Goodbye Snow

On the bus from Minsk to Grodna, we drove out of town past most of the buildings and sites we had visited during our stay. It was a weird experience to drive by these majestic buildings and statues knowing that this would most likely be the last time in my life that I saw them. It's not because I didn't like Minsk or didn't find it interesting, but I can't see myself running back to Belarus in a hurry. First of all there is all the hassle of getting INTO  the country, both in preparation (visas were expensive and difficult to get) and when you get there (remember the border control back at the start of the story?). Then there is the fact that we'd easily exhausted the entertainment options in the space of 3 days and the absence of a meaningful party scene that can normally keep you busy even in places that completely lack cultural or architectural diversions. The first time I got off the subway in New York, I knew I would make many visits to the city. I will very likely make return visits to places like Bratislava and Sarajevo because I really enjoyed myself there. I know I'll be back in Sydney. Minsk, however, was a once in a lifetime experience, unless I win an all-expenses-paid trip there.

                                           Goodbye, Huge square

I won't bore you with the details of the trip to Grodna because there were no details. As soon as we left Minsk, there it was again: the never ending mountains of snow as far as the eye could see. I lost myself in my book immediately. I woke from my reading when Renae pointed out that we were approaching a city. I startled from my book in that vague state of limbo that you enter when you fall asleep in daytime and wake up to daylight and realise that you have no idea what time of day it is. Did you doze off for a couple of minutes? A couple of hours maybe? Or was it the next morning? Looking up from my book, I just couldn't tell if I had been reading for 10 minutes or 4 hours. It turned that it had been close to 4 hours as we were nearing Grodna. We got off the bus and directly went about our task of getting bus tickets back to Lithuania for the next day. There was only one bus a day so we absolutely HAD to be on that  because our visas would expire the next day and I really, seriously, didn't want to contemplate the amount of shit we would be in if we were stopped at the border with expired visa papers. A friend of a friend had once shown up at the border between Belarus and Poland with a visa that was 1(one) day overdue, demanding to exit the country and was promptly sent back on a 6 hour bus trip to Minsk and ordered to contact her national embassy and a host of local burocrats to obtain clearance and a flutter of forms in order to be allowed to leave. This thought alone made sweat well up on my neck and I was glad when we got our bus tickets. Where in Minsk we had had a more or less comprehensible map of the city, in Grodna we had to go by a print out of Google Maps. Maps of Grodna exist only in Grodna.

                                    A Map of Grodna, as available in the West

After half an hour of walking around in circles we finally managed to locate our hotel. After checking in and doing all the normal stuff you do in a hotel (jumping up and down on the bed, switching on all the lights, stealing all the small shampoo bottles, you know the drill)  we set out to explore the town. The main attraction, it would appear, was the abundance of fairy tale churches. They were everywhere. We walked around, admiring the churches and then, inevitably, stumbled upon a square with a large, stately building and a massive statue of our old friend Lenin.   

The Great Leader of the People was wearing a fishermen’s cap for the occasion and looked out sternly over the town. Grodna was a nice little city, but there is one thing I did not understand. The reason that we had put it on the itinerary, was because it was listed in one of those books of “501 locations you must visit before you die”.  As I said about 2 lines ago, it was a nice little city but I could not see why it would have been listed in that book, while places like, say, Stirling or Oakland or Malaga were not.  The main attraction of the town are those Disney-castle churches and to be honest, I had pretty much seen enough churches by now. 

           This one was pretty cool though


We had dinner at a really cool traditional restaurant. We were first asked to put our coats in the coatroom and then sat down at the table. While waiting for our food, and looking at the lay out of the place, at the exact same moment we both said “This would be a great place for weddings!”.  Strange how you sometimes have those moments. The food, again, was really nice and both the food and the beer were considerably cheaper than in Minsk.  As we were approaching the end of our time in Belarus and didn’t want to be stuck with any worthless money, we sort of had to budget around our last money without having to go to an ATM again. We had an extra beer after dinner and decided to spend the rest of the money on food for the trip back to Lithuania. 

The next morning, we had a final walk around the town, bought a bag full of candy and cookies to keep us occupied on the bus to Kaunas. In the supermarket we were approached by what I would guess was the store manager. I was taking a picture of the beer aisle (something I always do) and apparently this was not to his liking and he urged us to put away our cameras at once and depart.

