Deep snow

Last Friday a huge snowstorm blew into Minsk, bigger than most people could ever remember. The Belarus Digest has an interesting and complete story about the storm itself, so I won’t go into much detail here except to say that we got well buried.

Alla and I went out the next day on cross-country skis. The sun shined and we got plenty of exercise, but we didn’t go fast because our skinny skis sank too deeply into the fluffy snow. I don’t know where Belarus Digest got the impression that total snowfall amounted to 20 cm. I would have said more like 20 inches on average, and in places the wind piled it much deeper. For example, we didn’t see any park benches on our ski trek because they were all buried, and in some places the wind had piled the snow even above the accompanying trash cans, about waist high.

I walked across a field on Sunday afternoon, optimistically imagining that somehow somebody else’s ski tracks would support my weight. They did not. With each step, my foot plunged down to knee level. In a couple of areas, my steps plunged down to thigh level. My boots were pretty snowy by the time I got to the road and the moisture wicked all the way down to the toes of my socks.

My friend Yulia had a worse go of it. She got stuck at her grandmother’s place in a remote village and spent the storm shoveling out the chicken coop every two hours. It sounds like she got a lot more snow than we did. Then after the storm stopped she spent a couple of boring and lonely days remembering her warm room in the city. Finally her dad figured he could drive out in his Jeep and rescue her, but he ran out of drivable road too far from the village. Intent on getting her home, he called a friend in another village nearby. As I heard the story, the conversation went something like this:

Dad: Do you still have a horse?
Friend: Yes.
Dad: How about a sleigh?
Friend: Yeah, I’ve got a sleigh too.

Dad talked his friend into hitching up the sleigh and going to rescue his daughter in the other village. Apparently it wasn’t terribly far away, and the trip might have taken ten or fifteen minutes in the car. The horse and sleigh required more than a couple of hours, and the horse wasn’t too happy about it. In the end, the horse refused to go any farther and Yulia had to wade through the snow to meet them.

I think it’s a great story. Who else do you know who has access to a horse and sleigh? I wonder if she thought to get a picture.

Chocolate Room

I saw an article this morning in the Huffington Post, about a chocolate room in a new shopping center not far away from us. The chocolate room would be there until April 14. Noticing that today was the 14th, I freaked out and invited Alla to go there today. I was a month early, but that’s OK. The chocolate is still nice and fresh. In fact, it smells great. Even the art on the walls is painted in chocolate. The floor is chocolate. It’s all ever so appealing.

Clearly, the shopping center’s advertising campaign worked on us. To lure us further, they posted a girl next to the chocolate room inviting us to sign up for a raffle to win a trip to Switzerland. You can only enter the raffle after you’ve spent 150,000 rubles in the shopping center. (Remember, all you Americans, that’s not so hard. It’s well under $20.) We visited all the stores. Since the mall sells mostly imported stuff, the prices weren’t so great. I saw a Nexus 7 tablet, for example, at about twice the U.S. price.

The only way we could in good conscience spend our 150,000 rubles was in the grocery super-store. It had Italian pasta sauce, which we can’t buy anywhere near our apartment. I bought pretty nearly one of each kind, which probably pushed us over the threshold right there. I really wanted to eat their blini, but I’m not sure the ones on display were even real. It’s Maslenitsa this week, and they had a display table at the grocery store’s main entrance, set for two with a huge stack of blini and a bowl of obviously-fake salmon caviar. The fake caviar didn’t impress me, but I will confess that I felt a twinge of temptation as I approached the blini. I’m looking forward to Sunday, when I won’t have to resist temptation at all. Meanwhile, the display table got our digestive juices going and we bought plenty of real groceries.

The chocolate room did its job, and we did ours.

Women's Day

Yesterday we celebrated International Women’s Day. This is a really important holiday in this part of the world. Businesses close. Schools close. Florists extend their hours. Men cook burnt toast and other tragic dishes for their longsuffering wives. Americans: Think of Mother’s Day on a weekday and apply it to every woman or girl you ever kissed, smelled, looked at or talked to. Now you understand.

I started out by burning the pancakes. I’m really good at making buckwheat pancakes and Alla likes them a lot. Somehow under the pressure of the holiday, however, they weren’t 100% successful. Fortunately, my feeble breakfast didn’t set the tone for the day at all. We had lots of fun with some new friends.

