Moskva!

Compartments on Russian trains come in four classes: 1st class (spalnyy vagon), which is a sleeping compartment for two; 2nd class (kupeyny), a compartment for four; 3rd class (platskartny), which is essentially 54 cots bolted down in one uncompartmentalized wagon; and 4th class (obshchiy), unreserved bench-seating where there may or may not be a place to sit and where there may or may not be livestock. After an uncomfortable experience last year in platskartny, I opted for the 2nd class ticket for the young girl's erotic journey from Milan to Minsk -- except the girl is a guy, not young, not erotic, and from Minsk to Moscow.

Fate seems to always mess with my mind when it comes to transportation. I usually sit there in my nice seat thinking, this one time, I'm going to finally have some leg room or elbow room. The empty seats beside me will taunt me, like a wounded butterfly does a kitten. And I can always see that guy from afar who has been assigned the seat next to me - slothlike and lumbering, noticeably unkempt and unbathed, rocking back and forth as he drags his white plastic bag down the aisle at shoulder level, knocking head after head on his way, slowly every slowly, to the place right next to me.

But not this time! Just two twentysomething secretary/advocate types, Olga and Olya, quite pleasant, who gave me some of their crackers and I gave them some of my beer (which is the custom in Russian trains). They asked me all about America and I asked them easy questions about Moscow and I could understand their Russian much better than I could understand those pesky Belarussians. And I actually ended up sleeping exceedingly well.

I've been walking all day long around Red Square and my feet are absolutely killing me. I write this in the TimeOnline internet cafe, which, with 200 computers running, is supposedly the largest computer cluster in Eastern Europe. And only 60% of them are occupied with annoying teenage boys playing video games.

Final Two Hours in Minsk

There's something calming about Minsk. I mean, save for the whole totalitarian feel to the place, it is actually kinda nice here. No one's really smiling or laughing or getting too out of control but I so appreciate the orderliness of the whole place. Trains really do seem to run on time here and there are no rogue social elements that make a place like, say, Moscow, unpredictable, chaotic. And fun.

I guess my final verdict on Minsk is that it is, well, kind of boring, especially in comparison to other ex-Soviet metropolises I have visited, like Moscow, Kiev or Odessa. The kids, for example, congregate at McDonald's, as if it's the cool place to be. Interestingly enough, the drive-thru version here is, you guessed it, McDrive. And I see from the window that they offer the MacFresh, the vegetarian verion of their Big Mac or something. Quite honestly I have not had the nerve to fight the crowds to try one out and I prefer to use the place as god intended, as a non-pay toilet.

Though very few people here speak English, I see it constantly. The cool threads for male younglings to don are T-shirts emblazoned with something in "American" -- it doesn't really matter what it says. It is rather odd to walk by and see hipsters with "PepBoys" or "Lancaster, PA High School Track & Field" or "Louisiana is for Lovers" or any number of random T-shirts that would amount to junk to Americans. Of course the women wear high heels and very short skirts *everywhere*, something that I keep wishing would catch on in the USA.

In two hours, and with some trepidation, I climb aboard the train to Moscow, a skant 11 hour train ride away. I've been told that there is no border patrol or customs between Belarus and the Russian Federation, so I might, perhaps, be able to sleep all the way through. Wait, did I just write that? And as Belarus goes the way of Burma in becoming pariah of the world (due to extensive pressuring by both the European Union and the United States, in light of its poor human rights record and habit of disappearing independently minded journalists), I realize that I'll almost certainly never visit this quaint town again (unless called upon by Condi Rice to do so).

And now I leave you with a McDrive menu, in preparation for your next trip to Minsk.

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.

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.

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.

Two Lifelong Cups of Feculunce

One of the most difficult things about my slow-motion wade through Eastern Europe is the whole vegetarian/vegan thing. Getting a decent meal here, besides the glorious Nutella, can be very difficult, but it doesn't stop stupid me from trying.

Today I entered a pizzeria on Karla Marksa vilitsa (Karl Marx Street) and, over the course of twenty minutes, managed to order a somewhat edible vegetarian pizza with no cheese. The lithe and very alert server kept repeating, smilingly, with ever bigger eyes, "Nye Myasa? Nye Sur?" (No meat? No cheese?). Foolishly I continued, such was my quest for something prepared by another human being. Predictably, fewer than five minutes later, the manager came over and counted down my order, in disbelief. Yes, no meat, no cheese, yes on the tomato sauce, yes on the bread, no on the mushrooms, yes on the basil.

The alien presence in the restaurant must have been too much for the other servers, because they stopped being attentive to their tables and had to slow down and gaze at the monstrosity that had managed to slither into their cafe. Soon it was like I was being waited on by five or six young women (to this day I have not seen any man work in any FSU restaurant), and one of them found the courage to ask, "Viy Italianets?" (Are you italian?). I laughed and said nyet. "Viy Espanets?" (Are you spanish?). Of course, being an honorary Spaniard, I felt like saying yes, but behaved myself. Such was the spectacle that other patrons began to chime in. Was I Portuguese, was I Greek, was I Macedonian? Clearly my Russian is too bad for them to ask about any of the ex-Soviet states.

Finally I let on and told them I was an American and, swear to god, one of them put her hand over her mouth and made one of those girly sounds that men cannot make and can barely hear. The pizza soon came, it took me forever to snarf it down, all the while fielding one-word questions from servers zooming past. Caleefornja? Beeverly Heels? Hoolywud? Las Wagus? Each answer, either da or nyet, came with it the same routine -- laughter, looks at one another, then more laughter. After nearly an hour, the bill appears, service here is notoriously slow, and the damage was a hefty 9200 Belarussian rubles (about five dollars).

As I gathered up my things to go, the manager rushed up and said "Gift for the American?" and set down a dainty cup of Italian coffee, with a small vodka accompaniment, in front of me. Now, to say I don't like coffee is perhaps an understatment. I believe it is the most foul taste -- and smell -- on the planet. I do not like coffee flavor in anything, I'm not sure I even like the word. Being the cool American drink that everyone is supposed to like, I have, in prior sittings, tried to drink it, but the fact that it tastes like ass has always gotten in the way. In my lifetime I have consumed a grand total of something like 1.5 cups of coffee. Total.

So there I sat, with eleven or twelve eyes fixed upon me, with the unholy sludge mocking me with its vile aroma. Do I drink or is this the point where I feign a thrashing heart attack and knock it to the floor? Being the recent master of the stoneface, and not wanting to insult these very nice Byelorussians, I quickly planned it out. Put in as much sugar as possible, kill it as fast as I could, then drown it with the cold vodka. At this point I should state that (a) both the coffee and the vodka were at higher temperatures than I had assumed, and (b) I cannot drink hot liquids at all, always ending with the same result: seared mouth flesh.

Needless to say, I didn't pull this off at all, my blank face turning into more of a sniggering/painful one, as the sickly hot ooze poured over my toungue, finding no relief with the lukewarm vodka chaser. Every unused olfactory gland exploded out of protest and my eyes started watering immediately. "Excellent!" I falsely proclaimed, with lips halfcurled from revulsion, voice cracking from abuse.

I quickly took leave, American tail firmly between legs, looking for the kind of relief that only Coca-Cola Light, with lemon, can bring.

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.