Pinsk (and tour guides)

From 2010-04 Pinsk

Yesterday we had an excursion to Pinsk. The university offered us a chance to gang up and buy a one-day trip, and I scurried around and enrolled a bunch of people I knew to be good companions. Amazingly, everybody but one succeeded in reaching the starting point at 6:45 a.m. as planned. (Unfortunately, Miriam awoke feeling ill. But she really did wake up in time.)

On the way to Pinsk, we had a professional guide who told us about everything we passed along the way. At first it was interesting, but since most of the students couldn’t follow her they started conversing. I actually followed her pretty easily, but finally reached information overload and joined in quiet conversations. It turns out, however, that she was a relatively good guide. We got a whole lot more detail from a local expert who joined us at the city limits.

Our local guide knew absolutely everything about Pinsk, each building in Pinsk, and what happens or ever happened inside of each building in Pinsk. My friend Alex observed that old stuff is probably a really big deal in Belarus, where pretty much everything got destroyed in World War II. (And what the war didn’t destroy, perhaps Stalin did.) For us, to be truthful, it wasn’t really important to know that this hotel was one of twenty-seven (or was it twenty-eight?) hotels in the city and that it had direct-dial telephone service from the rooms. OK, it’s interesting all by itself. But following a torrent of such excruciating detail about every building in the city, I was approaching my wits’ end.

We could have used a little more consultation about the nature of our tour. We saw a children’s park, for example, with little brick castles. Most of us wanted to get out of the bus for a few minutes while we were there and play in the castles. We begged, but were refused. They promised us that we would have time to go back later. Instead, they looped back past stuff we’d already seen and took us out of town to see the swamps. By “out of town,” I don’t just mean that we popped across some borderline. We crept down a bouncy dirt road for uncounted kilometers watching endlessly-similar scenes unroll out the windows. The windows got dirtier. Finally we stopped at a low spot that was under water as a result of the spring thaw, and they let us out.

The guide told us that we couldn’t get to the house that we saw over there because of the water, so we walked around a bit and took pictures of ourselves.

I began planning my revolt during the outbound portion of the swamp trip. The story gets too long if I tell you about all that, but let’s just say it provided me a good opportunity to think about how I would run things if I were a tour guide.

We did have some free time later on, but really the best part of the trip for me was the ride home. The guide was finally silent, so we took the microphone and entertained ourselves with song and dance. Did you know that Arabic men sometimes belly-dance for the women? Pascal was really good at it. Enough people had diverse and interesting music on their phones that we were able to enjoy a great program. Thank God for good companionship!