Out on the town

Yesterday morning Alla and I walked to the train station to buy tickets for next weekend. We took the long way in order to enjoy pleasant weather and parts of town we hadn’t visited recently. We wandered past the main football (soccer) stadium and gawked at the reconstruction project underway, making friends with a security guard in the process. We meet the nicest people here!

After buying our tickets, we wandered toward the marketplace by a route that kept us off of the streets we know best. In the process, we walked past an exhibit I’d been meaning to visit, “Back in the BSSR.” (The BSSR is a lot like the USSR, only more local.) It looked like it would be interesting enough that we decided to go out for lunch before beginning, so we wouldn’t rush through the exhibit. I’m glad we did it that way, because I did enjoy lingering. The exhibit presented lots of Belarusian Soviet art and a wide-ranging collection of household artifacts and details from everyday life in Soviet times. I spent the most time puzzling over a Lucite fighter-plane desk ornament, inscribed to a lieutenant-general Kravtsov from the Top Gun pilots below him, apparently at his retirement in 1976. I studied the ornament at length because I’d never seen a five-engine aircraft or lifting body resembling the model. After an intensive web search, I still haven’t. I think the desk ornament represented the future, but that future has not yet arrived.

Alla went home from the museum, and I continued on to the market. I’d walked pretty far by then, and felt like a chocolate truffle might serve me well so I went back to visit the “Old-school Masters of Chocolate.”* On the way in I noticed a mom with a couple of kids in a stroller waiting at the foot of the stairs. I asked her if she knew Alexei, which confused her greatly because I was talking about one of the partners in the business, whom she did not know, but one of the kids in the stroller was called Alexei. We sorted this out as I returned eating my chocolate truffle. She had been eager to visit this store for a couple of months but could not get inside because she couldn’t get her twin stroller up the stairs.

I told her I could help her get inside but allowed as how she’d still have a problem because she wouldn’t be able to get back out. Then I offered to babysit while she went in, and she took me up on it. Her boys don’t talk yet, but they know their names and they behaved admirably while I waited. Mom (now known as Alyona) brought me a truffle on a stick when she came back to collect her sons.

It all made for a very pleasant day.

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*Not the proper translation, but if you read my previous post you know that.

For more pictures, see this album.