skip to main |
skip to sidebar
I wanted to learn whether we ever had a formal “you” and a familiar “you” in old English. We did. “Thee” is for family and other intimates, and “ye” is for everybody else. But the more interesting part of the Wikipedia article explaining it is the fact that the English language has cases too, but I didn’t know what they were called. In Russian they are called Падеж, which I long ago improperly transliterated to padej. I had a really hard time figuring them out, so I am very amused to know that I’d actually seen them in grade school.
Here’s a table cribbed from Wikipedia.
Russian also has the first three of these cases, but I never imagined that we ever did too. I’m still not sure whether this stuff counts because the Russians have so many (MANY) more uses for them. But it takes a little of the wind out of my self-righteous sails to know that we’ve actually been using these things successfully in English for a long time.
My dad read my post about blue jeans and decided to do something about it. He is sending me a pair from my home town in California. He had about as much trouble sending the jeans to me as I've ever had with any of my projects on this side of the ocean, so I couldn't resist posting his letter to me. He says:
Your Jeans left the East Sacramento Post Office yeserday afternoon (5/17/11).
The postal clerk was very anxious to be helpful, and I only hope the postal people in Minsk can read your address. The process is first to fill in a 3-page address and info form, which for some reason is not meant to be attached to the package. I then wrote on the sealed and taped package although my writing is not very legible. The clerk then sold me the second largest bubble envelope, and crammed the pants in. (I would have bought the larger one for about 50 cents more if he had not insisted in helping me and saving 50 cents). Then he requested I write your name and address on the package using a ball point pen that punched through the distended envelope. Upon again returning to the counter he gave me a Sharpie pen which was awkward for me, so he took over the job, and I do not think his writing was much better. In desperation I asked him to tape the note I had copied from your e-mail. He did and concluded it would work just fine and sends his greetings. This was a historic moment in East Sacramento since the clerk had never heard of Belarus, and apparently this is the first package sent from Sacramento.
I am sure it will all work out, and for the sake of the people waiting in line behind me, I am sure they do not want me to come back. So, let me know when you receive it. In spite of the writing struggle, I am sure that they can decipher it at your end.
Love,
Dad
Very little happens automatically around here. On the plus side, this results in a lot of pleasant experiences involving helpful strangers, but on the minus side it results in a lot of work. I have mentioned earlier bureaucratic challenges, but I still can’t resist posting another story because this one is so completely crazy. As this story unfolded, I thought about how I much fun it would be to write up all the details about sending a pair of broken sunglasses to France for factory service. That only made sense until today, when I finally realized that the story is so confounding, so complex, that you wouldn’t want to read the whole thing.
I have a pair of Maui Jim sunglasses, and they broke at the bridge of my nose. This is not the first time this has happened, and I’m an old hand with the Maui Jim warranty service folks in the USA. This time, however, I thought it would be convenient to order service from Belarus. I was wrong.
Getting the glasses out of here proved to be a problem in the first place because the glasses were expensive and I couldn’t insure them for their full value unless I sent them international express mail. We tore up most of the forms I filled out trying to order priority mail and started anew, in triplicate. Triplicate here doesn’t mean a three-part form that you fill out once. It means a one-part form that you fill out three times. Alla helped me, and it “only” took about half an hour.
I should mention at this point that the mail service hadn’t been my first choice. Originally I called DHL and was prepared to compare their price with UPS and FedEx, but the lady at DHL talked me out of it. She said that if I used a private service I’d have to go to the airport two times to escort my package through customs, once on the way out and once on the way back. The postal service had no such requirement, so it still seems like the right choice.
Unfortunately, Maui Jim France had a different idea, and they used a private service called ChronoPost to return my repaired sunglasses. I learned this on Wednesday evening, when the postal service left a note on our door telling me to come to the main post office for my package. When I went to the post office early on Thursday morning they gave me a different piece of paper and told me to take it to the airport so I could escort my package through customs.