A very sweet couple, Sergey and Snezhana, came from the town of Molodechno to a “Romantic Evening” couples’ program at church last month. They ended up at our table and captured our hearts immediately, though I never expected to see them again. They took initiative, however, and invited us to visit them on Women’s Day. We took the elektrichka commuter train right after breakfast, and they met us at the station.

Not only are our new friends as delightful on their home turf as they were at the Romantic Evening, they reminded us how much of Belarus we have not yet seen. Molodechno is a delightful, colorful and fresh town, big enough to have plenty to offer, but still small enough that I wasn’t surprised when Sergey and Snezhana appeared to know the people coming and going around us. Among other things, we went bowling. I forgot how much fun it can be to roll a heavy ball towards defenseless objects that clatter when they fall. We bowled about as quickly as the machinery could reset the pins, which is to say that we bowled a lot during our hour of reserved time. The men, forgetting all about the holiday, obliterated the women. The women smiled and treated us nicely anyway.

I’d like to go back and see Molodechno again when the gardens are in bloom and the snow is gone. The park looked pretty good even under the snow, but I hear it’s great when it’s green. I’ll be happy to investigate. Actually, we’re inspired to get back out of Minsk and start acting a little more like tourists. Before we decided to live here, we did better at exploring. Now we’ve been a little lazy, knowing that we can go look around tomorrow or next month if we don’t do it now. It’s nice to have some new friends to get us out of our chairs in a new direction.

From 2013-03 Minsk

Vilnius, Day 1

We came back to Vilnius for Kazukas Fair. It's only about three hours by train from Minsk and we really like to visit here.

Since we've already been to a Kazukas Fair, we didn't feel any need to see a high percentage of the vendors' booths. We just like being in town with lots of other people for a cheerful event. We focused today on the university, since our self-guided tour last year left us with more questions than answers. This year Alla signed us up for an English-speaking tour. Pleasantly, a group of seven friends signed up to join us. Six of the friends live in Vilnius, and they brought along an American guest. They were very sympathetic people, we had a great guide, and everything clicked. The guide appreciated everybody's interest and curiosity so she added spaces not normally included in the tour, and we spent two and a half hours together seeing beautiful rooms and hearing fascinating stories about them. Our guide is a librarian, and she knows a lot about many things. Her tour already made the weekend a success.

We did lots of other fun stuff too, but I have to mention dinner. TripAdvisor recommended a new restaurant called Druskos Namai, and we went to try it out. It's in a part of town (technically, not even in Lithuania, but there's no border control) we hadn't visited before. They're following the local-foods movement and reinterpreting Lithuanian cuisine using traditional ingredients in very non-traditional recipes. The pureed caramalized-onion soup started us out right and everything flowed from that. We can hardly believe how deliciously we ate for a lot less than we'd spend for less-interesting food in Minsk or in Boston. Needless to say, we're going back for lunch tomorrow.

Free electricity

Something was weird about our electricity when we returned to Minsk last month. We’d be sitting around minding our own business and suddenly the lights would get much brighter or much dimmer. It happened so frequently that we began joking that the lights would react if any neighbor plugged in an electric shaver. We also began to worry. Something must be heavily overloaded if our lights reacted to every action in other apartments.

Finally we called the building services department and a knowledgeable and experienced guy came over within a few hours. When Alla answered the door, he asked her if she were the landlady. Alla answered affirmatively, noticed the concern on the guy’s face, and added that we’re renting. The guy brightened up over her care with the facts and set about investigating our problem.

It turns out that some of our building’s circuits had gotten reconnected to the old wiring. The new wiring leads to individual electric meters, but I have my doubts about the old wiring. I’ll bet it was originally communal, since it was installed by genuine Communists. It might explain our mysteriously-low electric bill from the last few months. We thought our Belarusian refrigerator must be amazingly efficient, but maybe we are about to learn differently.

Before the repair guy disconnected the main building circuit, he had to call the Militsia (police) because otherwise they’d be freaking out about everybody’s burglar alarms. The Militsia sent over a couple of officers who guarded the front door very attentively during the outage. I know this because I came downstairs to wait for a guest whom I wouldn’t be able to buzz in and they watched me closely until they understood why I was standing there.

