Still the same but much in the works

Tomorrow’s not only Wendy’s birthday, but it’s also the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, which affected Belarus way more than it did Ukraine. All the radiation blew northward and the border is really close. Belarus isn’t all that big, so proportionally, it really took a hit.

Last year, in my last hurrah before COVID shut everything down, I’d gone to Kyiv and to the site of the plant and the exclusion there. This year, I’m hoping to go to the Belarus side, which is now open (sort of) for tourists. There’s a local tour company that puts together excursions there and a small group from work are planning to go in a couple of weeks. It is a sad commentary to the times that I am looking forward to it.

Belarus side of Chernobyl disaster.
Photo: Walk to Folk tour company

But not this weekend. I am currently bored out of my mind. I’m not studying either Russian or HR, which are both viable options for productive things that I’ve shunned to sit here and veg out with some really bad movie with Edward Norton in it. (Although, with him in it, really, how bad can it be?) I was a little productive this weekend; I made M&M cookies, which used up the last of my M&Ms and one of three remaining Crisco sticks, plus I vacuumed and cleaned the bathroom. Since I hate those last two, I figure I get a bye for the rest of the day.

I did, as per usual, get up and at ‘em, but in my 8,000-step walk to get to a grocery store on the next block (I went via the river), I discovered it was closed, perhaps permanently. There are multiple businesses shutting down here in some political actions, but I don’t know if this particular grocery store is in that department. I’d tried to go last week and it was closed, too, but I hadn’t realized it was a permanent thing.

So this marks three weeks without hitting a grocery store and honestly, I still have plenty of food. I basically need bread to make my PB sandwiches for lunch; I’m still loaded on everything else. I really want to buy carrots and hummus but I am a little concerned that if I go to the grocery store, I’ll buy that and more. The same old is really getting old. It appears I’m down to less than four months, and with the pantry stock I just don’t see eating out any time soon.

And hopefully it’s not less than “less than four months.” Our relations with Belarus are a tad sketchy right now and people at work are a little concerned at what may happen. International relations geeks may have seen the news out of Lithuania that the eventual U.S. ambassador to Belarus (first since 2008) was in Vilnius recently. The foreign ministry there apparently announced for some reason that she was seeking to be accredited there and would be sort of an adjunct ambassador to Belarus. I’ve no idea where they got that, because it doesn’t work that way but it’s causing some people I work with to be a little on edge because we don’t know what’s going to happen.

Next weekend, though, I know what I hope to happen: we have a four-day weekend and I plan on getting out of town. I’ve now been vaccinated, although I don’t yet have full immunity, but Belarus has not at any point shut down, so I figured I’d just take the train. Belarus isn’t that big a country (one reason Chernobyl was horrific) and the border isn’t further than four hours in any direction. Minsk is conveniently smack in the middle.

There are a handful of major cities, and my plan on this long weekend (Friday is something that I don’t’ remember and Orthodox Easter is Monday) is to take an early train to a city in the northeast that’s almost on the Russian border, then take a bus the next day to another city that’s south of that and then come back on Sunday. Even with some pretty awful Russian, I managed to get the train tickets from cities 1-2 and 3-1 yesterday. I’m hoping to bus between 2-3 because it’s for some reason an hour shorter but I have both the train and bus schedules written down just in case. And Expedia came through with hotels.

As far as what I will do, I have no idea beyond going to the Marc Chagall museum and just walking around. It’ll be nice, I think, to just walk around a different city.

Last Tuesday, I got to do that, too. I was able to go to Vilnius for a meeting. The next morning, I woke up at 5:30 and just walked all around the Old Town. I’d been before – I took a Baltics trip from Istanbul – so I wasn’t in it for touristy things but just walked to be someplace else.

In Vilnius

In May, hopefully, I’ll get to explore Belarus a little more. Beyond this weekend’s trip, we have the Chernobyl thing planned and then a long weekend for Memorial Day. If I can do all those, then I really will have seen every corner of this country, albeit only lightly. There’s a lot of castles and things here that I don’t know if I’ll get to, but if I can at least do these things, maybe that will make me feel like this hasn’t been a waste of a tour as far as travel goes.

I’m still hoping to do some out of country travel and am eyeing places that are opening up. So far, Iceland and the Seychelles are open but I’m really just hoping that Poland starts letting people in. I’d also still like to see Bratislava, but that one will be more complicated because it involves leaving one country, flying to another and then taking a bus to another. Maybe July.

In a couple weeks, I am due to get a new boss, and my hope is that come June and July things will have settled down enough to take a week off each of those months to go somewhere. I have a lot of “use or lose” time that I need to figure out how to take between now and Baghdad, because, assuming I get to Baghdad, I won’t be able to take off until 2022.

Not hungry at all

Finishing up a long weekend here in Belarus, but it’s been a boring one. We were off both Good Friday and Easter Monday, and it’s the second consecutive Good Friday-Easter Monday long weekend where I’ve been stranded due to COVID. The good news out of that is that Christ has risen, of course, but a far distant second is that I haven’t had an opportunity to spend money. In any other normal time, I would have plunked down $400 for a flight to anywhere.

Instead, I’ve done pretty much nothing. The weather hasn’t been all that great, although it is finally warming up. (Think low 40s.) I tend to be up early and get my outdoor walks in before noon and it’s really chilly still. This morning, it wasn’t quite in the low 40s and was windy to boot – I wound up going two blocks and turning around to come back for the warmer jacket.

The only thing I’ve really accomplished this long weekend is to procrastinate studying. I did manage to finally get to this week’s assignment and discussion, but I’m even at this very moment dilly-dallying to put off working on the final paper.

Mostly, I’ve been watching TV and eating. Not a good combination. I mean, I have gotten 12k-14k steps a day – I’ve started out doing four miles each morning on the treadmill – but after that, not a whole lot. One of the more productive things I’ve watched was today, when I tuned into two different seminars on the class topic. Although I am a visual person, just reading from the textbook and the online forum just isn’t doing it for me.

Beyond that, I watched “The Passion of the Christ” and the entire Hunger Games series, which is kind of ironic considering the amount of food I’ve consumed. Gosh, being home is boring and when I’m bored, I want to do something. Eating is the low-hanging fruit.

The pit is where the Jews were massacred.

I did walk to the far-away market and bought veggies, which meant I could cook. This, in turn, led me to another game of Tetris, trying to fit stuff in the freezer. I’ve again completely exhausted my storage containers and am again vowing not to set food into a grocery store next week. Unless it’s for carrots, because I still have a jar of hummus I’m working on. Hummus is pretty wonderful.

But I managed to make progress with my pantry, which overflowth like that of a Victor of the Hunger Games. I really am trying to whittle it down and right now, I could live through a couple of hurricanes. I used up a Lipton Onion Soup mix, one of the three Jiffy cornbread mixes, the remains of the big canister of butter-flavored Crisco and the rest of the rock-hard dark brown sugar. I still have several Crisco sticks and half a bag of light brown sugar that’s solid, but not rock solid. I made blonde brownies for the first time in awhile with that – it melted the sugar rocks just fine, but they weren’t as chewy as I remember. I need to make a dessert that’s made up primarily of powered sugar because I have a ton of that. When you only use it to sprinkle on brownies, a bag goes a long, long way.

I’m still planning on saving the brownie mixes and the bags of M&Ms and chocolate chips for a bit longer, but I think I need to start making popcorn as my “chip” at lunch, and I’ll have to really douse it with the yellow butter flavor popcorn topper. I’m still working on my first bottle of that and I have two more. Not really sure what I was thinking on that.