Adventure in Brest

We went to Brest on Saturday with our friend Elena Razgulina. We took a slow overnight train down by a circuitous route overnight on Friday night and arrived at a civilized hour on Saturday morning. Elena's friend Misha came to meet us at the train station. Misha is a really nice guy. He's actually a friend of a friend, and he volunteered to spend most of the day introducing us to his city. I keep thinking I've seen the best of Belarusian hospitality, and then somebody goes and does something like this. There's just no way to describe how nice people generally are here, and they set a very high standard for paying social debts forward.

We spent most of our day at the fortress, which is a moving tribute to the bravery and patriotism of its defenders on the first days of World War II. Poorly armed and expecting reinforcements that never came, the defenders held off the German invaders for a long time, retreating deeper and deeper into the fort and firing on their attackers with weapons they recovered from the dead. After this, Hitler decided it may be more efficient to leave forts as isolated autonomous zones as he pushed eastward into Russia.

We spent the whole morning at the fort, and then Misha took us to his favorite Italian restaurant for lunch. Having eaten well, we toured the city together before Misha finally took his leave and dropped us back at the fort so we could visit the museum.

Finishing our day, we walked back to the Italian restaurant and ordered dinner. Over salads, Alla asked me to show her our train tickets. She had an uneasy feeling, which a quick look at the tickets confirmed. I had misread them, and our train was about to leave. Alla gulped, "We missed our train!" Nobody understood, so she said "Our train leaves in ten minutes." This time I understood, and Alla got up and ran to the front desk. Elena still hadn't absorbed this information, and looked a little puzzled. I reviewed for her what I had finally come to understand, and she realized that we were not joking.

We gathered our stuff and went to the front desk, where Alla was paying, the head waiter was calling a taxi, and the waitress was loading our main dishes into take-out containers. Reassembled, we rushed out to the street. Not knowing how long it would take for our taxi, Alla flagged down the first car to come our way. I'm not talking about a friendly little wave: She got into the street and wouldn't let the guy drive by without talking to her.

The driver immediately understood the gravity of our situation and snapped his cell phone shut, telling his friend simply, "I'm busy." We piled into our car and shot out of the parking lot as the taxi arrived. Our man violated several rules of the road in his dedication to his mission. Cleverly, he asked us which direction we were going and he navigated us to a hole in the fence right beside our train, still in the station. We handed him a fistful of rubles and ran onto the train, past a very bemused conductor.

Here we are, about to enjoy dinner on the train. For more pictures, click here.

From 2010-05 Brest