By Linda Thalman & Pierre Nagel |
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Belarus
Friday, 19 June 2009 Our next destination: Brest just a kilometer across the border between Poland and Belarus.
It turned out much faster although very surrealistic. No one speaks French or English, but we get hustled to various booths for getting personal and car insurance (2 Euros each in coins); then registering the car itself, then customs. Finally we are done and make our way to the large (very large!) city of Brest. It is so spread out, we just cannot find the center of town. It took us an hour! Of course we have no idea what "city center" might be in cyrillic. Also, the country is not covered at all by our GPS map. We finally find the hotel, check in and go for a drive to the famous fort. More rain. We took cover in the busy central market.
Saturday, 20 June 2009 The next day we drive the 400 kilometers from Brest to the capital Minsk on the motorway. But we do make a diversion to the two Unesco heritage sites. At the Mir castle, there was an enormous music festival being set up, so we could not visit the inside. But we did visit the Nesvizh castle that had belonged to an aristocratic family. We experienced the same problem of finding the city center in Minsk. Where is it? These cities have many many sectors of large residential buildings (much nicer than the old Soviet concrete blocks) interspersed with green parks and woods. So when you think you are approaching a city center, in fact, it is just a suburb. Finally we get there and cruise down the main boulevard twice before checking in to the hotel. Although the hotel has wifi access in the lobby, Pierre did get cut off whenever he downloaded his daily Le Monde newspaper and also when connecting to our server using encrypted protocols.
It's a big agricultural city with some old factories and apparently was also the site of a Soviet missile base. Finally we crossed the border quite quickly and arrived in Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania. Linda writes: We were at the Belarus border at 13:00 and made it through customs, health insurance, car insurance, passports, visas and who knows what else they wanted for papers by 14:00. Border control took an hour... we don't speak Russian and the border control folks don't seem to speak English, French, German, Spanish, Italian or any other language we have some notion of. But we made it into Belarus. We weren't sure if we'd be visiting a country like Romania some 20 years ago or not. Well, it didn't seem like it in most respects. Brest and even more so, the capital city Minsk, are pretty modern. Good public transport, nice restaurants, reasonably nice hotels, very pretty parks, shops full of food, clothes, shoes, consumer items, markets, bars, coffee shops,... Every body seems to have a cell phone; there are lots of cars and new ones at that. It's just a couple kilometers to Brest from the border but we managed to miss the MAIN street and went for a frustrating drive through the northeast suburbs. Neither of us speak or read or understand Russian and there is a dearth of signs in Roman characters. A very quick study of the cyrillic alphabet helps a bit but it's a real challenge. And our GPS doesn't have Belarus so we really did have to wing it. Pulling up at Hotel Vesta was a relief. We were checked in very quickly and a French-speaking receptionist sorted us out.
My mouth dropped and thought oh my gosh, where will be find another hotel? But she assured us they had rooms available and she also kindly phoned Minsk to confirm our reservation for Saturday night. Quirky room furnishings, TV, fridge, bathroom with bath/shower for 122,000 Belarus currency per night, including breakfast and parking. We headed for the Brest Fort -- with its gigantic stone scupture, about 800 meters from the parking lot. This is a Soviet World War II memorial. There's also the oldest church in town close by. No entry fee to visit. Splattering rain and overcast sky pushed us to do a drive around the town. We stopped at the Central Market for a walkabout at the end of the day. Lots of fruit and veg, fish, pork, beef, chicken, canned goods, flowers in abundance. Two beers cost the equivalent of one euro a the market drinks stand. Dinner with an Indian flavor at the Jules Verne restaurant was delicious. One might have thought the cusine would have been French, but it was mostly Asian and Indian with a few Italian dishes thrown in. Restaurants in Belarus don't have neither big signs nor menus displayed outside. It's almost as if they are hiding the places to eat. We tried both a white and red Georgian wine by the glass. 133,000 Belarus rubles for the meal: 2 starters, 2 mains, wine and tea. Saturday, 20 June One hundred kilometers west of Minsk are two sites to visit. Mir Castle is a UNESCO site built in the 16th century. Unfortunately, we weren't able to visit it as there was a a local festival going on and the crowds of locals pressing to get in through a tiny door one person at a time every three minutes. We gave that up and drove to Nesvizh Castle, owned by the Radziwill family dating back to 1533. Three-forths of the castle is undergoing renovation. There's a modest museum and the walk along the tree-lined, cobblestone causeway is pleasant. Minsk, the capital city has about 1.7 million people, it is really spread out and just full of ring roads and huge thoroughfares. Our hotel, the Belarus, is a 23-story high building with views on the city center and the river Svislach. Double room, breakfast 885,70 rubles; parking 10,000 rubles; internet cards for 3 hours were cheap.
Driving tip: tolls on the freeway for foreign cars must be paid in dollars or euros only. Rubles not accepted and no use trying to argue with the toll booth folks. Our afternoon stroll took us to the main drag, Praspek Francyska Skaryny. It's an 11 kilometer long avenue full of cars and buses and people. The restaurant we'd picked out for dinner was closed! So we took a taxi back to the old town; a young fellow helped us explain to the taxi driver where we wanted to go. Very kind and helpful! Then at the Banana restaurant we had a chicken stew with potato pancakes and a Greek salad, recommended by an English/French speaking Lebanese/Belarussian fellow -- again ever so helpful as the menu was only in Russian. We had 2 main dishes, 1 salad and drinks for 75,000 rubles.
Baltic Trip By Linda Thalman And Pierre Nagel
Email – Linda@wfi.fr
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We expected possibly a very long wait at the Belarus border post, as we remembered a five-hour wait for six cars entering
Romania in 1988.
In the evening we identify a lovely restaurant and order a glass of good Georgian wine.
Sunday morning we set off to Lithuania, going through Smorgon, the birthplace of my great-grandmother (Rebecca Maschlinkera)
who left in the 1890's to go to Belgium.
In passing she said the tourist agency had cancelled our reservation this morning.
We took a lovely walk past the Island of Tears to the upper and old town, known as the Traetskae Prodmestse or
Trinity Suburb.
Paris
