br23 blog - minsk, belarus

I don’t know much about German journalism, but today I had one opportunity to witness how “fast” and “efficient” their work is. Our main opposition leader Alexander Milinkevich met with Bundeskanzler Angela Merkel today. The meeting ended at about 5PM. It’s already past 9PM, but there is not a single news item, and nor there’s […]

23 (imdb entry) is a great movie. It’s a German production, and I decided to watch it on a Saturday evening almost by accident, just because I always look out for my favorite number. And I think I just discovered another dimension to my own internet identity, with some strikiing similarities…
“The movie is based on […]

This happened several months ago at Minsk-2 international airport. Minsk mayor M.Paulau together with our Russian Orthodox (sic!) clergymen baptized an Austrian Airlines airplane Fokker-100, dubbing it “Minsk”.
I saw the news report on the state TV, and it was bizarre, like watching a tribal ritual, Orthdox clergy being the savages. A black-clothed priest was walking […]

It seems Russians screwed up yet again. They are going to sell gas to themselves for $230, while Ukraine is going to get it for $95 per 1000 cubic meters. That obscure Austrian-Russian intermediate company is created by “Gazprom” just to safe face. It’s funny to observe the Russian blogosphere and see how many Nazi […]

Toronto Star published a brilliant commentary about Vladimir Putin’s best friend Gerhard Schroeder:
It’s one thing for a legislator to resign his job, leave his committee chairmanship and go to work for a company over whose industry he once had jurisdiction. It’s quite another thing when the chancellor of Germany leaves his job and goes to […]

A German linguist Sonja Heyl from Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität Institut für Slawistik has written a Belarusian language study guide, which will be published in 2006. It’s already listed on amazon.de:
• Lehrbuch der weißruthenischen Sprache (250 pages, 29 euro)
• Audio-CD, weißruthenische Sprache (19 euro)
That’s nice to know someone is doing this. So far, the only Belarusian-language book […]

The effects of the internal struggle inside the “grand coalition” in Germany can be felt even in Belarus.
A Chrisitan democrat Georg Schirmbeck after visiting Minsk last week sharply critisized Belarusan regime in his interviews to German media, calling it “last dictatorship of Europe”, saying that Belarus is showing “revival of Stalin’s traditions”, and calling for […]

This week Belarusian Culture and Education Center in Poznan (Poland) started collecting signatures against Russian language broadcasts of “Deutsche Welle” to Belarus…
To the credit of “Deutsche Welle”, though, it must be said that two weeks ago their Belarusan page has became bilingual: in addition to Russian, about 30-50% of their materials are being published in […]

After looking at the more traditional outsourcing venues in Asia, the German bank decided to build its state-of-the-art development centre in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, which is within a two-and-a-half hour flight from Frankfurt. So, just what was the lure? Minsk isn’t the most forward, wealthy or democratic of cities, but hey, it’s safer […]

Did you know that we have a lot of loan German words in Belarusian language? For the most part they came to Old Belarusian via Polish, when we were living in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, being a real European nation. Just to give you an example, here are a few German words that end […]