annabelleec

So my adventures have begun, for a lack of a better word, adventurous. I have successfully arrived in the Netherlands and am looking forward to continuing on to Germany tomorrow. However, oddly enough, I am already homesick. And this nostalgia started sooner than I had thought it would: back in the Minsk airport.

So I got to the Minsk airport with no problem and no annoying neighbours on the plane, but had to spend an hour in passport control trying to get through hordes of bickering passengers who had just arrived from Tel-Aviv and Yerevan. And for a moment there my Armenian folk made me proud of them, showing themselves as nobler and more honorable out of the two groups of people. But nobility soon gave way to the pushing and shoving, which ended in some tough looking Belarussian women having to pull people apart.

When passing passport control I was politely informed that I would need a visa before I could leave the country. Unfortunately, the politeness ended there, and all my subsequent questions were met with a stony look of a person resigned to get her job done despite the annoying customers.

Having unshakable faith in information booths, I decided to leave Ms. Cranky Pants to her work and walked courageously onto the uncharted territory of this post-Soviet but nearly European country. Once past the customs the deception was quickly uncovered: nearly European my a**. Minsk airport even smelled like it used to 20 years ago, when my mother duped me into trying the Slavic alternative to our matsoon, kefir, at the Minst airport. What a major mistake that was! Either way, I was on a quest to find an iformation booth and I was not going to let the smell of dirty mop cloths, body odor and overcooked soup deter me.

After roaming around 3 floors of the airport I finally saw the promised sign, except it was not over a booth, but over a somewhat humble looking intercom system, which had directions posted in both Russian and English, inspiring confidence and hope in me (as I lapse into English-only mode under duress, and this visa thing was stressing me out). I pushed the button and waited. When a gruff female voice finally answered on the other end my hope was shot down in a heartbeat: my weak and shaky "Excuse me" was stonewalled with a forcefull "No English" and a forlorn dial tone that followed.

When I tried asking a customs officer for help, the "No English" was coupled with a sneer, and the woman turned around and stomped away so forcefully that she nearly knocked me off my feet. This set me back a little, reminding me of my first taste of the Moscow metro. I sat down in the departures area, inhaling the bitter-sweet aroma of a Soviet era cafeteria, puzzled over not being able to find a single soul in the airport who spoke English.

Things ended when I simply gave up, deciding to figure things out as they came up, and I took advantage of the seemingly only thing in which the Minsk airport was better than Zvartnots: the cushy couches in the departures area, on which I napped for the next couple of hours.

When I was finally checking in to my flight to Amsterdam having passed passport control without problems, I realized that I had been missing the service at the airport in Yerevan, however much I may have complained about it before. I missed someone calling me "aziz jan" or "balik jan" as they did or did not try to help me.

I guess the old statement holds true - absense makes the heart grow fonder.