We tried really hard to get ChronoPost’s Belarusian partner to escort my package through customs, but it proved to be a waste of time. I e-mailed to them copies of my passport and several other documents including a Limited Power of Attorney and waited for my glasses to arrive yesterday. As 5:00 approached, Alla called the local ChronoPost rep and asked what was up. Either the call failed at that moment or the guy hung up on her. When she called back moments later, he was out of the office.
Skipping ahead a few steps, we decided to go to the airport ourselves this afternoon. As a matter of principal, I didn’t want to take a taxi because Alla was already alarmed at the mounting cost of this repair, and I had a fresh magazine to read on the bus anyway.
The customs office isn’t “at the airport” in the way you might imagine. It’s about a kilometer’s walk around the back. Getting inside involves passports and tickets, and then more tickets to get into the inner sanctum. In the inner sanctum we had to fill out more forms and negotiate with a customs officer who thought we should pay duty on the incoming glasses. Finally he relented and agreed that if the glasses were indeed repaired and not new, then he’d allow them without duty. My heart sank when they opened the box and the glasses looked awfully-damn-new to me. By this time, however, the customs officer had decided to be a good sport and he filled out the paperwork confirming that my glasses had been repaired. This part of the adventure took about an hour, not including the bus trip and the walk around the airport.
The return trip included its own adventure, since the bus didn’t show up. (We ended up sharing a seven-passenger van with a veritable United Nations of passengers.) I didn’t care, however, because I had my glasses.
A couple of years ago we went to an out-of-the-way museum in the town of Vetka. They feature handicrafts of all sorts, and I always regretted that I didn’t buy a photo pass when we went in. Since I had to go to Gomel last week after my visa anyway, we allowed time to continue on to Vetka and see the museum again. I still like it a lot. Even the building includes a lot of beautiful hand-made elements, and it’s a lot easier to photograph than the exhibits behind glass.
Click on the photo to reach our album and get a taste of what we saw.
When in December I packed for my return to Belarus, I tried to remember what pants I wore home because whatever they were, I knew I’d want them back. Somehow I decided that the pants in question were some high-tech travel pants which virtually scream, “The person wearing these pants is an American tourist.” In point of fact, I do not like to identify myself that way here, and I have not once put on those pants. The pants I should have brought were an ordinary pair of Levi’s 501 blue jeans.
I did manage to bring myself a second pair of 501 jeans, but both pairs I have here are black. This certainly makes it easy for me to have a pair of clean black jeans at the ready, but I’m getting really tired of them and almost desperate to wear something else. So I went out a couple of weeks ago to do something about it. We have a Levi’s store not far from our apartment, and I walked in there to see if I might be lucky enough to find my size in stock.
Buying jeans in the USA is difficult for me because I am unusually tall for my waist size. Or perhaps I am skinny for my height. Whatever the problem, this means I usually have to look at more than one store to find somebody who has my size in stock. Here in Belarus, where my height is even more unusual than in the USA, I found a choice of about eight pairs in my size, in various color gradations. “Wow!,” I thought, “I’m in luck.” I chose the shade of blue I wanted and asked how much these jeans would cost. The price worked out to about $120.
A hundred twenty bucks? Don’t I usually pay somewhere around forty or fifty bucks for these things back in the USA? I couldn’t do it. Instead, I went home and logged onto Amazon.com and found the same jeans for $40. I figured there was no way that shipping could be anywhere close to the remaining $80 and I set out to order a pair for myself. I was delighted to find Belarus in the drop-down list of countries on Amazon’s shipping-info page, and figured I was home free.
Nope. After I filled in the page, Amazon’s server came back with an error message saying that they couldn’t ship this particular order to my address. I clicked through for more details and learned that manufacturers won’t allow certain items to be shipped to certain countries, and that if I reduced the contents of my shopping cart I might be able to get the order to work. Unfortunately, those jeans were the only contents of my shopping cart and the Levi’s company had obviously felt that Amazon was inappropriate competition for their store in Minsk.
