch we went on a walk through the city centre and the size of everything left me completely amazed. Every building was enormous. Every statue was huge. Official-looking 

government buildings routinely took up 2 or 3 entire blocks. The ambitiously named Grand Palace of The Republic was bigger than an airport terminal. 

Every building was adorned with large Belarussian flags. Most roofs were lined with statues of statesmen, folklore heroes and other noteworthy characters from Belarussian history.  I had obviously never been to Minsk before, yet still it looked familiar in a vague way,  a persistent spark in the back of my head saying that I had seen this before, but I  couldn't say where it would have been. We walked onto the huge square on which the picturesque Red Church is set, faced across the square by another 3 block government building and then it dawned on me.

Minsk is what the world would look like, if the Nazis had won the war.

It was very impressive. Now before you start accusing me of sympathising with nazi ideas, let me state here that pretty much everything the nazis did was very wrong in every way imaginable, but their architecture was sort of cool. If you don't believe me, type the words "Albert Speer" and "Germania" into Google or Wikipedia and you will see what I mean. To give you a bit of background on this: Albert Speer was Hitler's chief architect. When the 3rd Reich would have won the war, and had overrun Russia in the process, Berlin would be renamed Germania and Albert Speer was assigned the task of rebuilding the city and turning it into the capital of the world, a city consisting of broad boulevards, impressive and huge buildings and large parks, all decorated with grand statues of noteworthy people from German history. This is exactly what Minsk looked like. You could see from the look of the city that it had once been an important city in a vast empire. It would not surprise me at all that an alien civilisation, if they flew their space ship over Europe, would assume Minsk to be the capital of the continent.  What a weird, yet fascinating city.

Into the East.

And so I found myself standing at a border crossing between Lithuania and Belarus, in the middle of a snow storm, engaged in a conflict with a Belarussian border guard who had an  impressive fur hat but little vocabulary outside of Russian and was telling me that I could not enter their territory because I had bogus travel insurance.  Argueing that my travel insurance was from the acclaimed insurer AIG, and that it did in fact include medical cover, seemed pointless, so I trudged through a foot of snow to the border insurance office, erected there for the sole purpose of forcing those few tourists that enter Belarus by road to purchase the official state insurance.
But let's go back in time a little bit. How the hell did I end up in this situation in the first place ?
 

 Rewind a couple of months to mid December. My friend and flatmate Renae has been travelling across Europe on and off for the past 11 years. She had visited every country in Europe, even the tiny ones like Kosovo and Liechtenstein and the ones that seem to exist solely for the purpose of tax evasion like Andorra or to keep the stamp collecting industry rolling, like San Marino. She'd been to each and every one of them. Except for Belarus. So one night somewhere in mid December, she asked if I wanted to come along with her to Belarus. When I initially balked  at the idea, she threw a couple of days in Lithuania in the mix to make it more interesting for me. We settled on a week around the Easter weekend. It had all seemed like an excellent plan,  sitting at home by the fire, working out an itinerary on a map, with a glass of bourbon in my hand, but now, standing in a foot of snow with an angry Soviet border guard staring down at me, I was having second thoughts about the brilliance of the idea. 

We had set off from Dublin on Thursday afternoon, after a couple of days of snow scares. Just days before, I had been talking to a friend about our trip. I had told him that, even though I have a number of friends working for Ryanair, and I have been on well over 100 flights with the airline, I had never seen any of them on one of my flights. Sure enough, when I walked onto the plane, one of my friends was there checking boarding passes. We exchanged a quick greeting but as she was working and I was holding up the line, we didn't really have time to talk. We had a quick chat later on in the flight though, which got me appreciative nods from my 2 Lithuanian plane neighbours who were clearly impressed by the fact that I was on a first name basis with the crew. The flight continued without any real excitement so at around 8PM local time, we walked across the Tarmac at Vilnius international airport. Vilnius is roughly the size of Edinburgh so I expected a similar sized airport. To my surprise, it was much biggerthan that. I soon found out what accounted for the difference in size though: Vilnius airport mainly consisted of long, empty corridors whose only function it was to take travellers on a long walk around the terminal to the arrivals hall. 10 minutes later we stepped into the arrivals hall, got a map from the tourist office and took a bus into town.  Lithuania  is generally regarded as the least western of the Baltic states and this showed in our hostel. Where in Tallinn or Riga all hostels are run in typical western style, normally managed by Australians, Kiwis or Canadians, with a cheap bar, exciting excursions on offer and a lounge area full of backpackers enjoying a beer and playing with laptops and iPhones, this place was supervised over by a grumpy old lady, who didn't speak two words of English and was constantly interrupted by the gruff looking locals who were hanging around the hallways and kitchen, seemingly without purpose.
We were first shown to a double room near the entrance but when we explained that we had ordered a twin room, we were sent down a rabbit warren, up and down steps and through narrow hallways to our room. It was basic, but clean and warm so that was good enough.
We set out for something to eat and after wandering around for a while settled on a lively place call Cili Kaimas. It was laid out so as to resemble an old farm. It looked really cool and it even had a fish pond and a glass enclosure with some real life chickens in it.
Just for the sake of novelty, we ordered a plate of pigs ears and chicken gizzards for a starter. I have no idea what a gizzard is, but after trying two I can confidently inform you that they are not suitable for human consumption. Neither are pig's  ears, for that matter. We chewed through about a quarter of the plate and then swept the rest aside. Our mains, however, were excellent, a nice concoction of potatoe dumplings filled with pork, served au gratin and with a salad. It was lovely. We washed all this down with a beer tower, a 3 litre vat of lager from which you could poor your own pint. It was all much fun. We played with the beer tower until it was empty and that was when we noticed that 5 waitresses were staring at us and it became clear to us that it was way past closing time and we were the only obstruction standing between them working and them going to the pub. 

