My Kingdom for Shoe Adhesive!

The feeling of a freshly deglued shoe sole, flapping like a dying fish with each new step, making the kind of slappy sound one only hears in the seal tank at Sea World, is the last thing one wants when already a stranger in a strange land. Flap flap flap went the obviously not-from-here dumbshit, as if every eyeball was not scanning him already, now trying desperately to mute the symphony of slappage by sliding his feet instead of stepping, of course to no avail.

My nice Diesel shoes have been rendered useless by the hot, humid Minsk air for perhaps the remainder of my trip (My other pair, the Cruel Shoes, have helped me set my personal record for the number of blisters acquired in one afternoon). Let it be known that I'm no MacGuyver in my own homeland, much less one in a country where I cannot tell cat food from breakfast cereal, so fixing these things out of tree bark and mud is out of the question. Nowhere in my 53 Pimsleur Russian audio CDs did I ever learn the term for shoe glue.

Perhaps these Byelarussians (and Russians also), who look as if they not only read Mademoiselle religiously but also uptake it intraveneously, will think this flaccid sole thing is the new fashion coming out of California? Yeah, me neither.