We had an exhausting tour of the dug-up streets as we headed into badly lit basement of a local police station to complete the ritualistic process of 'passport registration'. With me and Jeannine was our apartment company manager who was functioning as translator and transliterator (my name doesn't transliterate easily) as well as calming her fractious kid. I also learned later that despite being hated by the US, Belarus uses US dollars as a de-facto second currency. And the banks won't accept any notes that have been folded. Weird. My ever-reliable girlfriend found the one bank in the city which accepts Pounds in exchange. In some ways the streets could be anywhere. We have Maestro signs in every shop and a generally European street furniture and vibe and then there is the alphabet, the number of army and officials on the streets and the brutalist architectural style of essentially Soviet buildings. All this bureaucracy is driving me mad, I hope its over. My nice little short wave radio is pounding out the nicely multi-lingual Alpha Radio but I have to make an incursion into the written world because presently I'm gambling on context and guesswork.
We bought a dictionary and now I at least know the city's name is MИHCK (the И is always I, the C is always S) and Russia is POCCИA. I'm not sure what Belarus is, because the dictionary only offers "Byelorussia", which is outdated.
When was the Soviet Union, Belarus was called Bielorussia. But after it was collapsed in 1991, they cut the last part if the word, and now it's BELASUS (БЕЛАРУСЬ in Russian and Belarusian).
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