We had already kept aside some of the currency as souvenirs (and to have an interesting story for in the pub) so Renae decided to give our final 20.000 or so roubles to local beggars. We walked by another church, and I had noticed that a rather battered looking homeless guy was always standing near the entrance. On each of the 3 occasions we had walked by, he was there, holding a dirty beanie and asking for money. We decided to have a look inside the church. When we approached the entrance, I noticed that the beggar smelled like shit. And I don’t mean that he had that token homeless people smell, that comes with irregular showers and sleeping under bridges. No, he literally smelled of human excrement. It was appalling. Renae threw a pack of currency in his hat and we went inside. In my mind’s eye, I had a cartoonesque view of the beggar, upon receiving such a generous donation,  taking a good look at his new found fortune and running off to a liquor store or the race track. When we came out of the church about 3 minutes later, sure enough, he was gone.

I donated the other 10.000 roubles to a young girl in a wheel chair outside a supermarkt and we got on the bus back to the free world.  It turned out we could easily have gotten tickets on the day itself because the 50 seater bus had a grand total of 4 passengers. Better safe than sorry though.  When we got to the border, I wanted to make sure we were first in line, even though there were only 4 people on the bus, but before we could get off, a serious looking border guard came in and collected all our passports and then checked the toilet to see if anyone was hiding in there. He walked to a cabin beside the road, where some 20 people were shuffling in the cold, waiting to be waved through. Due to our exalted status of bus passengers,  the border guard saved us quite a lot of time by jumping the queue for us. While he was doing some important stamping and visa checking, another guard came onto the bus, and checked the toilet again. Do people really still hide in bus toilets when trying to illegally cross a border?  Within 10 minutes we were across the border and back in the European Union. It might sound a bit overly dramatic, but I was glad to drive past the European Union sign and back into Lithuania. 

We arrived in Kaunas as daylight started to fade. A 10 minute walk took us to our hostel where we checked in and had a chat with  the manager. As a big fan of staying in hostels, I was glad to be staying in one again. I have nothing against hotels, but when given the choice I prefer to stay in hostels. The atmosphere is generally better, it’s easy to meet other people and you can always have a party with the other people staying there. Hotels are generally more business like and people do not stay there to meet others. I took an instant liking to Kaunas. I don’t know why, but I just liked the way it looked, the way it was laid out and the way the people went about their business.  We had a meal at a traditional Lithuanian restaurant, which was really nice, apart from the pig’s foot that came with the main course we shared. I’m not going to go into details (you, my dear reader, may be eating) but pig’s feet go in the same bucket as pig’s ears and chicken gizzards.  After dinner, Renae decided to have an early night, and I decided to go into town and check out some bars. The hostel guy had shown me where to find a heavy metal bar, a basement location that could only be reached by crossing a darkened parking lot and going down a stair case. When I found it, it turned out to be closed. I went to a different bar and despite it being nearly 11PM, there was still live Champions League football on tv because of the 2 hour time difference with Ireland. I appreciated this very much and watched the rest of the match and stayed until nearly closing time, enjoying many pints. 

We had to get back to Vilnius that afternoon to catch our flight back to Dublin, so our sight seeing time was rather limited. Fortunately,  we had only 2 things on our to-do list, the Old Town and Kaunas Castle. We started out at the castle, which was nothing like I expected. Castle tours normally bang on about the history of the castle and when it was built and what role it played in important battles and so on. This was included in the castle experience, but only in the basement, where a couple of plaques commemorated historical stuff and a model showed how it had been rebuilt throughout the years. The rest of the castle was mostly filled with art exhibitions, which was a nice change from your regular castle visit. I especially liked the work of a Lithuanian painter called Kloshar, whose works mostly consisted of brightly colored city scapes and other urban scenes that really appealled to me. 

The Old Town was basically like any other old town in Eastern Europe, so you can paint your own picture of that. What did stand out in the old town, was a bizarre bar/restaurant called the Crazy House. It was, in fact, really weird.It had a number of seats that were actually toilets, chains hanging from the wall and, well, the whole place had the look of an asylum for the insane, which was probably the idea given the name. The food was nice though and the beer cold, so it all made for a nice lunch.  Having ticked Minsk, Grodna and Kaunas off the list, it was time to head back to Vilnius for our flight back to Dublin. We got to Vilnius with a couple of hours to spare, so we walked around for a bit, had a couple of drinks and went back to Cili Kaimas for dinner where we had another fine meal. 

And so ended our trip to the barren, snowfilled lands of the East. Back at the airport, I spent some time trying to drink all my remaining Lithuanian money, but I didn’t quite manage it. As the airline also wouldn’t take Lithuanian money, I still have some 30 Litus left, enough for about 5 pints.  The money now sits in my foreign currency pint glass, and is in the good company of about a dozen other currencies.

