A Caning in Minsk

Perhaps the most famous Minsk resident -- to Americans -- is Lee Harvey Oswald, who lived here in his twenties, after defecting to the Soviet Union, in an apartment overlooking the lovely Svisloch River (Okay, try saying the name of that river fast with a [faux]Russian accent and you know the hell that my lips and tongue are in half the day). Although the view is amazing, the apartment was supposedly quite run down in the day, and extremely bugged by the KGB.

Speaking of said organization, the KGB still exists here in Belarus and, in fact, I had a drink in a little hole-in-the-wall directly opposite their current headquarters. Tell me how simultaneously cool and weird that is! I'm quite sure that I've been [snip] bugged, edited [snip] and [snip] followed this [snip] entire detour into [snip] Byelarussia.

I can't get over how taintless it is here, easily the cleanest city I've visited of this size. While strolling this afternoon through Park Gorkogo , I noticed that even the stumbling russkie dipsomaniacs went out of their way to properly dispose of their Baltika bottles.

One thing that is really bothering me about Belarus is the fact that one US dollar is equal to 2190 Belarussian Roubles and, here's the kicker, they have no coinage. Yes, everything is in bill form and many of them are very close in color and not necessarily even the same sizes. Right now I only have something like $20 on me but the gigantic wad of rubles in my front pocket is so thick that, upon sitting down, it has effectively ensured that I will never be able to have children.

Oh yeah, one more thing, I did see a cop beat a motorist senselessly today. That's something you don't see everyday in the good ole USA.



I wanted to sign off with that, but I had better elaborate, since the story is just too good. Given: Belarus is a dictatorship, as totalitarian as it gets in Europe nowadays, and the police presence is shocking. But their system of pulling over cars is very odd as there are very few patrol cars running around. Today I watched a little cop dude in a big red hat arbitrarly waving his white baton at every 10th or 11th car that went by. What transpired afterwards I don't know, but I assume he was just checking papers or taking bribes, the usual routine.

But one renegade, I guess, decided he wasn't going to stop and throttled it. The little cop bolted -- on foot -- after the car, whose driver was easily six feet tall and 200 pounds. I don't know why the driver decided to pull into a dead end stop, he was probably all a-panic, but the sight of this mini-cop pulling the "criminal" out of the car and caning him six seven eight times in public, with onlookers trying to only half-watch, was a sight I'll never forget.