Blue jeans

When in December I packed for my return to Belarus, I tried to remember what pants I wore home because whatever they were, I knew I’d want them back. Somehow I decided that the pants in question were some high-tech travel pants which virtually scream, “The person wearing these pants is an American tourist.” In point of fact, I do not like to identify myself that way here, and I have not once put on those pants. The pants I should have brought were an ordinary pair of Levi’s 501 blue jeans.

I did manage to bring myself a second pair of 501 jeans, but both pairs I have here are black. This certainly makes it easy for me to have a pair of clean black jeans at the ready, but I’m getting really tired of them and almost desperate to wear something else. So I went out a couple of weeks ago to do something about it. We have a Levi’s store not far from our apartment, and I walked in there to see if I might be lucky enough to find my size in stock.

Buying jeans in the USA is difficult for me because I am unusually tall for my waist size. Or perhaps I am skinny for my height. Whatever the problem, this means I usually have to look at more than one store to find somebody who has my size in stock. Here in Belarus, where my height is even more unusual than in the USA, I found a choice of about eight pairs in my size, in various color gradations. “Wow!,” I thought, “I’m in luck.” I chose the shade of blue I wanted and asked how much these jeans would cost. The price worked out to about $120.

A hundred twenty bucks? Don’t I usually pay somewhere around forty or fifty bucks for these things back in the USA? I couldn’t do it. Instead, I went home and logged onto Amazon.com and found the same jeans for $40. I figured there was no way that shipping could be anywhere close to the remaining $80 and I set out to order a pair for myself. I was delighted to find Belarus in the drop-down list of countries on Amazon’s shipping-info page, and figured I was home free.

Nope. After I filled in the page, Amazon’s server came back with an error message saying that they couldn’t ship this particular order to my address. I clicked through for more details and learned that manufacturers won’t allow certain items to be shipped to certain countries, and that if I reduced the contents of my shopping cart I might be able to get the order to work. Unfortunately, those jeans were the only contents of my shopping cart and the Levi’s company had obviously felt that Amazon was inappropriate competition for their store in Minsk.

I may have to buy a pair of Belarusian-style jeans. They will probably be highly decorated, and I’ll probably have to spend a day visiting numerous small stores until I find something that fits well and looks the way I’d like to look. Then again, it’ll soon be warm enough to wear linen pants and I can put my jeans aside altogether. Then next time I should make a better packing list.