It was an interesting trip, though it confirmed my hatred for snow and sub-zero temperatures. Vilnius was a nice city, and I will go back there sometime in the near future to have another look around, and spend my left over beer money. Kaunas looked promising too, but I only got to scratch the surface due to the limited time spent there.  As I said earlier, Minsk was a big surprise. It was big, clean and very well organised. It was a very interesting city but it appears to be somewhat limited when it comes to entertainment options.  All in all, it was a week well spent and visiting a paranoid dictatorship was certainly a different experience.  Next up.. Spain.

Goodbye Minsk

Another thing that illustrates how isolated Belarus is, is the fact that hardly anyone speaks English. Now I don't want to state that the ability to speak English is the sole indicator of sophistication around the world but it goes a long way to see how connected a place is to the rest of the world. In Bratislava, for example, pretty much everyone spoke English when I got there. In Slovenia, most billboards were in English. Hell, even in Bosnia I was able to get around speaking English, and that was in Sarajevo, a mainly Muslim city and about as far removed from English culture as you can get in Europe. In Belarus, however, English will get you pretty much nowhere. 

                                          Any guesses?

This was brought home to me when we were looking for a museum about the history of Minsk and we couldn't quite find it. It wasn't until we showed someone a flyer of the museum that we got a vague wave of the hand directing us in the general direction. In the end, we didn't find the museum we were looking for but we did walk into an exposition which, I think, was about the history of cameras. In any case, the lady at the entrance booth didn't speak English either so we were none the wiser. Looking back on it now, she may have been asking for the entry fee or something like that. With our search for history and culture rapidly ended, we decided to go for the other global culture: the one of drinking. On our way to the elusive museum, we had spotted a bar that looked like a rock pub, so we went in it now. We were, in fact, correct in our assumption as the place was decorated with guitars, cymbals and old concert posters. Even the floor was done up with lots of band logos, which  looked pretty fukcing cool. As I had a look around, I did actually find it a bit too nice. 

                          TNT Bar, about as busy as when we were there.

Heavy metal bars the world over nearly always have a certain air about them, divey without being too threatening, rough without being dangerous and there's always a bit of a "you only live once so you might as well enjoy it" vibe. Not here though. Even though it was Sunday mid-afternoon, there was hardly anybody there. I worked in a heavy metal/punk bar in Holland for years and the Sunday afternoon sessions were always legendary, surpassed in madness and drinking only by the Friday night. 

                              Heavy Metal Bars: how it should be done.

Here, however, there was hardly a soul about, the music was in the background more than in your face and the barman spent more time playing with his espresso machine than pouring pints which I have never ever seen before in a rock bar. It was all really strange. That's not to say that it wasn't a nice place, it was just that it was so categorically different from any other rock pub I've ever been in.  What was also different from the usual standard, was the realisation that the place only had one male and one female toilet. Again, I'm not sure how busy it gets here on, say, Saturday nights but in pretty much every heavy metal bar I can think of right now, you can be 100% sure that a 2 toilet policy will result in major logistical problems before midnight.  

In any case, it was a nice, if somewhat strange place, and we had some other things to do, so we set off after we finished our beers. 

 

The next place we went to see was the aforementioned State Department of Important Decisions or whatever it was called, and the place was absolutely huge.  It was so big I couldn’t even get the whole thing in a picture, even from a 100 yards away. There also happened to be another interesting bar in the area, called T34. Those of you with a fascination for Soviet millitary memorabilia, will recognize the T34 as the standard combat tank of the Soviet Union in the middle of the 20^th century. 

Even the nazis were afraid of them because they were nearly indestructible. The T34 was produced, roughly, from the early  40s to the late 50s and was the second most built tank in history, after the T54, the model that was developed after it. To give you an idea of how hardcore these tanks were, T34s were still being actively used by armies in 27 countries as late as 1996, nearly 4 decades after they stopped making them. The T54 is still in active use all over the world today.  The reason I bring this up is because there was one standing on a plint on the square where we were now, as a tribute to all the great battles it stood in during the days of the Soviet Union. And an enterprising soul had named a bar after it in the basement of an old KGB building and decorated it with millitary memorabilia. It being situated in a KGB basement, it was sort of hard to find but we got there in the end. It was quite a cool place, most of it in dark colors and with the fading light coming in from the windows near the ceiling it certainly had some atmosphere. But again, there was hardly a soul about. When we were about to leave, a group of about half a dozen people came in and sat at a table in the corner but apart from that it was just the two of us and a guy typing away on an iPad making up the clientele. What do people in Minsk do on Sunday? They certainly aren’t out drinking.

                                   Typical bar in Minsk

With another long day of trudging through the snow behind us, we were looking forward to dinner and a drink. We decided to trace down the local Irish pub which was situated conveniently near our bus stop so we set off for it. We couldn’t find it. We were certainly on the right square but couldn’t for the life of us find it. The pub was supposed to be on number 4 and we had found number 2,3, 5 and 6 but did not see an Irish pub. Until someone walked out of it and we found that we had been standing in front of it for the last 5 minutes. 

