Eastbound and down

It’s Orthodox Easter Monday and the end of a four-day weekend. Next weekend, there’s another. I just couldn’t stand the thought of being locked up again and I had almost reached full immunity, so I took a train to a city that’s northeast from me (right in the corner near Russia) and then the following day went down to a city that’s pretty much due east of Minsk. I came home yesterday. I’m off today, too, but I have a class and other stuff to do so I came on back. Besides, I was limited to walking around and am pretty sure I saw everything I could see while on foot, including a dead man.

I’d met a friend for dinner on Friday night and, walking back up the pedestrian street to my hotel, saw both a police car and an ambulance. There were two uniformed officers nearby, standing near the corpse of an older man, who was sprawled out on the sidewalk. I guess he had a heart attack. My first thought had been a jumper but it wasn’t messy.

Previously, on the way to work last week, I witnessed the term “falling down drunk” in real life. Not being a drinker myself, it never occurred to me that could be a real thing. On Monday, I walked through “Old Town,” which is a cool area with bars and restaurants by the river. This was on my way into work on a Monday, and I walk out of my house at 7:45 a.m. Apparently Sunday night is a party night because there were people standing around talking or waiting for taxis. On my side of the street as I was walking, I saw a guy facing kind of a half wall, holding himself up on it. I kept walking and put together that he was peeing. Do men (besides Jerry Seinfeld in a parking garage) do this in America and I just never noticed? It sure happens overseas to the point where I just ignore it, which is what I did with this guy. As I got closer, he slowly turned, paused and then completely collapsed on the sidewalk with a smack.

But I don’t think the older man in Vitebsk was drunk. I really think he was dead.

Other than that, though, it was a lovely weekend away and at times I caught myself wondering why I hadn’t done it before. Then I’d realize, duh, COVID, and although at no point has Belarus shut down it wouldn’t have been a good idea. The first city I went to was, early on, Belarus’ early hotspot, too.

In two more weeks, a group of us are headed to the Chernobyl Zone and over Memorial Day weekend there is a smaller group heading another direction. Even though I’d really like to go international, it’s really nice to be able to go somewhere. It’s incredibly cheap, too. I think my three-day trip only came to maybe $100. It wasn’t intentional to scrimp or anything but I certainly don’t need souvenirs. I just took a million photos and walked by rivers.

Back at home, I finished up my first HR course. (Yay! 10 percent complete!) and am trying to figure out how to go through all this food. Today, I used up the rest of my chocolate chips to make cookies (they’re in the freezer), made Jiffy cornbread (which leaves one box) and finished off the chickpeas. I hadn’t intended to do that, but the brown sugar needed to go into an airtight container and I didn’t have one so I cooked the chickpeas. Unfortunately, though, the chickpea-rice-spinach concoction once again stocked my freezer. I really don’t need to cook at all and although I had planned on going to the grocery store, it turned out to be closed so I skipped it. The only thing I really want to get is ice cream (I have two things of caramel waiting to be consumed) but since I made cookies I can’t really justify that.

Next weekend, we’re having a little bike ride get-together so I’m hoping it’s decent weather. There’s been a lot of rain lately and it’s still chilly. I’m over it.

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.

 

Goal lines, groceries and goatees

 Happy post-Belarusian Freedom Day, which is an unofficial holiday that marks the declaration of independence from the Belarusian Democratic Republic, which lasted a year after WWI. The unofficial holiday is a big one for the opposition, and the opposition’s leader, who is still exiled in Lithuania, called for renewed protests following the fraudulent (legit fraudulent, not Trump-fraudulent) summer elections. People have still been protesting, but this past winter was super cold, with more freezing temperatures and snow than in the last 25 or so years.

Museum of Culture

 Now that the weather has improved (it’s about 40 and sunny today), some people are trying to get the protests going again, but Europe’s Last Dictator isn’t letting go. People are protesting on smaller scales, with basically people walking in small groups (think like 3-6 people) being considered a protest. And yes, these people are being rounded up.

 This weekend I have the duty phone and I’ve already had one call from the relative of American citizen who apparently didn’t know that taking pictures of what’s going on is a bad thing and got detained for a couple of hours. Hopefully there aren’t any more calls.

 To stay out of trouble on protest days, it’s best to not wear white and red, as these are the colors of the opposition. I have a Red Wings knit hat that Dana gave me (Hockey is for Everyone-themed) and people here love it, but I can’t wear it on Sundays. That’s been the main protest day.

 

The hat is a nice conversation piece, although my Russian stinks. (And always will, a fact I’m coming to terms with.) One of the groundskeepers at work and I have a friendly attempt at a Russian/English lesson whenever we meet. He knows I’m awful in Russian and we’ll stay “good morning” and try to do short conversation or something. I’m terrible. I can’t even say “have a nice day correctly.”

Anyway, he noticed my hat one morning and asked me something about Detroit. Although I wasn’t sure what he meant, I said yes and asked, “And you?” He said yes. Then I tried to asked if he played and thought he said yes, so I tried to ask what position. Well, I can’t remember the words for “forward” and “defence” (they’re in a script I’m trying to memorize), so I said “Sergei Fedorov, Igor Larionov” and then “Slava Fetisov.” Didn’t work. He said, “Russian.” Not what I was trying to convey. Undaunted, I tried again and I first mimed puckhandling towards the goal line while saying “Sergei,” And then did the same thing going backwards and said “Fetisov.” It worked! Turns out, he doesn’t play. He’s a fan and sits in the stands.

