Visa application in Belarus

When you go to Belarus, you have to have a Visa to enter. Belarus embassy in Sweden is placed in the fancy area of Lidingö, but in a ordinary building togheter with dentists and embassies from small african states. The security is on a high level. At the door a securitybabushka, meets you, looking exactly like the KGB-officer in'From Russia with love'. The embassy staff is very, and I mean very rude. The first Visa I applied for was for myself, and it was quite easy. They asked me funny questions like "What is your purpose for visiting the Ukraine?". The second for my friend Elisabeth was worse. I dont know why, but I suppose they thought us as strange. We where to swedishs male in our thirties, togheter with heavely tatooed danish circus artist female in the same age. And then Elisabeth, a seventeen year old blonde swedish girl. We where going by car and needed transit visas for 48 hours for crossing Belarus from Lithuania to the Ukraine. Elisabeth got here visa last, and they where screaming all the time for "The papers of the car". We had sent them papers of the car earlier, but it seemed like they couldnt use the same papers for more than one application. When they finally got the papers, they were quite upset about us not writing which application it was meant to be used for. "We get 25 faxes a day, how can we know that these papers are for this application?". So write the name on it. Our next problem was that Reije, the danish female, had to switch to a new passport, with here Visa stamped in the old one. We thought this to be our biggest problem at the time. We where wrong. The car, which was supposed to go from Sweden to Japan, broke down in Norrtälje at the ferry to Estonia. We fixed it in Vilnius (the problem was the start engine and we had to drive non-stop from Paldiski to Vilnius). Now our biggest problem was that the time we could stay in Belarus, according to our Visas, were very short. At the border, Reijes passport didnt give us any problems at all. They just checked her old passport with the application in it, then her new valid passport and nodded. The problems were in the customs.Our baggages was checked two times, the last time by the only english speaking in the staff, Misha. He found three cigarettes in cough drop-can and this was enough for him to suspect us to be nasty drugtraffickers. I dont really blame him. One of them was a rizzla rolled blunt-like thing, dont ever use rizzla when youre travelling. Well, after about half an hour he was done. Tobias, our driver, hade to rip the package apart and throw it in the trash. "Because this is what we call trash in Belarus" Misha stated. He asked us a lot about other drugs and political litterature too and threatend us all the time with 10 years imprisonement. After he had let us go, we did som money exchange and visited a very filthy toilet.

Minsk was fabolous. A very beutiful city. We found a restaurant where they spoke som german. The prices in Belarus are quite cheap, and Minsk is a good shopping spot for books and records. The food, was russian styled and not so good for vegetarians. But you get used to that travelling in eastern europe.

Then we got into some trouble. Our transit time was, as i mentioned earlier, very short and we had to get out of the country before midnight. We drove like hell towards the border and arrived 2 minutes before 0:00. They didnt look very happy about us arriving so late, but they let us out to the Ukraine anyway. At the ukrainian border everyone was drunk and happy. They let us in with a smile cheering us for the swedish success in the olympics. The only problem now was the very icy road...