Minsk, Belarus and Vilnius, Lithuania

23 November 2000

We got back from our trip to Belarus and Lithuania on Tuesday. Four of us had been planning to visit the two countries for a long time since their capitals are only about 200 km apart, and then people dropped out and we cancelled, then we rescheduled for Thanksgiving, and suddenly twelve people decided to go. I told you about the visa problems and the counterfeit hundred-dollar bill I had to pass off, but those got solved OK. We got our visas just a few hours before we left on Thanksgiving day.

At 11:00 p.m. we got on our train to Minsk, and amazingly nobody even woke us up to do visa or passport inspections. No one ever checked our documents, actually. Before I left California, I was reading a new travel guide to Eastern Europe, and it said something like, ‘Eastern Europe used to be like the girlfriend you had in high school with the really strict and violent father; you couldn’t do much, but it was really exciting to try. But then you visit her ten years later and she has her own studio apartment on the Upper East Side with throw pillows everywhere, and the first thing she does after making love is check up on the Japanese stock market.’

It wasn’t totally like that, but they definitely showed signs of wanting to shrug off the absurdities of the Soviet system and join the rest of the world. They even had decent toilets. Their government, headed by Lukashenko, is still fairly authoritarian, but after Yugoslavia's example, it's not clear how long that will last.

But much to my disgust and disappointment, the first thing we saw when we got off the train in Minsk was a big fat McDonalds sitting in the middle of a square. What is the world coming to? And of course, six out of the twelve of us immediately headed straight for it (those were the six who spent about 6 hours in Belarus just to say they’d been there and then went on to Vilnius for top-quality manicures and expat bars).

The other six of us stayed two days in Minsk and explored the city. One of our first impressions was of their two-line metro (Moscow’s has thirteen lines). Before the subway doors close, there’s always a message in Russian that says, “Caution, the doors are closing. Next station, Kievskaya,” or whatever. (“Ostarozhnya, dver’ zakravaetsa. Sleduyushya stantsia, Krasnopresnenskaya.”) Only it’s so fast that I didn’t know what they were saying until after I had been in Moscow about six weeks. But in Belarus, they said it so slowly and mellowly I felt like I was being hypnotized. The people in Minsk in general were nicer and more patient and more apt to smile and in much less of a hurry than the folks in Moscow. It was nice in a way.

The first thing to do was find accommodations, and the hotel I led us to turned out to be closed for repairs. We were carrying all of our junk, it was snowing, and we all had sniffly noses, so patience was wearing a bit thin. I found another hostel in our guidebook and led us there. When we got there, a sign on the door said “nyet mesto.” No vacancies. We went in anyway, and they absolutely had places, I don’t know what the sign was about. We bargained them down to $13 a person. We had our own bathrooms with tepid bath water, and our room had a color TV with two channels.

There was a Chinese restaurant of sorts in the hostel, but the three girls running the place looked absolutely shocked to see six people come into the tiny, empty room. (Perhaps the hostel/restaurant was not their main business interest…) They had almost nothing that was on the menu, but they did have some tasty carrot and chicken and garlic and oil salad (I really miss garlic; my babushka has apparently never heard it). We had soup that should have been called “warm water with cucumbers in it” and some chicken that was mostly bones and cracklins, very tough and cold. The rice was pretty good at least.

When we were settling the check, Liz asked me if I had paid enough, and I said, “Yeah, I put in five million and took out a thousand.” It sounded kind of absurd, but a year ago their currency was so devalued that the exchange rate to the dollar was over a million to one, and then they struck off three zeroes so this year it’s only 1085/1. It was very confusing, and there were a lot of huge bills worth almost nothing floating around, and you never knew whether you had a dollar or a tenth of a penny. But I only exchanged about $50 the whole time I was there, so any mistakes I made couldn’t have cost me too much.

The rest of our daylight was spent getting to the WWII museum. Belarus had not had the easiest of times in the 20th century. It was razed in both world wars, and then the Chernobyl disaster destroyed or contaminated 20% of the entire country (the blast happened in the northern Ukraine, but prevailing winds brought most of the fallout into Belarus). Minsk is only about 50 years old because it was bombed and bulldozed to the ground in 1945. It was built back according to the exacting standards of Soviet planning. The city is surprisingly nice, with big boulevards and trees and parks and European-looking buildings in pastel shades.

The museum was sobering to say the least. It really hit home about the frailty of human life and not just the ability but the willingness of some of the people in power to destroy lives. It was hard to think about how so many seemingly nice and secure lives in a nice city could be destroyed in so little time. It’s something people in America haven’t experienced on such a scale. And it’s not just an interesting historical note; it’s happening now in Chechnya and all over the world. Russian troops recently got the go-ahead to bulldoze and pillage the main market in Grozny (the capital of Chechnya, which has already been virtually destroyed), so the main way the few people left in Grozny had to scrounge a living and buy their bread is now gone, their goods mainly stolen by Russian troops.

