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Comment by stevesimmons | Hacker News Reader

I had my second trip to Minsk last week to work with a local IT company.

I was very impressed with the technical skills of the people there. Belarus and Minsk are advanced in many ways (metro with trains every 2 minutes), electric busses (powered by capacitors, not batteries), mobile phone (MTS shop at the airport sells a $9 SIM with unlimited data for a month), Yandex taxis beats Uber, etc, etc.

The main downside I noticed was meals based on meat and potatoes, not many vegetables.

All in all, I now am curious to find out more about Belarus... Need to spend some time learning basic Russian now!

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Minsk is a great city indeed. IT is pretty strong, many startups evolved recently (Wannaby, OneSoil, MSQRD (aq. by Facebook), Fabby (aq. by Google), PandaDoc)

Sorry for the meals - Belarusians love their potatoes. There are some 300+ dishes recorded in Belarus - that it came to be considered the core of the national cuisine.

P.S. Not quite related to the meals, but Belarus bans use of plastic plates in restaurants recently.

https://eng.belta.by/society/view/ban-on-single-use-plastic-...

They don't just have startups EPAM, Wargaming are multi-billion companies

> Belarusians love their potatoes

I am a bit fascinated as to how this came to be from Ireland to Russia, given that the potato is native to the Americas, and thus was unknown in Europe before around 1500 CE.

As far as I know, Europeans used to eat turnips and rutabaga, but in 1700s the potato mostly replaced them due to being cheaper and easier to grow.

"Traditional cuisine" is often more recent than we think. Tomatoes aren't native to Italy. Chilli peppers aren't native to India or Thailand.

Of course, both of those came over from the Americas, like the potato.

In the other direction: flour tortillas in northern Mexico (someone from Mexico City will probably come and tell me burritos aren't really Mexican food; but they are, in places like Sonora).

Or beef in Brazil and Argentina. Or Dulce de Leche.

I don't want to sound like a Negative Nelly but you all in this thread are swooning over a dictatorship with pretty awful human rights abuses.

I find it valuable to learn things that go against my preconceptions about what life in Belarus is like. It's surprising to learn that it has a tech scene and capacitor-charged busses. We could also focus on their poverty and repression, but would any of that be surprising to you?

People working in gov sector risk their jobs for expressing political views. IT and other private sector workers are much more liberal. Supporting private companies helps democracy

How awful exactly is that dictatorship?

And besides, the swooning is about Belorussian people, not Lukashenko

You make the very common mistake of assuming a country with a dictator and human rights abuses is automatically a horrible place to be.

Earlier this year I was in Sudan for a few weeks. Hands down the friendliest and kindest people I've ever met on earth. Much, much friendlier than Australians or Canadians.

Open your mind, accept there are other ways to do things, and we can learn to improve our way of doing things. It's not to say these countries are perfect, just better in different ways.

PS I'm Australian/Canadian.

>Hands down the friendliest and kindest people I've ever met on earth

Anecdotally, Iranian people fall into the same category despite living under a despotic regime and severe sanctions imposed by the US.

I agree. I've never met a single person that has travelled to Iran that doesn't list it as their all-time favourite country, and number 1 they want to return to. I've met at least a few hundred people that have driven across, spending 2-4 weeks.

(Note: I've never been)

Were any of them women, or gay?

Indeed! I worked very closely with a team of contracted software engineers from Minsk for 5 years and I learned a lot from them. It's anecdotal of course, but the Belarusian team members I managed had amazing work ethic and positivity as well. The level of skill in English was also impressive. I was told there is a "tech district" in downtown Minsk with a budding tech scene.

The company they worked for had an open invitation for me to visit Minsk, and apparently it is very easy to visit on a US passport for a short period, someday I'll go and check it out.

Yep, have hired designers from there. Quality of work is first-rate, English is always excellent, and they have (perhaps somewhat contrary to the article) a good understanding of business and what the goal of a client might be. Stark contrast with the work I get locally in the UK.

Would definitely love to visit Minsk too. Seems like a very nice place (if you can look past the govt).

You make it sound glamorous but as Lithuanian I found Minsk to be rather sad. I mean painting over manhole covers, destroyed architecture, national library that looks like giant bacteriophage that has robots inside but you still have to let babushka sign off a book, the town that looks like it has population of 100k, not 2M. It felt like a dead city with boring food and basically nothing to do. I agree the engineers are great tho.

Do you know any Lithuanian that thinks positively about Belarus?

Maybe some old pro-soviet folks (there are quite few). For others the mere ideas Russia now being next door is disgusting.

The city was wiped off the surface of the earth during the World War II, it suffered much worse than Warsaw or Dresden. And you wouldn't expect the Soviets to rebuild it in anything other than social realism, so that's what Minsk is today. Though there are two or three streets of pre-War architecture left.

In Belarus, I felt the weight of history more than pretty much any other country I have visited.

To put things in perspective, Minsk is geographically midway between Berlin and Moscow. In World War 2, the whole country was basically the front line between Germany and Russian. Most houses and infrastructure were destroyed and and 2.3m people -- a quarter of the population -- lost their lives. The equivalent in the US today is 75 million people!

I find it amazing that the country has recovered so well.

Aside from downtown Vilnius, Lithiania looks worse than Belarus. At least as far as appearences go.

Fair, I haven’t been to country in Belarus.

Keep in mind that IT domain is somewhat separated from the rest of all other economics of Belarus. Pay rates in IT-related companies a much higher than in in almost any other domain. On the other side, most of heavy industry, education and medical service are in decline.

Frequency of metro trains is reduced if compared to what there was had few years ago. 2 minute intervals are only on rush hours. Most of other time it's ~7-10m intervals.

