This is another fleeting experience of my home continent, the Atlantic Ocean colony of Madeira.

Oddly, Madeira is of Europe but not in Europe.The same can be said of Belarus. Despite bordering Russia and Poland, the country remains an outpost of outdated Soviet-era logic.

Belarus in 2006

The journey here started with two night buses and a changeover in Trafalgar Square in an atmosphere best described as "tetchy".

Heathrow was an eerily quiet place, gearing up very slowly for a rush-hour I'd never see and there are no LOT desks, everyone is filtered through BMI, but nonetheless my luggage and my check-in for both flights was done right there. Plane arrived on time at the Warsaw Frederic Chopin Airport (Port Lotniczy im. F. Chopina) and I was greeted by an X-ray bag check despite being on an "internal" EU flight. When it was over I ran through to the transfer area to be greeted by a clock bearing a time past the "boarding time" on my ticket.
A remarkably unflustered LOT rep told me that it was the 'boarding time' not the departure time though, so I settled down for a wait.

Sitting on the Brasilian Embraer 170 and devouring the chocolate, pretzels and spreads they throw at me. I've never eaten so much snack food on a journey before than on that flight, all of it free too.

On arrival in Minsk, Belarusian entry immigration was a lot less complicated and long-winded than I had been led to expect. I wish that could be said for the rest of the process. After an exhausting tour of the pot-holed streets, myself and my companion Jeannine headed into badly lit basement of a local police station to complete the ritualistic process of 'passport registration'. The journey started with myself and Jeannine meeting our apartment company manager ,who was functioning as translator and transliterator (my name doesn't transliterate easily), as well as calming her fractious child.

In some ways the streets could be anywhere. We have Maestro signs in every shop and a generally European street furniture and vibe.

But 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 would later learn 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.

My ever-reliable companion found the one bank in the city which accepts Pounds in exchange.

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.

My companion Jeannine brought me some books she had also been given in English to help my Russian learning. A quick update - she's here to learn the language. Vocabulary is beyond me but I'm trying to get the alphabet nailed because at the moment I'm frightened to even leave the flat in case I get lost (and it doesn't help that street names are in Belorussian, a close but not exactly the same language as Russian).

I settled down to watch the Russian version of Ugly Betty. The Metro station is across the park from the end of our development but they don't have any network maps, on the walls or on paper.
On the plus side, I got out of the flat fine and there's a supermarket (and bureau de change) at the Зacnaвkar (Zaslavskaya) end of our street where I grabbed some Kommunarka chocolate, locally produced.

The evening finished with us eating the Belarusian cheap pasta dumplings known as Pelmini with a Japanese class-mate of Jeanne's, Marie.

I had thought that the perception that Belarus' president Lukashenko dominates news was overblown, but when he does speak he dominates the news. At least 10 minutes of a 20 minute bulletin was him.
Considering the tight control over news, Belarus broadcasts a lot of news bulletins, most have hourly updates.

Saturday and Sunday we had Marie and another of Jeanne's friend's "Alvan" Fu around.
On Saturday the three of us went to the large indoor market and then came home to see a Manchester United game was on TV, live (on the ЛAД channel of Belarussian TV).

On Sunday morning me, Jeanne and Alvan, a Taiwanese fellow student, packed into a bus with a guide with Russian verbal diahorrea and with Jeanne's room-mate, a Mongolian woman named Mogi. Our destination was the fortress at Mир (Mir, a Russian word meaning both 'world' and 'peace'). The building was light brown and crennelated and the weather was so cold we were glad to get back on the bus and head for the second stop at Несвиж (Neshvits).

Несвиж has a seminary and a church including over-excited icon-sellers. The seminary is atop a hill in a huge park with beautiful tree lined boulevards and despite the time of year, the trees were in full autumn yellow. If you had seen a picture it would have looked like August, but the air was very cold. In a mass of cold unhappiness, we trooped through the park listening to tales of various statues and of the war memorial before collapsing back onto the bus.

