wandering 29 December 2008
We wandered about the town yesterday with only vague intentions and it’s a great way to get a feel for a place. We bought 2 train tickets at the station as we’ll be leaving by train to Vilnius and flying back to Dublin from there – no idea why that became the plan in the long ago but it’s the plan now so it is, so it is. We ended up at the station because we’d got the wrong end of town in our heads for where the Old Town is. Most of Misk was bombed to nothing in WW2 and after and is largely rebuilt so that’s why there is so much large, Stalinist style architecture – in all the photos it looks very grey but it’s quite alright up close and not half as foreboding as you might think. A more recent structure is a bit of a hoot – it’s the library which is a mad-looking hexagonal building on a pedestal and is known in local mutterings as The Death Star because of its resemblance to the DS in the Star Wars movies. It’s lit up at night, like all of Minsk – the town really comes into its own then. Anyhow, we were the wrong end of town completely for any so called ancient stuff and saw a lot of apartment buildings which were as nodescript as in any other place on earth. Today we are venturing into the huge public building in the main square which is massively abustle with types each day and we’re bursting to know what’s going on in there. The sqaure will be central to New Year celebrations and has a very impressive Fir tree all lit up – apparently it was the one thing the people couldn’t give up during the darkest days of communism so it was held onto as a tradition and modified by the powers that be.
We watched some hilariously dodgy Belarussian stand-up comedy on tv last night and both of us could tell it was really quite quite bad – I even guessed a punchline before it happened and am sure I was right – it was a sektch about 2 underwater divers and I am certain, after they went through their paces straddling two chairs, one said to the other ‘and tomorrow we’ll even go in the water’
