Day 2 (July 7, 2019): Made it to Minsk!

Despite a delay leaving Toronto, and our concern about missing our connection, we ended up making up time enroute and landed in Paris right on schedule, at 8:45AM.  Unfortunately, we didn't sleep at all;  the flight attendant call button keep ringing nonstop through the entire flight.  We don't know if there was a malfunction, or if a kid was using it for sport!

It took a good two hours to deplane, do customs, get our bags, change terminals, and then check in for our connection flight, do security and another round of customs control!  Our flight to Belarus was with the state airline, Belavia.  We sat in a very hot plane for an hour, waiting for something-or-other to be rectified.  Once we finally got away, however, it was a good flight, and we ended up landing in Minsk just half an hour late.  (Tail winds have been in our favour so far!)  Unfortunately, bag delivery took a full hour, and we it took a long time to find a cab driver who wasn't trying to gouge us for triple the normal fare.

Minsk Airport is a good 45-minutes out of the city.  The honest cab driver we did find worked out well, and we made it to our hotel in central Minsk just after 6PM.  At that point, we had been up for 28 hours straight, but decided to start exploring in spite of it all.

We headed to the massive central railway station first, to buy our train tickets for Brest, Belarus, on Wednesday.  All I can say is that we never would have been able to buy them without having written up the instructions in Belarussian via Google Translate beforehand -- very little English is spoken here.

Train tickets squared away, we next headed to the very center of the city to get an initial glimpse of the grandeur of Minsk's heart, built in Soviet times.  Minsk was completely destroyed in WWII, so the city is a complete rebuild at the hands of the USSR, with post-communist capitalist add-ons springing up all over.  One is still very struck by the fact this is a city with a Soviet soul, however.

The summer peak extended daylight hours gave us enough of a boost to let us explore for a couple hours.  Then we found a cafe with a river-view for dinner and made it back to the hotel by 11PM.  We are already huge fans of the simple (two lines) but very efficient Metro system and the excellent bus network.

Minsk is THE cleanest city we have ever seen.  You could literally roll around on any sidewalk or underground pedestrian walkway and stand up again, clean as a whistle.  There isn't a speck of rubbish, a cigarette butt, or a blob of matted chewing gum or doggie-doo to be found!!  We've visited some clean cities, but Minsk takes the cake.

Getting here wasn't too bad, really.  Yes, we've been up for 32 hours at this point, but we are really liking what we've seen this evening, and we are very pumped about our next two weeks here in Eastern Europe.  Time to turn out the lights!

A perfect French village, upon descent to Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.

The lunch box on Bellavia - the state airline of Belarus - from Paris to Minsk.  Not bad!

A line of Russian-built freight planes greeted us in Minsk. No trouble to tell the lingering influences with the former USSR.

Deplaning the Bellavia Boeing 737-800 flight from Paris to Minsk.  

The very modern Renaissance Minsk Hotel where we are staying.


These very Soviet-looking buildings are called the Minsk Gate.


The Communist hammer-and-sickle emblem still dominates the Metro station platform at Plosca Lenina, near the main railway station.  The people of Minsk love their Metro - it is clean, modern, efficient and very well used.


One is quickly struck by the wide boulevards in Minsk.  Which seems odd, as very few people owned cars under the Soviet regime.


October Square, at the center of Minsk, is dominated by the Palace of the Republic (left)...


...and the Trade Union Palace of Culture.  That 'ant of a person' in the bottom-middle of the photo is Pam, to give a sense of the size and grandeur of the building.


The center of Minsk is filled with huge, stark administrative buildings reflecting the Soviet-architecture of the day in which they were built.


A war memorial in Minsk.


Another view of October Square - ground zero for any demonstrations that ever arise against the regime, such as the quashed Denim Revolution following the 2006 Belarusian presidential election.


At the Svislach River in the heart of Minsk, at sunset.


Dinner was a meal of "pelmeni" - Russian dumplings, overlooking the Svislach River.  At 9:30PM, it was still very light.  Notice the blanket:  after the record-breaking recent temperatures in Europe, people are literally wearing winter puffer jackets in the temperatures ranging from 10-18 Celsius!