2009: Minsk Tourist Information (Belarus)

This was the place where my map said the Tourist Information Office was... well, it was me who assumed it would be an office. Actually, all there was was this sign.

The same was true at the train station... Information just means that you'll find a sign or board with information on it, always in Russian. Absolutely nobody at the train station spoke English so I had to book my ticket using whatever extremely rudimentary Russian I could piece together. At first I figured I would fall back on using a travel agent - there was one of those in my hotel - but travel agents don't book tickets. They just book vacations. If I wanted to go to Spain for two weeks in the sun, they would be glad to help me. Booking a train ticket, no, you have to do that at the train station.

OK. Back to the train station. For a while, I thought I would be stuck in Minsk until I could learn enough Russian to figure out how to buy a ticket to leave the country. But I eventually figured out where international train tickets are sold (in a separate building further down the square), and figured out that the train I needed to take to go from Minsk to Vienna was the Moscow-Prague train. Great! Now at least I knew what to look and ask for. But whenever I tried to pay for it, the woman at the ticket desk pushed my money back toward me with a firm "nyet." Why wouldn't she let me buy a ticket?

The woman finally pulled out her cellphone to call a translator. This was how important things were always communicated at my local hotel in Saigon as well... the people who ran that hotel didn't speak a single word of English so what they thought I didn't understand in Vietnamese, if it was important, was translated by someone at the other end of a cellphone. That's how I found out that, although advance reservations were required for my 22-hour Minsk-Vienna trip, they would only be available starting at 10:45 pm the day before travel.

I see... I have to come back.

Something about Minsk made me want to come back anyway. Not just to the train station, but to the city with its fascinating mix of Soviet past and undefined future; its friendly but shy people, so eager to talk once they got started, even if the conversation was thoroughly broken. Maybe it's not a stupid time to learn Russian after all.

Best hot chocolate in the world at Cafe Stary Mensk.