Day 12: Back in the EU

Today was mostly a driving day; however, there were some nice bits throughout the day.

We left The hotel in Minsk and drove to a memorial that honored Belarusian Jews that were sent to concentration camps. The memorial is quite poignant. You can feel the fear and despair as the sculpture shows the people lining up to go into a gas chamber. It was very moving.

We made a brief bathroom stop at a gas station and I noticed crab-flavored chips. They must be popular in Belarus because there were three different types!

After that stop we continued our journey to Warsaw. We stopped at a city called Brest (still in Belarus) just before the Polish border for lunch. It was a nice lunch and I have very much been enjoying the soups and authentic meals. After lunch we drive to the Belarusian border where we were able to line up and go through their customs rather quickly. We all boarded the bus again and went to the Polish border. This was another story. We ended up being there about 3.5 hours. We had to unload the bus of all our belongings, luggage and all. We went through customs and had to re board the bus again. I don’t know how our driver did it. He had to pull out all our suitcases and then reload them again. There has to be about 40 full size suitcases plus carryon luggage! Anyways, we continued our way to Warsaw. We arrived at our hotel just after 7pm. We had dinner for the group at 7:30pm. We said goodbye to our driver, Tomas, at the dinner as he was leaving our group to take mandatory time off after being with us for 12 straight days. He was a great part of our tour. He taught me how to properly pronounce my last name in Polish. :-) He reminded me a lot of Chris actually. He was quite tall, always smiling and a gentleman, very helpful with a calming energy.

PS: today’s blog may post be late as WiFi has been spotty in my room.