 In any other city, whether it is New York, Johannesburg or Belgrade, Irish pubs are always very obviously there. They’re always decked out with Irish flags, Guinness signs and neon signs of shamrocks and leprechauns. More often than not, there’s a tv in the window or a sign outside advertising what games are on tv that day and there are nearly always some people standing outside. In Minsk, however, we could have stood there for another 20 minutes and if no one had come out, we would have been none the wiser. 

                                                                  Normal Irish Pub

Strange place. The pub itself, however was nice and the food we had (smoked salmon and, yes, potatoe pancakes) was excellent.  Tired of another day of snow ploughing, we decided to go back to the hotel.



On our way to the bus stop, one of the local winos walked up to me with an outstretched hand, the wino sign the world over for ‘I’m out of vodka, please give me some change’. I told him that I had no change, which got me a comically grumpy “grmnst, chrttssv Amerikanski hgrghd!” or words to that effect. It was funny to see that I was immediately dubbed an American after refusing to hand him some of his country’s worthless money. 

The next day, we found that we had more or less exhausted our entertainment options in Minsk. Interesting as the city may be, after 2 days you have pretty much seen all the interesting buildings, the stadium and sites and if, like us, you can’t find the museums, that’s pretty much it. We took the subway to a residential area in the North East of Minsk to see what that was like. That, again, was quite interesting. The apartment buildings were huge,like everything else. What made it interesting, was that all the buildings had huge Soviet murals painted on the sides. There were 12 story paintings of Soviet astronauts and memorials to the time when the Olympics were in Minsk. 

Minsk never organised the Olympics, but when they were last in Moskou, in 1980, the organisers decided to spread the joy of the Olympics across the Soviet Union and the football stadium in Minsk was one of the main venues for the Olympic football tournament.  To give you an idea of how far spread out these Olympics were, events were staged, among others, in Leningrad (630 km to the North) and, stunningly, in Tallinn, which is nearly 900km from Moscow. Again, the Soviet Union was a ridiculously vast country, about the size of Canada and the USA combined. 



We had lunch at a football-themed pizza place, that had crests of Premier League teams engraved in the windows that separated the booths and jerseys and scarves on the wall.  After lunch we took the subway back to the city centre. The subway operates on a system that is somewhat similar to the one in Philadelphia. You buy little coins that you can use to operate the turnstiles in the stations. In Philadelphia the coins are made of silvery metal and look sort of professional. The ones in Minsk are made of purple plastic which gives it a bit of  a cheap look. The stations are pretty cool though. Like a lot of other things in Minsk, they still look like the Soviet Union was never dissolved. Impressive busts of Lenin stare at you in every station. Big Hammer and Sickles are above every exit. This, combined with the fact that there isn’t a single piece or garbage in the entire city, make that it looks pretty cool. 

Back in the city centre, we spent another half hour trying to buy bus tickets to Grodna, in Western Belarus, where we were going the next day. Buying a ticket in Eastern Europe can be a bit of a task at any time, but if you can’t even begin to imagine which window you have to go to, it takes just that little bit longer.  We spent the rest of the day in the manner that you do when you’re in a foreign city and have done everything you wanted to do and don’t really know what to do until it’s time to go to the next city. We walked around a bit, had a drink in a bar with a middle ages theme (again, it was practically empty) and had a look at Lee Harvey Oswald’s old apartment.  Most people don’t know this, but Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who clearly did not kill JFK, lived in Minsk for 2 years from 1959 until 1961. While there, he planned to attend university, but he was sent to work in an electronics factory where he was assigned a co-worker who had to teach him Russian. This guy, believe it or not, would (much) later become the first prime minister of independent Belarus.

Oswald lived in an imposing yellow apartment building not too far from the cenotaph we had visited earlier. The building consisted of 3 parts but it was unknown in which one exactly he had lived so I took pictures of all 3 of them. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around and ended the day with dinner at a traditional Belarusian restaurant with a complex Cyrillic name above the door. It was next to the TGI Friday's were we had had our first lunch on Saturday so in a really lame way we had come full circle in Minsk. The food was great, I must say. We both had a sort of stew consisting of mushrooms, meats and, ofcourse, potatoes, and it was served in a breadbowl. While serving food in a bread bowl is nothing particularly exciting (anybody who's ever been to San Francisco will tell you that after 3 days there you get the urge to dropkick the next breadbowl you encounter into the Pacific Ocean) but this one was exceptionally good. It was made of dark bread and had a taste somewhere halfway between sweet and savoury. It was amazing.

It was also time to go to Grodna.