Novi Shoeskis!!
What began as a noble goal -- come back to the United States somewhat fluent in Russian -- is now laughable at best as I try to survive my safari without losing too much weight. There's no way I'm going to master this monstrous language. Of course I've gone about it all wrong as I should have just enrolled in some language school somewhere in the middle of Russia, where I couldn't get into too much trouble, but, as usual, I made it all too complicated. I have finally figured out why I can't understand what the hell these Minsk people are saying -- they are conversing in a mix of Russian and Byelorussian, which only contains 40% or so of the same verbage. So not only have I not made any strides forward, I've regressed, lost all confidence in my language skills and now go completely blank when any of these nutcases talk-yell at me.
However, one thing that someone somewhere might be proud of me for is that I actually got my shoes fixed at a shoe repair shop (pictured, below the "Don Corleone" restaurant, actually inside another store, the Italian shoe shop). Amazingly, I was able to get to the address chickenscratched on the paper by the hotel matriarch, then, somehow, I was able to ask, translated, "bad.shoe.fix?" all the while making the seal slapping noise with the shoe in an overexaggerated fashion. The presence behind the counter muttered something back to me betwixt his baked-bean teeth, and, of course, like the idiot that I am, just replied "Da! Da!" to whatever he was uttering, though it was complete jibberish to me. I could just as easily agreed to having my shoes fixed, polished and shoved squarely up my ass for all I knew. The dark undersized and hobbling man snatched them, and told me to come back, one hour, then disappeared behind the red curtain.
In the meantime, I watched with interest three cops either interrogating two motorists or giving them directions (though from what I understand, these guys are almost exclusively recruited from the countryside and know nothing about Minsk). I'm fairly certain that they took down his address and arranged for a later take-home beating. I'm not sure that they liked me taking their picture, I tried badly to be discrete, and luckily I did not get my ass kicked and skull batoned.Soon I returned to the repair shop and voila my shoes are better than ever! This dwarfling, this veritable Lilliputian wizard of cobbling, only charged me $7! You gots to love the blue-collared countries.
Further progress was made in that I single-handedly procured a train ticket to Russia, leaving Minsk tomorrow evening and arriving at 8:50 am in Moscow. Readers of my previous wobble through Eastern Europe might remember that the train-ticket purchase is the most feared of all the harrowing social transactions in Russian culture. I had thought briefly about taking a day trip down to Gomel, the one city most adversely affected by the Chernobyl nuclear accident, but I am eager to move on. On to Mother Russia! By the way, visiting Gomel for one week is supposedly the equivalent of receiving a single chest x-ray. After seeing so many traces of radiation sickness last year in Ukraine, I'm not sure at this point I could stomach visiting a nuclear ghost town, still populated by several hundred thousand people. Perhaps next time.
And now, some more pictures showing how obsessed this place is with World War II, in which 1 in 4 people were killed, along with over 1 million Jews, a culture that is now almost entirely absent in modern Belarus.
posted by rod at 2:12 PM
4 Comments:
In reference to the wwII pictures: I guess hindsight isn't always 20/20.
You only took one pair of shoes?
You should be e-slapped! ;) Glad the sole soles are back in action.
Be safe and thanks for allowing us to partake of your journey!
love, darci
Another shoe repair story.....While a student in Europe several decades ago, I found myself in Rome on New Year's Eve with a 1-inch diameter hole in the sole of one shoe. This was bad for two reasons: snow (from the previous week in Vienna) kept getting packed in there and that foot was getting awfully cold; second, the Italians have a custom of throwing all their depleted wine bottles from New Year's Eve out their windows, so the streets are covered with broken glass on New Year's Day, and no one dare drive or bicycle until the street sweepers perform their critical duty. Even walking can be treacherous over the shards, especially with a hole in a sole. So on New Year's Eve morning, I found a shoe shop, a tiny hole in the wall, where a middle age (not Middle Age) man who didn't walk very well himself worked at his bench. We communicated with hand signals--well, I held up my shoe, and he scrawled 2,000 on a piece of paper. (fortunately, that was lira, not euros) For the next 45 minutes, I watched him work. He didn't take a pair of soles out of a package and glue them on. He took out a big piece of virgin leather, fresh from the cow; had me look it over to see that it was of acceptable quality (like I could judge); cut an approximate size, then did the fine sizing with razor-sharp knives; and finally nailed on the freshly minted one in place of the offending partial one. I think that 2,000 lira was about $7 at the time. Well worth it. I echo your sentiment that it is nice to see a skilled craftsman at work. We've lost so much of that in our society. Fortunately, we still have synthesis chemists. Happy walking.
Told ja (see previous post)
Now I'm trying to figure how to get e-spanked by Darci. By the way Darc, you forgot about Rod's backup Cruel Shoes ... which come to think of it are almost as worthless as no backup shoes depending on the particular shoe problem. What are talking here Rod? ... dress shoes for the occasional formal dinner date?
D
Yes, I have two pairs of shoes, one black and one brown, one nicer than the other in case I want to eat in an actual restaraunt. The Europeans are much more shoe conscious than we are and won't let you into some places unless the shoes are in order. Besides, it helps to even out the blistering zones.
Hilarious story about the italian cobbler, Jan! The visuals sorta turned my stomach, though.
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