Belarus comes to us

Our friend Antonina came to visit, bringing with her three loaves of delicious Belarusian bread. Excited to have her around, we became tourists once again in our own town. Mostly we walked around a lot, though I started her out with a ride on the back of our tandem bike. I think the best way to see a place is slowly, in such a way that one can interact by chance with the locals. That’s what got me, one evening, onto a cement pedestal with Antonina and a Mexican guy neither of us knew. The Mexican guy was out with friends from Colombia and Argentina, posing for pictures, and he wanted to draw us into his photo. We jumped onto the pedestal and I gave my phone to the Argentinian guy so I could get a version of our group picture too.

Antonina drew me out of my usual framework. For example, people in Minsk tend to walk a lot more than people in Boston. We visited a church together in Porter Square, and started home on foot so I could show her Harvard University. I figured we’d get onto the subway at Harvard and ride home, since it would take another hour to walk and we’d already been on our feet for a while. Antonina felt differently, so we walked all the way back. I’m pretty familiar with that route because I do it often on my bike, but still it felt different on foot and I’m glad we did it. I saw stuff I’d failed before then to notice, and the walk didn’t seem all that long anyway.

We also spent a couple of days in Maine. Alla and I went to Camden about a year ago and had a nice weekend, so we took Antonina with us to go see Cundy’s Harbor in the same general area. At this point on the Maine coast, the shoreline runs roughly east-to-west with lots of fingerlets of land projecting southward into the Atlantic. We came nowhere close to exploring this long stretch of coastline, having spent lots of time in Portland on our way up and not having any easy way to get from one fingerlet of land to the next. Still, we thought it was pretty cool to see the sun set over the water and then rise over the water from the same vantage point. Then on our way home we stopped at Bowdoin College because a friend of mine had gone there and Alla wanted to see their art gallery. The school has a beautiful campus, and we spent a lot of time simply gawking.

There’s nothing like having an out-of-town guest to spur discovery of one’s environs. And you know what? We live in a pretty nice place.