Museum of Culture

It looks like I might be able to put the hat away soon. We’re finally warming up, and that means my time is winding down. I expect to be out of here around September or so, though that’s not nailed down. It’s not like I’m counting down, but I have come to realize that I have way too much stockpiled food and need to start eating. Somehow, I have maybe four more bags of grits and I have only been eating them maybe once a week. I don’t think I’ll have to buy juice again, either. Some stuff I need on a regular basis, like fresh veggies. But what I have I am loading up with spices, because I overestimated the amount of this and that I’d be using. Some stuff I’ve been saving, like Jiffy cornbread. I bought a six-pack and have eaten three but since I’m down to three, it doesn’t seem like much so I haven’t touched them in a couple months. Same with the brownie mixes. I haven’t used a brownie mix since before Christmas, but the minute I make a batch, I’ll only have one left! It probably sounds very silly to people who can run to Publix anytime they want but it seems risky to me.

Also risky: COVID here. Belarus will start manufacturing the Russian vaccine soon and its residents will have options but right now, only medical personnel have been vaccinated. I think they’re starting another tranche. The virus just isn’t being treated like a serious thing here. We do finally have mandates to wear masks indoors and on mass transit, but when I go into stores, maybe 50-60 percent of people are wearing masks (not necessarily properly) and as I walk, I can see inside the city busses and trams with unmasked people inside. No one trusts the numbers here so I don’t even track them, but basically I wash my hands every time I arrive home or to the office.

Work is different, of course. We wear them indoors for the most part. I hate it and wish I could open a window, but it’s still pretty cold most of the day. My boss is a double masker and I rarely see him without one, although I’ve noticed a lot of people are closing their office doors lately because we’re allowed to remove masks if our doors are shut. (I had a door but it went away in an office re-do.)

A couple days ago, his door was open and I needed something, so I went in – and caught him without a mask. Not like I cared or anything, but what blew me away was that sometime in the past, oh, year since I’ve seen his face, he grew a goatee! I was utterly stunned. I had no idea.

I can’t imagine what the look on my face must have been, but he would not have seen it because I was wearing a mask.

 

Exploring the city, at least a little.

 Despite COVID, I’m trying to get out a little bit. Looking at the calendar, I could be down to my last six months here and I’d like to get into some of the nooks and crannies before I head off to the sandbox again.

The Prophet - what do you see first?

I’ve checked a few boxes, such as Stalin Line (the tank place), a couple outdoor museums and the biggie museum, the one of The Great Patriotic War.

But Minsk is a European capital, so there’s so much more to explore. My apartment is so centrally located that it’s a shame not to check out the neighborhood, which includes two museums less than two blocks from me.

On Saturday, I headed to the national art museum, which is literally on the next block. I went with a colleague, who parked in my parking lot and we just walked from there.

The place is huge! It’s actually in two buildings, but there was no map or anything so we wandered; we were in there about three hours and didn’t quite finish it but hunger wins. There were some really nice pieces in there, and most of it was paintings and such. I very much appreciated there wasn’t a trash can roped off in the middle pretending to be some kind of art installation; I just don’t get that at all.

But a lot of it was fairly freaky, and there was, as one may imagine, a very large and mostly depressing post-war contingency of art, plus a lot of soviet-influenced pieces. There were several oil paintings done on cardboard, which I have never seen before and more wood carvings that I would have expected. I couldn’t tell what kind of tree had been used; we tried to ask and it came back “clay,” so I think there was a miscommunication.

Son of Bitch. (I don't get it.)

One of the funky pieces was an optical illusion-type by an artist who had several colorful “landscapes” of what he called Saturn, including some kind of fair ride with “warning signs” (skull and crossbones) and some bizarrely-shaped women’s heads he called “Women of Saturn.” The piece I liked was called “The Prophet,” and at first glance, I thought it was of a natural window in a rock. When I looked again, I realized the opening was in the shape of a man. Cool.

Had a Ferris Bueller (or was it Cameron?) moment when I saw a joltingly real picture of a wooded area with lots of fallen leaves. It looked to real, it could have been a photo – but only at a distance. As I got closer and closer, I saw that the leaves were merely blurs of paint, scattered at random across the bottom but creating an amazing beauty. There were also several artists who had illustrated books and stories, and one that I wish I could have read was an illustration that translated to “Son of Bitch.” I have no idea what that was about.

On Monday – a holiday for us – I risked it and headed to the circus. They’re big in the Former Soviet Union (FSU!), but they’re not the big three-ring ones from my childhood. It’s a small venue with one ring, and it’s a permanent venue. The Minsk circus is, I saw online, the first permanent building to house a winter circus. AFAIK, there are two performances a day, and it was pretty packed. I’m sure I was the only adult there without a small child and most people wore masks, including the circus workers, but not the performers.

Fortunately, it was more of an athletic circus with no abused animals like bears riding motorcycles. They did have some animals, but it was limited to two chickens, two ferrets, about six dogs, six ponies and five or six horses.

The acts weren’t out of this world, but the amount of athleticism to do them is pretty incredible. After reading “The Orphan’s Tale,” I felt I was a little more aware of the work the trapeze artists put in, for one. Some of it hurt just watching. My favorite was some kind of 70s music going on with three guys jumping on a trampoline, as random as that sounds. But it was a nice way to kill an hour and a half on a holiday afternoon.

Next up in my museum exploration was to be the history and culture museum, which is a block the other direction from my house and I intended to go on Sunday. However, Saturday evening, a colleague and his wife had three of us over and we had such a good time that I didn’t leave until 11:30. I had an appointment at 10 a.m. on Sunday (getting my permanent eyeliner redone) and, following that, it started snowing really hard again. These little pellets about half the size of BBs came at me on the three-mile walk home from the eye place and at that point, I just wanted chocolate and a nap, so I did that instead. I considered it a good use of time.

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.