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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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