We retreated to the bar in the basement and had a couple of drinks until, again, we noticed 4 sets of eyes staring at us and we understood that we had passed closing time again. We walked out into the street and decided to have one for the road if we could find a suitable establishment. As luck would have it, next door to the restaurant was a place that, with a bit of imagination, could pass for an Irish pub. It was quite busy when we got in but the crowd gradually thinned out as the night wore on. We were the last but 3 of the customers when we stumbled into the cold Vilnius morning at 4.30.  What a great start to the trip! 

I woke early the next morning and had a shower, eager to explore the city. My friend, however, told me to go ahead on my own while she caught up on lost sleep. Like their Baltic counterparts Tallinn and Riga, the old town of Vilnius consists mainly of winding streets and cobblestone alleyways, interrupted every now and then by a small square with a picturesque church or a statue of some national hero, which has nearly always been involved in orchestrating the downfall of communism and the Soviet Union.  I wandered  around for a bit and had a look at the statues. At one point, I encountered a statue of what looked like an old man reaching out one of his hands to a little girl. Curious as to what this might be, I walked over and found that it was standing next to a tourism information centre. I thought it was odd that they put the information centre in a back street, whereas it would normally be in the central square, or at least close to it. Upon further investigation, I found that it was the information centre for the former Jewish ghetto, which had been situated in this area before the second World War. It had not occurred to me before, but Vilnius was one of the main centres for Jewish people and culture in the world. Up to the second World War, YIVO, the central research institute for Jewish culture and language was situated here in Vilnius, rather than in more obvious centres of Jewish culture, like Warsaw or New York.  Sadly, aggression from first the nazis and then the Soviets, resulted in a diminished presence of Jewish culture in Vilnius as most Jews that weren’t killed or deported left for Israel, Poland or the USA. The statue of the man reaching out to the girl is there to symbolise bridging gaps between the generations and people of different faiths. It was quite touching.   

We walked around for a bit, had a drink at a pub with an unpronouncable name, which had a statue above the door of a man clutching a beer mug while sitting on a keg. It was pretty cool. The drinks were quite expensive for Baltic standards though. A Red Bull and a pint of Grimbergen set me back 18.50 Litus. While we’re on the subject, Grimbergen beer is somehow immensely popular in Lithuania. Every bar I went in had at least one type on draft, and most had 2 or 3. I’d say it is easier to acquire a pint of Grimbergen in Lithuania than in its native Belgium. It was rather strange.  

 Having done our admin work for the day, buying bus tickets to Minsk for the next morning, we set out for the district of Uzipis.  Uzipis is an area on the river Vilnelne, just east of the centre of Vilnius. Like a lot of these micro breakaway states, the inhabitants are mainly artists, squatters and drunks. It reminded me immediately of Frestonia, an area in West London that declared independence from the UK in the late 70s. The story is quite interesting, if you want to know more about Frestonia, check this link: Frestonia

In any case, in 1998, the inhabitants declared a breakaway state and set their independence day to April Fool’s Day. On this day, they position ‘border guards’ on the bridge in fake uniforms that will check your passport and stamp it. As we approached the area, I noted that they have an official sign informing you that you are about to enter the Uzipis Republic. The district mainly consists of art galleries, artist’s studios and other low-strain enterprises. Along the main street, there is a wall with the republic’s logo, a big iron hand with  an eye in it, and 3 big silver plaques on which the Uzipis constitution has been engraved. Among much other things, the good people of Uzipis are entitled to living along the Vilnelne river, the right to heating and a roof over their head and the right to die, although this is not mandatory. It was all quite charming. 

We walked around for a while, and passed the symbol of the ‘nation’: the Angel of Uzupis.  We enquired at a couple of places if we could have our passports stamped, but unfortunately nobody seemed to know. Just when we were about to go back to Lithuania, we decided to ask one more local and, as luck would have it, he directed us towards the local office of the Free Tibet movement, whose souvenir shop doubles as the Uzipis Department of Foreign Relations. I am not making this up. The girl behind the counter was a textbook hippie, wearing a tie-dyed shirt and long unkept hair. The whole shop was full of beaded armbands, keychains, buddha statues and other Tibetan trinkets. The girl was happy to stamp our passport and as a token of appreciation I bought a Free Tibet keychain. It was all very refreshing to see.   

We had dinner at a pizza place called Cili Pica, obviously a sister establishment  to Cili Kaimas where we had had dinner the night before. I ordered a pizza that looked as if they simply tipped everything that was left in the fridge on it, and it tasted great. I had a large beer with it, and it went down a treat. Isn’t that the great thing about pizza? If you have a good pizza, it’s absolutely great, but even if you have a pizza that isn’t that great, it’s still pretty good. Some research I did when I got home revealed that the ‘Cili’ brand comprises 5 or 6 different chains, and apart from the pizza places and the traditional restaurants, they also operate a chain of sushi restaurants (Cili Kanija) and some other assorted food barns. It was cheap, good and the beer was cold, so I was happy. We picked up some cans on the way back to the hostel. I toyed with the idea of going out for a beer after we took a rest at the hostel, but it was cold outside and warm inside and in any case we had to get up at 5.30 the next morning to go to Minsk, so I had 3 cans of Utenos beer, watched some videos on Youtube and went to bed early. 

Minsk was waiting.