Breezed into Minsk on a Belavia Canada Air jet from Kiev.  Driving in from the airport on the smooth tarmac of an immaculate but apparently abandoned highway we get our first impressions of obedient life behind closed doors.  We exchange platitudes and make clichéd jokes as we enter a city we know nothing about except Lukashenko. We are greeted by tastefully highlighted high-rises. More than once there are policemen controlling solitary drivers on the broad boulevards with little traffic illuminated by countless streetlights. There are a lot of buildings with myriads of blinking colourful lights. This city is bright as if to show that it has nothing to hide. We’ll see about that tomorrow, we have scheduled sightseeing for noon.

I had a dinner of solyanka and cumin bread with the band and the local organizer and learned about our concert here in Minsk, the day after tomorrow. It seems we will be performing for 200 carefully selected patrons who forked over 95$ for a ticket.  Not what we expected after playing an almost full October palace (which can accommodate 2000) in Kiev yesterday. The organizer invited us to a grand opening of a beauty salon for the next evening, so we have a tightly scheduled off day - our first and only one on this tour.

In my tastefully furnished room on the seventh floor at the Victoria Hotel, there are two TV channels of interest; one is TCM running “Soylent Green” with Charlton Heston.  That’s appropriate because, with the climate catastrophe constantly on my mind, I have been thinking about this movie a lot lately.  It is alarming to see science-fiction visions of the seventies come true in our lifetime.

There is so much to tell since we left “our home away from home”, the SAS Radisson Kiev, at 2 p.m. this afternoon.  It was nice to be able wash the mire of Odessa and Shock Number 4 off my skin there.  Shock number 4 in Odessa came upon Hotel Check-Out at the Black Shit - pardon me - Black Sea Hotel.  The management of the Sady Pobedy Club responsible for paying for our hotel rooms had not done so.  The receptionist wouldn’t let us leave so our local girl was forced to pay the tab.  We hurried off to the train station to wipe this Odessa we didn’t like out of our minds and to remember it as the somewhat sleepy old town by the black sea that brought forth poets and thinkers. In the rather lengthy, overheated train ride towards Kiev, I rose in my sleep and raved about a man with glasses standing in our tiny sleeping car compartment. There was of course no one there except us two but Siggi couldn’t go back to sleep after my somnambulist attack while I had barely woken.

While Edward J. Robinson’s “Sol” character is taking his last breath to Griegs “Peer Gynt” Suite and Charlton Heston’s “Thorn” is discovering that “Soylent Green” is made out of people, I am again thinking of Odessa.  What a trip!  I was so bewildered by the everything, I refused to have my picture taken at the Odessa train station by some Ukrainian students who couldn’t afford tickets for the Sady Pobedy.  I am truly sorry about this but I just wasn’t up to it with my knit cap pulled low in my unmade-up, private face. My apologies. Karl, Pit and Otto took were game though, so the students left us, not entirely disappointed.

Back in Kiev, I immediately abandoned my duties as a chronicler and overindulged on all the extra features of luxury hotel life like someone who’s braved the desert and has finally discovered an oasis.  There is free Internet, an enticing steam bath, a clean bed and a television to catch up with. The images of the sorrows of the world passed by my zapping eyes bringing back things I had all but forgotten in the past few days of no media and eventful travelling.  Mumbai, Pakistan, Athens - nothing really new. People still don’t get along. 

But we do: at our concerts. In those rare moments the audience can witness that all musicians on stage are one and the applause showed us that that this concert in Kiev was a good one. This is the priceless privilege of the musician:  to bring people together into a peaceful setting with one universal language. While things ran smoothly with my companions, I had a few setbacks that evening though.  I nearly lost my satin gown which looks like a million dollars but wasn’t worth the 249 € I paid for it at OTTO mail order. The glamorous neck-holder, which is the glittering highlight of the dress, just popped open in the middle of “Dummes Spiel” and I managed to hold on to it while singing thus avoiding a double nipple gate. While I was trying to be elegant about the fact that I was losing it, my earrings decided to leave my person and thus stripped I left the stage flustered.  I did manage to grab hold of myself in the second half and our audience left us feeling like kings.

We had a small and fast get-together with the Big band and finally got to know each other over vodka, wine, and beer and snacks our local promoter sponsored for us although he has been losing money despite our new Big Adventure. Times are hard and people think twice about spending their hard earned cash on concerts. We insisted on paying for this after show party but he has repeatedly refused to take our money. He is being a good sport about it, and though he smiles sadly at us he remains quite professional by not pestering us artists with his worries, and tries to soften the heart of our stalwart tour manager instead, when he gets a hold of her.

Back at the hotel, I fall into a dreamless slumber until my phone rings at 8:30 and another priceless incident occurs.  There is a man on the phone and his name is George.  As I drowsily come to my senses he enquires whether my name is Patricia and if I by chance own a computer that hails under the name Macbook Air2 and is floating around in the wireless hotel network.  He tells me has been liberally exploring my hard disk and advises that I change the free access of my hard disk for all users willing to log into it.  Apparently the new Leopard system seems to make file access of other computers a piece of cake, after all the years of users despairing at pairing up machines in a local network.  As I change my network preferences and my laptops name to “Airbaby” we start to chat amicably as if we’ve known each other for years.  He’s got a nice voice and he’s pretty sharp for 8:30 in the morning.  It turns out he’s a pilot and he chauffeurs anyone who can afford his Bombardier Challenger 300 all over.  His company caters mostly to Russian clientele and we exchange experiences that involve such affluent individuals. He is Hungarian and a music lover and although he confesses he downloads music freely from the Internet, I invite him to our next concert in Budapest – whenever that will be.  While we speak we “google” each other and become “Facebook” friends.  He offers us a ride to Vienna which I must decline since we have flight plans for Minsk and can’t get him to stop there before he returns to Vienna, because he says his boss will kill him.  An hour passes and I rarely notice.  We part promising to meet and later really do saying hello in passing in the hotel lobby, where I am checking out and he is checking back in, because his company wants him to stay in Kiev an extra day.  These are the moments when Globalisation can be promising.

And thus we dine one last time at the TURGENEF Restaurant that sponsored our entire stay in Kiev by supplying wonderful dinners, lovingly packed doggy bags and excellent catering.  We smiled for photographs and left signed CD’s for Alexandr and Evgeniy, two great and discreet waiters who gave the word service a new dimension.

So there it is 48 hours on tour in a nutshell.  I rest my case.

I would also like to apologise for refusing to have my picture taken at Odessa trainstation last night, I simply wasn't looking my best.