All war memorials in Belarus contain an eternal flame, powered directly from mains gas in a show of energy control in the country. The show of power would seem ironic now, given the recent tension between the country and Russia over supply costs.

Russia has a strange and strained relationship with Belarus. The two countries are legally considered to be partners in a customs union, the majority of the media and fuel supply come directly from Russia and yet Russia's state controlled gas company Gazprom has asked for market price from its neighbour and the previously enthusiastically unionist Belarus president has come out against the system, suggesting he didn't want to be annexed.

Jeanne, Marie, me and Jeanne's German room-mate Sarah headed into the rarefied air of the Palace of the Republic on Lenin Square to watch a ballet reproduction of a Belarussian folk tale. The venue is a temporary home to the ballet company, whose name is National Academic Bolshoi Theatre Ballet of the Republic of Belarus. With no knowledge of Russian, I presume it is "the" Bolshoi. When in fact all that the name means is "the large ballet company".

An American film called Open Season was enjoyed by me, Jeanne and Alvan although the plot was a bit formulaic. We preceded it by a necessary trip to McDonalds, where we were greeted by names such as БИГ МАК (if I tell you the Г is a gamma, you should be able to guess).

The weather has turned (really) cold and the snow has arrived. Alvan told us that the attitude in Minsk is "if it's positive then its 'warm'" and I now know what he means. We posted post-cards in the monolithic post office whose innards are structured in a manner of smaller kiosks, a favourite arrangement of Belarus. We also booked our tickets for the slow trek down to the closest city to the Russian border, and Belarus' second largest, Gomel. The snow is falling heavily as I look through the guidebooks I also bought. Basically information based but nonetheless 'officially approved'.

Today was our second trip to the Aurora Lazunia (?) cinema, this time to watch an Aardman/DreamWorks cartoon called Flushed Away which is about a rat discovering life in the London sewers after being flushed down the toilet by his flatmate for objecting to the football being on TV. Where he arrives is also a model of London, complete with Big Ben and Tower Bridge and England lose the football to Germany - on penalties (a joke I had to explain later). A very English film full of English jokes and easy to understand even when dubbed into Russian.
After the film we alighted on a restaurant called Tempo which followed the much loved Belarussian style of self-service buffets but which otherwise felt like a restaurant with no real hurry to leave.

Tonight we headed off to the cinema again, this time to the Kinotheatr Oktobr to watch the decidely less chilled out "The Departed", which was originally a Chinese film and then was re-made recently with Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo di Caprio. To cut a long story short, all but one character is dead horribly by the end. I won't tell you who is left.

Mari and Meetja went to his, we others headed off to find something to eat. After what seemed like an age of walking and even the false dawn of a restaurant open but too expensive, we alighted on a Tempo-esque restaurant called Lido. Apparently it's 4.8km we walked before...

We started today by souvenir hunting, which in the end even needed us to buy a new bag to carry it all home! Anyway, we then went on to the National Library and I paid 5000 roubles and had my passport scanned before being given a Cyrillic name and an ID and let into the recently completed, spectacularly beautiful and pointlessly vast viewing area. There seems to be very little evidence of actual books, but Lukashenka did stare out from one glass cabinet. The new building had mixed reviews from our local friends and at night the glass shell with embedded lightbulbs lights up in a number of different patterns including the national flag. The membership card is really nice to have, but the trip was surreal.

In a moment I will run down yesterday, but first I must warn people against sitting (as I am) in the transfer area of the Frederick Chopin International Airport in Warsaw. It is so obviously not designed for long waits and when we finally did get through the gate we were subjected to the x-ray scan which logic says could have been made when we arrived on the connection. Ho hum, the Polish border guards are so enjoyably thorough!

A positive thought though, the restaurant food was nice and the staff spotted me struggling with the tray and physically carried it to the table for me, leaving me (with no knowledge of Polish or prices in Zloty) with a great impression of the Poles in general.

