quirk 30 December 2008
One of the quirks of being a visitor to Belarus is that you have to report to a police station within 3 days of arrival to have your passport stamped and further and visa verified again and so on. We’re off to do that this morning. It’s not part of the workings we see in most of the placs we go so it’ll be interesting and a tiny bit intimidating perhaps…
Our little adventure is getting in the way of the epic sleeping we’ve been doing since we got here. We have a lovely apartment on the main street and it’s v v cosy and warm so we allow ourselves as much of a lie in as we feel up to of a day – that can mean a midday start to investigations of new areas of town to us. It’s hilarious to see the two tired heads on us today because we only got 9 hours sleep last night…we’ll be easy pickings for the police and prone to admit to anything for a lie down.
We did quite native things yesterday – shopped at the huge GUM stores (these used to the the state department stores) and bought a cake at the best bakery in town. We travelled on the Metro. Confusingly, some signs are in Belarussian and some in straight Russian and the subtle differences between those languages and their alphabets is causing us some mild difficulties and I’‘m worried about pikcing up words and spellings that are not pertinent to my Russian lessons…we’ll see…still, I managed to understand instructions to the ladies loo last night in a restaurant and even checked I had by asking ‘to the right?’ in Russian. I was most pleased with myself, as simple a thing as it was.
