"Homestead.org in the Former Soviet Union" by Neil Shelton

"I picked Gomel because from my typical-American viewpoint, a map, it looked like one of the smaller places I could find and where I could make connections for a translator and an apartment... I was later to learn that the 'quiet little village' I was expecting was a city of 500,000, or about half again as large as St. Louis."

I don’t suppose anyone likes to consider themselves average, but I am NOT the average tourist.

Sure, I love to travel and enjoy the romance of finding myself walking around in cities of the world that I have only read about in the past, but as the cliché' goes, “you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy”.

That’s why wherever I go, no matter how many museums or parks or fantastic restaurants I frequent, what I always really want to find out about is how people live out in the country.

Maybe that’s because while London, Moscow and New York are all distinctly different, they probably have more in common with one another than any one of them has with the rural areas beyond their hustle and bustle and smog, and while the rural areas of the United States, Russia and England share many features they are all very distinctly different one from the other.

Traveling into the country of western Europe of the United States is a simple matter or renting a car and locating a good map, but to explore into the back-country behind what westerners used to call the Iron Curtain requires preparation and research.

During my first trip to Belarus in the late ‘90’s I set up living arrangements via the internet in what appeared to be a small town about 350 kilometers southeast of Minsk. On most of my maps, the place was called “Homel”.

That misspelling was only the first of the many contradictions I would learn to accept, even expect, when investigating the literal other side of the world.

I learned that there is some confusion between the letters “G” and “H” when translating the Cyrillic alphabet to the Roman one. That’s why expatriated Russians living in America often say, “gamburger” and “alcogolic” and why the correct name of the city I chose was actually “Gomel”.

Notice that I said “city”. I picked Gomel because from my typical-American viewpoint, that is, looking at it on a map, it looked like one of the smaller places I could find where I could make connections for a translator and an apartment online, and compared to Minsk or Moscow, Gomel is indeed much smaller, but since the vast majority of Eastern Europeans live in apartments and since places that don’t have any, or very many large apartment buildings don’t even show up on most maps, I was later to learn that the "quiet little village" I was expecting was a city of 500,000, or about half again as large as St. Louis!

I’m not saying that I was disappointed exactly. Gomel turned out to be the place where I met my wife, Olia and since I’ve now been there several times, I tend to think of it as my Belarusian “hometown”, but a little country village it ain’t.

Speaking of meeting my wife there, single men will discover that Gomel is one of the most magnificent places in the world for boosting one’s spirits as there are five universities and (I am not exaggerating) the sidewalks are literally clogged with beautiful young women. Not only that, but western men, even Americans, are considered polite and chivalrous, even (can you believe it?) refined, not to mention hard-working and sober, compared to their former-Soviet counterparts.

That first trip I was able to procure a decent, though certainly not fancy one-bedroom apartment which came with the services of the stunningly beautiful Oxsana, who appeared at my front door promptly every morning at 8:00, fixed my breakfast, gathered up my laundry and swept the whole apartment with a short broom about two feet long that required her to perform the whole job bent over almost double in a very fetching fashion.

"Single men will discover that Gomel is one of the most magnificent places in the world for boosting one’s spirits"

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