You want WHAT?

Everybody’s been talking during the past few weeks about a potential devaluation of the Belarus ruble. Acting on their concerns, many people have been trying to convert assets to dollars or euros, and we had a little trouble getting the dollars we needed at the end of March to pay our rent. This just means that we had to visit a few banks until we found somebody able to process our international transfer, but we spent more time walking around than waiting in line.

It was a little harder to get the euros we needed for our recent trip to the E.U., but that’s only because we started looking on the day we needed the money. There certainly weren’t long lines anywhere.

This recent experience contrasts sharply with a story I read in the Western press this morning about people in Belarus waiting in line all day to exchange their rubles for dollars. I scratched my head as I read the story and wondered where in the heck these long lines might be. By the end of the article I realized that the reporter had built this impression on the fact that he or she had found one woman who claimed to have waited ten hours to get some euros. Sure. Now I believe it. If she came to a bank that didn’t have any euros in inventory, perhaps she chose to stay there and wait for somebody to do a euro-denominated transaction leaving the bank with some euros. I suspect she could have walked around and asked at some other banks, but maybe it was payday or maybe that particular woman didn’t have much imagination.

I, on the other hand, wanted to go in a different direction. We came back from Poland with a few leftover zlotys, and I wanted to convert them to Belarus rubles. I walked into the nearest bank and discovered, for the first time in my life, a line of more than two people. That is to say, there may have been five or six people ahead of me, and two tellers to take care of us. I don’t know what most people were doing, but I did overhear one guy who wanted to convert some rubles to dollars. The bank was out of dollars but offered him euros, which he accepted. In this context, the teller was surprised when I asked her to convert my zlotys to rubles. “You actually want rubles?” she asked.

Yep. That’s what we use here, and they’re really easy to get.