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Minsk Travel Guide
Minsk is as mad as a sack of bent hammers. And so are you for wanting to go there, so you’re bound to have a great time. The place can be a bit like a creepy clown – pleasing one moment, pathetic another, but always somehow a bit spooky and un-nerving. At times you won’t be sure whether you should laugh or run away. You’ll probably do both.
Minsk is where class is measured in mirror balls and acres of pink neon and style is wearing a dead rabbit on your head in winter. It strives for glamorous heights but only managing a kind of immature kitsch, like an eight-year-old girl who has just come across a bucket of sequins and a pot of glue.
Wide, clean streets are immediately appealing. Public spaces are well maintained and beautifully proportioned. If you’ve just come from a Baltic state or Poland, the absence of cracked and wonky pavements is invisibly refreshing. Safety is simply not an issue. Civil order and civic pride are guaranteed because they are enforced. It all seems too good to be true, because, well … let’s just say it’s a bit 1984.
The time-travel feeling of Minsk is one of the most striking aspects of any visit. To see flash new hotels decorated in a manner that would have made the set designer of a 1960s James Bond movie beam with pride is remarkable. To see that people here really actually think it’s cool and new is startling. They take a childlike and innocent joy in things that would be passé to your parents. It’s hard not to have some kind of baffled admiration for that.
Of course you will form your own opinions and impressions – and that’s part of the appeal of coming to Minsk. It’s so fundamentally different from both Western cities, and the Eastern European cities that surround it, that it is impossible not to have some reaction. If nothing else can be certain, Minsk is interesting.