Anyway... yesterday, we three went to the Museum of the Great Patriotic War (which actually looks more like a factory than a museum) on Lenin Square, next to the Republican Palace where we saw the ballet. The building is vast and the tanks are largely hidden in the backyard. Not that unusually, photography was banned unless you paid (is the point to secure the artifacts or to make money?)
For the unitiated, the GPW is World War II and the museum starts by outlining in depth the cost of the war to Belarus. The country lost a quarter of its pre-War population and the numbers on individual settlements are astounding.
Belarus endured a period of German occupation whilst the Bundeswehr worked towards Moscow and like most occupied land there is a paper trail of German language material - which at least allowed me to follow events in the absense of Russian.
In the broader scheme of things, the museum also reflected on UK-US-USSR joint efforts (including a leaflet from the British War Department headlined "Our Red Army Ally" - why did they have to be so explicit?!) and finally on Belarus's place in the USSR.
Seeing the Russian side of the war is a bit of a shock to someone who has grown up in England and is used to the Western front coverage predominating.

Our final stop on my stay in Belarus was the central branch of the National Art Museum of Belarus (with another branch being at Mir) which is basically an unremarkable art gallery charging ridiculous prices (especially if you are a tourist).

In the absense of any pictures of my own (wasn't allowed), I would seriously suggest anyone visit here.

For some cracking pictures of the metro stations, in all their grey glory. And also a weird sculptury thing at Frunzenskaya (our home station) which I never did get explained....

During the trip, we also headed down to Gomel.

4 hour bus journey to Gomel and then we met Jeannine's 16-year old friend Vitalik, our host for the weekend. He lives in a village called Kaorma (Kopma). The church here has the Crypt of St. Nikolai and attracts pilgrims to its little village church.

The city of Gomel where we alighted from Minsk was unremarkable to be honest, possibly due to the effects of being the nearest major centre of population to Chernobyl. We wandered around in the freezing cold until the Mashrudka (?) arrived. These are similar to Turkish Dolmus except run with Russian efficiency.

We were given a guided tour of this remarkable village with its iconic and beautiful blue church by Vitalik.
The village was completely frozen and the slightly slippy pathways had become ice-rinks.

The church (hopefully a picture will be on here soon) was packed with holidaying pilgrims and the smells and sights were unmistakably Catholic (or 'bells and smells' to use a pajorative). Honestly it seemed like an event worthy of a bigger building but maybe the village could not cope were this to be the case.
We also met Vitalik's extended family, some of whom had lived in Belarus before he himself made the journey here in 2004.
Originally his family and he were all living in Tashkent,Uzbekistan and he obviously has great affection for the area. My lack of language skill is beginning to be a real burden but the change of vocal tone allows me to get "Pajalsta" in my mind (it means 'please') when several attempts by Jeannine had failed.

We walked together through the frozen landscape for a while after the church but we returned home once I fell over. By that point the weather had broken the minuses and was -5.

This morning we clambered aboard the Mashrudka (morning driver is more sane than the night time one) and then aboard the 4 hour bus home, saying goodbye to a really nice guy in the process. I'm sure we'll see him again at some point, and we'll definately hear from him. I had noticed these flags flying from every lamp-post and as we entered Minsk there were also blue ones added to the red and green. All the bunting was because of Republic Day, the celebration of the October Revolution which brought the Soviet Union eventually into being. To cover this briefly... Belarus is in some ways a country whose politics are still heavily tied to the Soviet Union, the flag is basically the Soviet-era republic flag, the squares and streets and statues to Lenin still stand and shout but day to day there is little evidence of Soviet propaganda and even the partially formed 'union state' which is a Customs Union between Belarus and Russia seems to have mixed messages at its heart with Russia hinting at full integration and Belarus' President Lunkashenko insisting that is not what he wants. And there was no mass evidence of anything unusual on that day, except the (unexplained) flags.
When we got home the TV was full of revolution anniversary coverage from across Belarus and snippets from corners of Ukraine and all over Russia shot sympathetically so as to make it look more spectacular.