Deferring to the Biggest Hat

Belarus, known to the locals as Byelorussia, is directly translated as "White Russia." While there is indeed a shocking lack of ethnic diversity here (although no more than most of Eastern Europe), this is not the supposed etymology of the name. If anything it should be called "Green Russia" after the lush, almost fluorescent green, landscape. Of course, this is summer, so perhaps come the snows of winter the actual name is apt.

My bus ride to Minsk was long, uneventful and uncomfortable. I was certain that I had two seats all to myself until, at the last moment, an enormous and -- forgive me for saying so -- smelly Russian plopped down next to me and, in effect, wedging me in for the remainder of the trip. I couldn't properly describe his smell, some mix of cheap cologne, body odor, alcohol, lard and something else intangible. But I would venture to guess that anyone who's been to Russia knows this smell on older men.

Truthfully, I was more than a bit nervous crossing over the border into Belarus, notoriously one of the worst and most bureacratic in the world. What would they think of this American rolling into what Condi Rice called the last dictatorship in Europe? Would they look at my passport, see that I was in Ukraine last year right before their Orange Revolution, put 2 and 2 together and figure out that I was trying to bring down their totalitarian regime singlehandedly? (If the kind government of Lukanshenko is monitoring this blog, please know I'm just trying to bring the funny). They did, of course, give me the once over four times (does that make it a quadrice over?), with each new officer, with hats of increasing size, looking primate-like over my dokuments as if it was the first time they'd ever seen such alien artifacts. The ridiculous pantomime continued with me trying to show zero emotion -- and not smirking is seriously difficult sometimes -- but also trying not to look scared or mean or sleepy. Finally, at 2:30 am, they let the bus through without me even having to bribe anyone (and I had an Andrew Jackson stuck in my passport just in case).

Minsk, a city of 2 million people and almost completely flattened in WWII, is completely built in the Stalinist neoclassical tradition. Huge brownish ornate buildings, expansive boulevards and little-to-no traces of the millenium-old settlements that were in place here. The saying is that Belarus is more Russian than Russia, something I'm going to test in the next few days. I do know that absolutely no one here speaks English, a far cry from what I've found in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kiev. Speaking Russian is getting easier but so often the words don't come quickly enough - I need to find some way to lance my mental boils.

There are police officers *everywhere* and I hope to hell revolution does not break out while I'm here. I cannot go into Russia proper until Friday, when my 30-day visa kicks in, so I will be somewhere in Belarus until then.