Cold but Cultured

It’s still snowy and cold outside and, for all I know, might be until the end of time. And COVID is rampant with no sign of the vaccine. But you know what? I live in Minsk and I want to see it before I move on next September. I’m tired of waiting for ideal conditions, so I made a pact that I’d start going to see some things that are right around here.

Yama Memorial stairs

Since moving to this side of the world, I’ve come to learn a lot more about this area’s place in history, mostly with what we know as WWII but here is called The Great Patriotic War. Americans were focused on the Pacific front, but it was this area that was being torn apart.

Following an event that my boss went to, I finally decided to find the Yama Memorial, which, as it turns out, I’ve passed several times but from the other side of the road. It’s a pit with stairs leading down to it. In 1942, it’s where the Nazis marched about 5,000 Jewish Minsk residents and shot them. There’s now a memorial and stairs leading down to the pit, with a line of sculptures going down that represent the chain of Jews who were marched to their deaths.

In a way, it reminded me of the Korean War memorial in DC, but I guess that’s just because it was a group of sculptures representing people. This one was haunting, as you would imagine. It depicted individuals and families who were slaughtered. 

This area is full of things like that, and I don’t mean just Minsk. I’m less than 10 hours away from Auschwitz, and the whole area is full of places that were Jewish ghettos and work camps.

Today, I decided to mask up and go to one of Minsk’s museums. There are three or four I’d like to visit,  and honestly, I’m just tired of waiting for ideal conditions. I’ve got a mask and wipey things and I’m not afraid to use them. What I am afraid of is not only depression from being locked up but leaving town without discovering the history of the area.

So today I hit the Great Patriotic War Museum, which I’d be wanting to see but for a variety of reasons, most notably that it’s been a protest site on Sundays, I hadn’t gotten to. So screw it, I’m going to do stuff now.

After a couple of false starts – I got there at 11:20 but say a sign that I thought meant it opened at 12, so I did my post-museum run before the museum, went back and still discovered the door locked, but then I watched a family go in a door that I thought said “no entry” – I paid about $6 for entry and little headphones and set out.

Initially, there were barely any people in there (one reason I went early) but eventually more started trickling in. I was there almost four hours, listening to every single segment on the audio until I got to about No. 70 and realized I was famished, so I started speeding through at that point.

Great Patriotic War Museum

But the whole history was just so depressing – 260 Jewish work camps and 2.3 million Belarusians killed. The country lost about a quarter of the population and quite a few of the cities were scorched and burned. I couldn’t absorb everything on the audio but man, it was rough. Minsk is one of the Hero Cities of WWII – I mean, The Great Patriotic War. No one calls it WWII here, and it’s the Soviets who were the heroes, not the Americans.

Tomorrow is a holiday and, true to COVID life, there’s no out-of-town getaway but I did schedule another massage. There’s just nothing else to do, but now that I’ve done the one museum with no known repercussions, there are a couple more I’d like to see.

I will probably never have housing more centrally located; there are two national museums within two blocks of me. One is a historical museum, but not war-related, and the other is an art museum. Hopefully I can get to those in the next few weeks.

Hell, Chee-sar

 
Globally, life sucks right now; I get it. Here, in particular, we have layer upon layer of suck being thrown on. Issues at work compounded with six months of (legitimate) election protests, COVID, depressing winter blahs. Today, I woke up to yet another four inches or so of snow, which, although pretty, is basically another crushing blow to my psyche. Just so over it.

We’re also had issues getting our mail – don’t get me started; I proposed a solution but got shot down – but word was, there was mail today! Just so happy, because I had an Walmart order and an Amazon order outstanding. The Amazon was just a piece of workout equipment I’d ordered at the tail end of December and by now my motivation for using it has dwindled, but I’ve been looking forward to the Walmart order since mid-December, when I placed it.

Want

I’d already received the rest: a Hank Williams CD and some powdered milk and alfredo sauce, with just one jar sacrificed to the evil shipping gods. Those came awhile back; after all, I’d placed the order on December 14.

So today’s the day for the balance of the order, I tell myself, and oh, man, I am so looking forward to six family size bags of Cheetoes. Hail, Chee-sar!

But alas, there are no Cheetoes and through my disappointment, I go to the Warmart site to verify I really did order them and try to track them. And yes, I really did order them, but tracking came up empty. There was one entry in the tracker thing, which was that the order was received in Atlanta. After maneuvering through all kinds of clicks (honestly, the more “customer-friendly” sites are becoming, the more frustrating they are to deal with), I found a way to chat with what was alleged to be a Walmart employee somewhere.

The very nice person (or maybe AI; I don’t know) managed to confirm that Walmart did indeed receive my order but then  … well, things got fuzzy there. Something about a truck not making it, a driver not doing something and the end result being I have no Cheetoes lost on the way, which is what I’d hoped had happened.

The friendly person/AI will be dispatching replacement Cheetoes to me and I am thankful for that but I WANTED MY CHEETOES. It’s just been such a brutal year, not even so much COVID but everything else and I’d been hoping week after week they’d be in the mail. It’s kind of crappy that Walmart didn’t, you know, pay attention when a whole van of cargo had issues because I’ve been hoping they’d arrive.

I just need a bone thrown at me about now, and this time, I was hoping the bone would have been in the form of a crunchy orange … gosh, I am not even sure what Cheetoes are. Probably better off knowing. But I want them.