After that and the abortive Chinese lunch, we were all starving, so I pointed us to a Belarussian restaurant by the river. When we finally got there and found it, it was booked for a private party. So we picked another one, and it was really nice inside and had cute and friendly waiters who were excessively patient with our bad Russian (and with some peoples’ tendencies to ask a million questions and request everything on the side, which would have resulted in a lot of eye-rolling and possible yelling in Russia). Mike Sulmeyer got the steak flambé, and the waiter prepared it while we watched. He grilled the big steak and poured in veggies to sauté with it, cognac to ignite it, red wine to put out the flame, spices, and lots of cream. By the end we wished we had all ordered it, and it was one of the best things I had ever tasted. But we all had a lot of good food including chicken and soup and fresh baked bread (it had been so long!), dessert and water and good coffee. Then there was folk dancing, and at the end the two main dancers pulled up Bard and Mike and Liz to dance with them. They didn’t know how to do the traditional dancing, and Bard tried to do the shoulder-shaking thing that only girls are supposed to do, and they looked so goofy, but everyone was laughing and smiling and having a good time. Even with a generous tip, the whole evening came to about $10 a person.

Then we just walked around the clear, cold city, along the river and up to a statue of Pushkin on the banks. I leaned against the base of the statue and felt the cold breeze from the river blow through me. I felt peaceful and refreshed.

We headed toward downtown and the clubs. On the roof of one big hotel were some lights that beamed up into the sky. It had a spinning half-sphere with about 20 powerful lights on it that made dancing spots on the clouds. It was pretty cool.

Pretty soon most of the others were complaining of cold, but I was pretty toasty in my stay-puff marshmallow coat. So they went back to the hotel, and Liz and I walked around and talked for an hour or two. We ended up getting kind of lost, but then we found a metro and took it back to the hotel. It is a beautiful city.

The next day we tried to find another café that my guide book recommended, but it had since moved across town. So they decided to go to a little western-looking café. I didn’t want to go to a western café, so I asked someone if there was a Belarussian restaurant nearby, and he said there was a Belarussian kitchen just across the street. But the others were too hungry to look for another place. About the time I got my food and realized it was chicken and rice (which is what I have every other day in Russia), I decided to throw in my five million rubles and go across the street to the Belarussian place and then walk around the city alone. I also realized that trying to explore a city in a group of six people would be kind of cumbersome, and it would be nice to have some time to myself for a while.

The Belarussian food was good. At the end I asked the waiter which dessert he recommended, and he brought me four little white cakes smothered in a creamy, spicy strawberry sauce. It tasted so fresh and good. Also, when I ordered cofe c molokom, they didn’t just bring me bad coffee with a packet of artificial cream. They gave me a cup of strong, good coffee, and a beaker full of scalding hot milk! So no matter how much milk I put in, the coffee was still hot. It was so unexpected that I almost burned myself.

I had a great day exploring the river and boulevards and the art museum (admission: 15,000 rubles (15 cents)), seeing churches, strolling through parks, and lingering on bridges. I got to the main Square at dusk and saw its big imposing government buildings and the big rectangular university building and a huge Lenin statue giving a lecture out in front. There was a big brick cathedral with yellow and red marquee lights around the awnings and the crosses and one of the Jesus statues. It looked like something out of Vegas.

At 6:00 p.m., we met up to board a four-hour train to Vilnius. I almost missed it because I got lost from the group in the tunnels connecting all the terminals--that is, all the terminals except number one, which happened to be the one we needed. The others had left because they figured that out, and I was left wandering around confused. But I figured it out just in time to catch the train.

The first thing we saw after we left the station at Vilnius was another big ugly Mickey-D’s. We found our hostel easily since it was close to the train station. The others had left a note saying they were at The Pub (an expensive British hangout). We had little interest in joining them. We looked pretty ragged, and we didn’t want to spend a lot of money just to pretend we weren’t in Lithuania.

We were all starving again, though, so we wandered around in the cold darkness for three hours looking for food. We were turned down at a couple of nice restaurants for being a big group of goofy, train-wrinkled foreigners, and other than that we only found bars with nothing but peanuts and beer. Finally we went to a restaurant where we had been turned down before because there were no tables. We asked if we could wait for an opening, but the waitress shook her head. So we stood there with our big bulky coats blocking the way for all the stylish Lithuanians until the waiters finally winked at us and cleared off a table. The food was hot and hearty, and we got a lot of it. We shared spicy beans with meat, potato pancakes with cream sauce, juice and water, fried potato dumplings, and hot black garlic bread. We went to bed fat and happy.

