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| Zhive Belarus! This is considered a protest in Belarus; whoever did it could be fined $1k or be put in jail. Not kidding. |
Hrodna is about 3-4 hours away, on the border with both
Lithuania and Poland. Three of us went and stayed in a really nice hotel on the
edge of (or maybe in; I wasn’t clear about that) a national forest. It had a
pool and sauna in addition to the lovely breakfast. The first full day we
explored the city and the second we went to the Augustów Canal, which is
almost on the Polish border.
There’s been a lifetime full of stuff since we went even though
it was only two weekends ago. Hard to believe.
Anyway, we walked into the city and saw another cool old
town. I’ve seen lots of ruins in this area and in Turkey, that is for sure. We
saw several churches and a synagogue, plus the old castle that’s there. It was
closed for renovations but it is definitely the highlight of the “skyline.”
(Not so many skyscrapers, you know?) Had pretty good schwarma (I felt like it
was legit because the guys at the next table were speaking Arabic, and they
would know.) Didn’t buy anything because I felt like I had everything I needed
from Belarus. I have so many magnets that I no longer pick them up from every
place I go. I have one from Belarus already (a tractor) and just don’t have
room for each individual city.
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| Boats and flowers. My favorite combination. |
So I took pictures. A lot of pictures. We had bizarre
weather in that we covered several seasons in a day. I’d brought a rain jacket but
didn’t take it, although we did get sprinkled on. (It’s a heavy-duty rain
jacket and seems wasteful for a sprinkle.) I wore my Chacos for the first time
in the season and got the annual horrible blisters that I get, but I’ve learned
to arm myself with Bandaids so it was fine.
The canal was much tinier than I thought it would be. I have
nothing to base any opinion on, but I was thinking Suez and this was small
enough for a tourist boat to squeeze through. But it was very cool to watch; we
saw a boat go through it. A guy manually opened the gates and we sat there and
watched the water level lower so the little party boat (maybe 50 people) could
pass on through.
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| One of the cool churches in Hrodna. |
We rented bikes there and had an hour-plus ride, which
reminded me that I am not a biker, but it was pretty. We just went down the
trails – over the river and through the woods to the little tent refreshment
stand by the river. My colleagues had the wheat beer (barely any alcohol) but I
just had a soft drink and an ice cream bar. There was no indoor plumbing, so we
used the outhouse. I went into a wooden one across a field, where someone had
thoughtfully left some really big leaves to use as toilet paper.
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| I liked this little guy. Saw him crossing the road and felt it was photo-worthy. |
On Monday, we headed back but stopped by the Lida Castle,
which looks more like a fort. There are differences and we discussed them, but
I really don’t know which is which. But Wiki calls that one a castle, so I’ll
go with it. At this point, I’ve been in dozens of them so we didn’t stay long,
but there was a field trip of kids there at the same time and we got a kick out
of watching them because the employees had staged activities from them: Tandem
skiing, sword fighting, archery and the like. After that, we went to the
drinking establishment by the river and had either a cold or a hot one (beer
vs. chocolate and then headed back home.)
Flash forward to two weeks and now I am sitting in a hotel room in Vilnius. More on that later, but much has happened. However, at the moment I am working on two classes and the paper due dates are on Sundays, so I need to spend the day doing that. When I catch my breath, I’ll update.
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