Electric buses are used only on single route in the center of the Minsk.

Yandex and Uber in Minsk are joined into single company. So you can't say that Yandex beat Uber :)

> $9 SIM with unlimited data for a month

I suspect that this is not true. AFAIK, there are no real "unlimited" plans. There always a cap on total volume of data.

Yandex taxis are only popular because they bought and extinguished Uber in Belarus. They're much worse in terms of quality of the service, people only use them because there isn't much choice.

The mobile application from Yandex.Taxi is in my opinion the best taxi app in existence, much better than Uber. And it's not like the quality of the service can differ between apps all that much, the pool of taxi drivers is the same after all…

Actually, they merged.

"On 13 July 2017, Yandex.Taxi and Uber signed an agreement to merge their businesses and operations in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Russia. ... Yandex invested $100 million and Uber invested $225 million in the new structure."

> The main downside I noticed was meals based on meat and potatoes, not many vegetables.

Do you realize where belarus is? It gets cold in belarus. Meat and potatoes are food that can be grown locally. Also, it is environmentally devastating to transport all the vegetables all over the world like we currently do. Look at how much globalism has damaged the environment, not to mention the problems with climate change.

More people should be eating their local "meat and potatoes" rather than a globalized diet.

Greenhouses

I'm not sure why this comment is being downvoted. I live in Kazakhstan, and while it's not exactly the same as Belarus, we're living in very similar conditions. In winter time, fruits and vegetables are very expensive here. Most of the cheaper ones (the only kind available to most people, myself included) look and taste like they're made of plastic, and are packed with nitrites. I tend to avoid them altogether, you don't get to have a very healthy diet with this kind of food.

> In winter time, fruits and vegetables are very expensive here. Most of the cheaper ones (the only kind available to most people, myself included) look and taste like they're made of plastic, and are packed with nitrites.

It's not much different in the "West". We already plant crops for yield, and in winter, we eat crops grown for yield and shipability. Out-of-season crops will cost substantially more than what cost in-season.

Though storage tech is improving: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/11/26/668256349/th...

And thank god for bananas.

The majority of apples sold in Belarus are produced in the Netherlands. Storage technology matters.

there's a ton of vegetables that grow in old climates. Basically all brassicae grow fine (cabbage, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, chard etc), and if you want to stick to roots you have carrots, beetroots, turnip, parsnip, radishes, chervil, onion, rutabaga, jerusalem artichokes etc. And beans preserve well.

I would bet the persistence of meat and potatoes is due to the higher amount of calories they provide, which historically made more sense as the productive capacity of the country was lower, and while it'd probably be ok to eat greenhouse tomatoes now, it just takes time to change habits.

unfortunately other westernized east european mainstream diet moves usually to burger, fried potatoes and pizza and corn.

I'll add to that, people in that region eat plenty of vegetables and fruit... during summer and autumn. But fast/street food is mostly meat, potatoes, cheese, anything that can be sold all year round.

That reminds me of British mushy peas, even served at expensive restaurants, which no one outside the UK seems to like heh

Does "globalism" really play a role here? There are self-proclaimed nationalist parties today and in history that also caused great environmental destruction. And to a certain extent, shipping freight from say China to west-coast USA is equally as polluting as shipping from west-coast USA to east-coast USA.

Consumption causes externalities, yes, but I believe a global trade economy is overall more efficient than nationalist segmented economies, thus the overall pollution load should theoretically be lower with globalism.

I am positive that vegetables from across the world have much less environmental impact that even locally sourced beef.

The main downside I noticed was meals based on meat and potatoes, not many vegetables.

The main downsides I noticed were the fact that it would have been completely unthinkable to walk the streets during a major public event and, say, hand out fliers openly criticizing Batka's leadership.† Which probably explained why no one was doing so, at this certain major public event I attended. That and of course the near-total suppression of LGBT culture.

The food offerings as such are quite good and reasonably diverse, if one knows where to look (there's a pretty decent nightlife district downtown, for example). And the people are quite friendly and grounded (somehow more approachable than in many Western cities I've been to).

But still - it's a very different country in certain ways.

† As the President is affectionately referred to by.

>>The main downside I noticed was meals based on meat and potatoes, not many vegetables.

Pretty sure you can find veggies too, but the price might not appeal to you. As others said, their climate is cold and importing veggies cost a lot, especially relative to wages there.

Next time you're in Minsk, go to chaikhana. It's the only nice place to eat IMO.

Chaikhana Lounge Cafe

vulica Surhanava 61, Minsk, Belarus +375 29 325-45-45 https://g.co/kgs/Y6YE4E

I was there last year, World of Tanks seems to be a huge thing there too

Belarusians are very proud of World of Tanks!

My Belavia flight back yesterday morning was a World of Tanks themed plane:

- exterior paint and headrests promoted World of Tanks.

- each tabletop had a blueprint of a different tank

- even the pre-takeoff safety briefing was recorded in a World of Tanks style!

See photos here: https://airlinerwatch.com/belavia-and-wargaming-reveal-secon...

Impressive and ridiculously tacky at the same time.

It's like flying inside of an ad that gets glued to your eyeballs for the duration of a flight. It's appropriate for ferrying gamers to a WoT event somewhere, but for regular flights this is completely unacceptable.

As a treadhead (but one who doesn't play WoT): that's awesome! Especially the tank blueprints. WoT also funds videos on some of my favorite military history YT channels.

A strong IT industry is probably a common thing among all Eastern Europe capitals due to the abundance of engineers from the communist past and the outsourcing to these countries that follow the fall of the Berlin wall. Minsk shouldn't be an exception.

>no vegetables

Oh no! What would we do without our rabbit food?

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

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