The next day we walked to the heart of downtown to the former KGB building, now the Museum of the Genocide of the Lithuanian People. It told about how the Soviets had repressed and killed and deported the Lithuanians and collectivized and ruined their farms and stole their animals. We went to the basement and saw the former prisons, which were tiny, cramped, and cold. There was a padded room for people who went crazy or for muffling the cries of prisoners who were being tortured. There were two or three torture rooms where the prisoners were given a small pedestal to stand on, and the floor was flooded with freezing water so that if they nodded off, they’d fall in the water. They just had to stand there for days. It made all of us sick. In the slanted execution building, there was a video about the history and the Lithuanian freedom fighters and some pictures of skulls with bullet holes in them next to pictures of the people they used to be.

After that we went on my request to the Frank Zappa Monument. Against the advice of the government, some locals erected an impressive bust and mural of Frank Zappa on a prominent downtown street. It was awesome. (And no, Frank Zappa is not Lithuanian, and I don’t know if he has ever even been to Lithuania. They just like him.)

Then we headed to the castle on the hill. We climbed some steep, icy, rocky steps and paths to the top and then climbed up the tower for an amazing view of the city and the hill of the Three Crosses. It was beautiful. I wanted to roll down the hill like the kids were doing, and we tried to find their spot, but it was getting dark, and the path was icy, so we went to the Applied Arts Museum instead. It was kind of like the Russian Armory, but a lot less disgustingly opulent and impressive. The coolest thing there was a little statue of Jesus sitting down with his head on his hands, kind of frowning and forlorn, deep in thought. Kind of like the Thinker. I read that that was the Lithuanians’ vision of Christ, and it makes sense to me in a way.

We went back to the Hostel to meet the others for dinner, and I asked the Lithuanian guy who ran the hostel to call in reservations for us at Ritos Smukle, a Lithuanian restaurant which uses only local produce and Lithuanian recipes and has no Coke or Pepsi or anything, only water, juice, and lots of alcohol. The Lithuanian hostelmaster was a trip in himself. He had long, fine, curly blond hair, a two-day shadow, and spoke English and Russian as well as Lithuanian. He seemed to like nothing more than to give advice about what to do in his city. He was cool.

Some people were watching Shawshank Redemption in the basement on DVD, and we had time before our reservations to watch the end of it. I really think it is one of the best movies ever made. It’s like a religious text almost, you can get so many messages out of it. “You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific Ocean? They say it has no memory.”

We watched it until the end and then caught some cheap cabs (about fifty cents per person) out to the suburbs to the restaurant. I couldn’t find anyone to seat us, so I went to the bar and said to the bartender, “We have a reservation for eight, where should we go? Oh, do you speak English?” He looked at me blankly, looked at his friend, and shrugged. “Sprachen zie Deutsch?” he ventured. I shook my head. “Vi govorite po-russkie?” I asked. He smiled. “Da, da.” I smiled and said, “Tak, u nas yest’...”

Eight of us were left by then, and we ordered food (good, fresh, hot food) until we were absolutely sick. We drank all kinds of fresh juices and spicy and fruity wines and ate traditional desserts, lemon-marinated chicken and slab o’ beef and soups and breads. The atmosphere was cozy and homelike, and we enjoyed a long, slightly slurred conversations about our families and where we came from. And of course talk turned to politics for a while since about 90% of our group are International Relations majors. Again, even with generous tip, it came to about $10 a person. I couldn’t believe it, I thought we had finally splurged.

Then we went back to our favorite restaurant from the night before now that we looked more presentable, and the snobby waitress didn’t bat an eyelash. We had good coffee and talked some more and then went back to the hostel. There we talked to an Australian girl who had recently gone to a smoke sauna on the Lithuania/Belarus border where you sit in a slightly smoky steam sauna until you are about to die from overheating, and then you go jump in a freezing river. You are so hot you don’t feel it at first, and then suddenly you do, and then you run back to the sauna and do it again. She said, “I reckon it’s about the best thing I’ve ever done.” So I’ll have to go back some other winter.

The next morning Liz and I got up early and went to a Bohemian neighborhood where some artists and painters and writers had kind of taken over, and we ate at a café and had vegetable fricasee and an avocado and cottage cheese and fruit and honey dessert. We wandered around the suburbs and climbed a little hill and saw a frozen soccer field that looked so forlorn. We climbed another hill to some more suburbs and saw a big highway that we followed to the river. But before we got to the river, we saw a sign that said a lot of things, and one of the things was “masazas”. We went in, and each of us ended up getting a 30-minute massage for $5. It wasn’t as deep as I needed at that point, but it was nice.

We walked along the river to the Peter and Paul church, which was really beautiful. But the door was locked, so we couldn’t get in. I bought an amber necklace on the way back to the hostel, and we also stopped by the university and looked around downtown. We had to leave for the station at 6:00.

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