Briefly a Belarusian multimillionaire

We had a busy day yesterday, our first full day back in Minsk. We had to upgrade Alla’s SIM card, pay the rent, register at the university and yadda-yadda. (For those who don’t speak English as well as I do, think of yadda-yadda as something like “и так дали,” especially if I spelled it right.) Anyway, one of the things I had to do was pay $1,300 in Belarusian rubles to the university for six months of study. Invoice in hand, I went down to the nearest bank to withdraw a cool four million rubles. I got a sizeable stack of hundred-thousand ruble notes and stuffed them into my jacket pocket and walked back to the university acting natural. It’s not often that I get to walk around with a million of anything, and I found it very stimulating.

Unfortunately, the excitement only lasted about five minutes because I had to hand over almost my entire stash to the University cashier. Sigh. Easy come, easy go.