Soon after the power came back, our landlady’s mother-in-law called. She’d gotten a call from the service guy, telling her about his work in our apartment. What with the Militsia and the conscientious service guy, I’m feeling really safe here.

Bike race

Minsk is hosting the 2013 UCI Track Cycling World Championships this year, and I’d never seen a track cycling race anywhere. Naturally, I wanted to go. When I tried to figure out the schedule of events, however, I only managed to find very generalized advertising on the web. I knew the dates of the competition, but not the times of any events. Finally Alla plunged in yesterday and found a very nice page in both Russian and English explaining everything. I don’t know how I failed to find it two weeks ago.

Anyway, I went on down to the Velodrome after an early dinner and bought myself an excellent seat right over the finish line. That was the last time I actually needed to know any Russian. When I entered the building the guards had an interpreter to make sure I understood the procedure of metal detection and bag inspection. Once past the security force, I met another smiling (and very pretty) delegate who told me in English where I could hang my coat and how to find my seat. I laughed about how she immediately recognized me as a foreigner and she reminded me that it’s completely obvious.

Inside the spectator area I saw lots of promotional tables operated by hosts and sponsors. Most of them wanted to speak English with me, though I generally continued to answer in Russian. I found one exception to this linguistic rule when I decided to buy a program. I found an official chatting with two uniformed underlings and came over to interrupt them. The official turned to me as soon as he noticed my approach, and I told him I wanted to know where I could buy a program. He replied in Russian, “These girls can answer you in your native language.” “Oh,” I replied in Russian. “You can speak English?” The girls giggled with a trace of awkward caution and looked at each other. I teased them, “Can you speak English better than I can speak Russian?” Neither wanted to try, telling me in Russian where to buy a program.

I had a great time watching the races and an OK time watching the awards ceremonies. I really came to see bike races, and the Ice Girls don’t float my boat. The Ice Girls perform at hockey games and other sporting events. They’re cheerleaders, and I think they’re supposed to be sexy and tame at the same time. It’s an impossible task. I found myself wondering why these no-doubt well-paid entertainers would come on stage with dye jobs grown out weeks ago. (Actually, I think I know the answer. I think it’s a look here. It’s just another cultural difference, but it still surprises me on stage.)

The big awards kept going to Great Britain. I cheered hardest for the Mexican girl who won a silver medal in the scratch race, pleased to see somebody from my continent do well.

Weight Room

I used to lift weights three mornings a week at Hotel Minsk's little fitness club. Membership didn't cost much and the hall had an adequate suite of equipment given the price, clean showers, friendly fellow members and a pleasant staff. I liked it.

While we were away, unfortunately, the hotel sold the sports facility to an outside investor who apparently didn't make enough money from people like me. The new owner jacked up prices to a whopping four dollars per visit and cleared out most of the big equipment. I kept coming back anyway because I could get by with the remaining dumbbells and barbells and I didn't really know where else to go. I missed the former members, however. Nobody seemed willing to put up with the scaled-back hall, and with only one bench the hall wouldn't really support more than one person at a time anyway.

I finally went out for a walk and investigated other facilities near home. Happily, I discovered that the professional hockey compound in the park near our apartment includes an excellent weight room. I bought my membership from Violetta who usually works at the front window, occasionally leads aerobics classes and always radiates sunlight. When I went in for my first workout I met Dima, one of two trainers. I told Dima that I had some idea what I was doing but asked him to stop me if he saw me doing anything improperly. He's been very helpful already, and I suspect he has lots more to show me in the coming weeks.

Then there's the hockey team. They work out before the hall opens to the public, and they occasionally pass through again while I'm there. Generally they seem almost as sunny as Violetta, though incredibly disciplined. Sometimes they spread themselves out all over the floor to stretch out before they disappear somewhere into the facility. Now I know why I'm not very flexible: They hold each stretch several times longer than I hold any of mine. I may have to ask Dima to help me with that, but since it looks painful maybe I'll wait until next week. Or the week after.

Every time I go to work out there it puts a big smile on my face, and all this pleasure costs about three dollars a visit. I'm so excited I'm going to give them a wall clock as a gift. It's about the only thing they're missing.

I don't feel like I know the members and staff well enough yet to take pictures, so I've attached a couple of professional photos from the Web. You don't get to see the staff, but at least you can see the facility. Hotel Minsk never held a candle to this place.