Sunday, June 4, 2017.
Morning flight to Minsk, Belarus; 35 minutes gate to gate (1). I took the bus to the edge of town and caught the metro. There was no tourist info booth at the airport, so I had no map of Minsk, but I figured I would get off the train where the two metro lines met, which I presumed would be centrally located. I emerged into an enormous Soviet-era central plaza flanked by grandious government buildings. I always find these communist-era grand plazas rather sterile (2).
I found a more active neighborhood nearby (upper town) and sat outdoors for lunch. A family was sitting nearby. The father and daughter left for a few minutes and returned with a large bouqet of red roses for the mother/wife, who was quite pleased.
Near the restaurant, I saw a sign for a horse tram museum, and went to take a quick look. I think the attendant was pleased that someone came to visit and she seemed to understand my pidgin Russian for "one ticket please."
A long walk took me to Victory park and the museum of the Great Patriotic War (i.e., World War 2). The first exhibit hall discussed Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 (3). There is a fairly accurate (but small) exhibit on the American provision of war matériel and the bravery of British sailors in delivering these supplies to Soviet Arctic ports. As the various phases of the war progress, you reach higher levels in the building, but the museum is rarher dark inside. At the end, you enter a grand rotunda with a large glass dome. On the sunny day I was there, the room was bathed in brilliant light, which had a very uplifting effect (as I assume the architect intended).
A walk to rhe other side of town led to the building where Lee Harvey Oswald lived when he defected to the Soviet Union, before he returned to the US and assasinated President Kennedy (4). A quick visit to the cat "museum" to play with some cats, and then it was back to the airport for the night flight to Yerevan, Armenia. I helped the old woman next to me on the flight who did not know how to buckle or unbuckle her seat belt!
(1) Vilnius to Mink is just over 100 miles. I would normally take the train such a short distance, but arrival in Belarus by any means other than by plane to Minsk requires the hassle and expense of getting a visa ahead of time. You can visit for up to 5 days visa-free flying into Minsk.
(2) There are similar overly-large and communist-era sterile central squares I've visited in Tirana, Albania and Chisinau, Moldova. Such large squares and grand boulevards can also make it easier to put down insurrections should the need arise (a).
(3) The Soviets also invaded Poland in accord with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact in which the Germans and Soviets agreed to divide Poland between them. A few panels later, the exhibit discussed how the Soviet Union "reunited western Belarus," which is an interesting euphemism for the Soviet invasion of Poland.
(4) There is no indication on the building of Oswald's residence here. I Googled what to do in Minsk during lunch and the address of the apartment came up. According to a New York Times article in 2012, the KGB closely monitored Oswald while he was in Minsk because they had no idea why he had defected (b).
(a) Some believe the grand boulevards of Paris were designed by Haussmann in the late 1800s for the same purpose, as Paris had experienced a number of revolts in the 1800s.
(b) "Defected" is a word from the cold war we don't use much anymore.
I so want to visit the cat museum.
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