I may have to buy a pair of Belarusian-style jeans. They will probably be highly decorated, and I’ll probably have to spend a day visiting numerous small stores until I find something that fits well and looks the way I’d like to look. Then again, it’ll soon be warm enough to wear linen pants and I can put my jeans aside altogether. Then next time I should make a better packing list.
 |
All winter long, Elena and Sasha tried to talk us into coming with them to the ski area called Raubichy. I had seen this place one time from the window of a bus and thought it was merely "interesting." From the bus I saw a big pile of dirt with a ski jump sticking up from the top like the feather on a Tyrolean hat. Belarus has no mountains so the Soviets built this as an Olympic training facility. Since I don't ski jump and have no burning desire to ski down a pile of dirt, our friends never managed to drag me there in spite of their assurances that we could have fun with our cross-country skis.
Finally they made an offer that I understood. They suggested that we go to Raubichy together on a day trip and cook shashleek (sheesh-kebab) outdoors. Everybody here seems to do things like this, speaking often about eating "in nature," but we'd never been on such an expedition. This time we found the idea instantly appealing. So, on Saturday morning we piled into Elena’s car and drove out. I’d forgotten how close this facility is to Minsk and we arrived in a few minutes, or at least so it felt.
Once again the huge ski jump dominated the landscape, but it turns out that the facility includes much more than I imagined. Indeed, we saw the cross-country ski trail running into the woods and up and down hills. The snow has long since melted away, and now the underlying asphalt ribbon presents a very attractive roller-ski opportunity for those who know how to stop on that apparatus when going downhill. (Do those things have brakes?) I’m eager to return with my regular skis next winter, when any falls will take place on snow.
We didn’t come for the trail, however. We carried our stuff to a little hut at the side of the cross-country ski trail and set up camp. Much to our delight, Sasha is a veritable wizard in the preparation of shashleek. After he built a fire, we all went for a walk. But while Elena, Alla and I were admiring the flowers, Sasha went back to tend his fire. Later, we set out finger food (while Sasha tended the fire) and ate it while the meat cooked over Sasha’s perfect coals. Sasha, our devoted chef, kept wandering back to turn the meat. Ah, what a treat he produced! The meat came out perfectly, tender, juicy and delicious.
After eating way more meat than I imagined possible, we walked around a bit more and played Frisbee before returning home to play more cerebral games.
By tradition we should have been fasting that day, but by breaking tradition we enjoyed a wonderful day in nature without a lot of competition. And we were so inspired by Saturday’s success that we did go out to eat lunch in nature once again after church on Sunday, but this time we went to a big city park and brought food that we didn’t need to cook. We enjoyed that day a great deal as well, and hope to eat outdoors regularly in the coming weeks.
I’m afraid my Belarusian readers are scratching their heads over the title of this post. Ersatz means “artificial” or “substitute,” and we understand that it’s not likely to be as good as the original.
I had some real peanut butter here earlier on this trip. First I managed to buy some Polish peanut butter at the central supermarket, and then I received a jar from Europe as a gift from our friend Elena. When that ran out, I started looking to buy more, but never managed to find anything besides some weird-looking white stuff from China. I didn’t buy the Chinese peanut butter, and as a result I have not had peanut butter of any kind for a couple of months.
Feeling severely starved for a favorite food, I tried to make some of my own. I bought a bag of peanuts and ran some of them our meat grinder several times. The first time was the hardest. The whole peanuts were too hard for the not-so-sharp teeth on our old Soviet meat grinder and I had to keep reversing and pushing forward just a fraction of a turn with each effort. The output resembled fine sand.
I ran my sandy peanut crumbs back through the meat grinder numerous times. Each time it got marginally finer, but the level of improvement with each pass got pretty hard to detect. I finally became bored and ran out of time when I had a cupful of slightly-sticky peanut dust. If I had a food processor, I could have converted this dust to peanut butter in moments, but I gave up and stirred in a tablespoon of honey to hold the crumbs together.
Honestly, the Chinese peanut butter probably would have been better. And cleaning up the meat grinder proved to be a bigger nuisance than I expected. I think I’ll regard this as a learning experience that I don’t need to repeat.
Posts
