счёт пожалуйста: Minsk money-wise

Something you immediately notice is the strange money they have. They have their own currency, called roubles as in Russia, but it is worth less than the Italian Lira in its latest days.



Therefore, the first time I was shocked, when I had to pay like a hundred thousand for a less than average supermarket shopping. Otherwise, however, I had that great feeling of almost being a millionaire already in my wallet. Fascinatingly, the clerks at the supermarket checkouts all can count money as admirably fast as everywhere else only bankers can do it. Astonished, I took my groceries I just paid what would be a fortune in other currencies for and got change in form of a huge bunch of notes with big numbers and strolled through the sliding doors feeling like a small tycoon.

Obviously, having to fit so many noughts on a coin is a bit inconvenient, therefore as an easy solution, there are plainly no coins. The big advantages in that approach, the light weight of your wallet and the absence of metal in it, are however, outweighed by the inconvenience of having to pick the note with the right denomination in a fist full of them. The colours, or my poor memory of associating the right number of noughts to a colour, make it a bit difficult to be fast and as an additional challenge, the number is always on the last spot you gaze at and instead your eye always catches a long string of Cyrillic letters that are basically useless as a clue to foreigners.

The absence of coins, makes it quite difficult for the rouble to roll in and therefore, the economical situation in Belarus is not very positive &ndsh; despite president Lukashenko's denial of a financial crisis in his New Year's address. A short word on prices, some of my dear readers might be interested in: groceries are about at the Western European level as are prices in restaurants and going out in general. Transport on the other hand is cheap and a train ticket for the four hours to Vilnus was only – gasp – 19 000 roubles, a mere £4.77 and a single metro ticket in Minsk is priced at 600 roubles, which are 15p.

Due to the financial crisis – ah, sorry, the free will of the government of Belarus, only ever doing good to its people – the rouble was devaluated by a fifth right at the beginning of the New Year and it is these instable rates that make currency exchange offices boom all throughout the city as even the locals like to keep their savings in more solid currencies as US dollar or Euro. You can even find ATMs handing out roubles and Euros or Dollars quite frequently although only roubles are allowed for payments.