The stars and the moon finally lined up work wise for a weekend getaway! Getting the weather for the trifecta escaped us this time but we still made the effort and packed up the kids in their winter warmies and headed off to Mir Castle or Мирский замок in Russian.
In my Trip Advisor review I shortened the whole story to…. Quaint Belorussian town, nice castle, service as usual!!! So if you are bored already, have better things to do with your time or flat out lazy, just leave it at that and go to the photos. Otherwise, read on!
We called our favorite taxi driver Jenia, who was happy to take us on the 100km ride for a very reasonable price. Actually for what we paid you probably wouldn’t get far away from an airport in the states and nowhere in a black cab in London.
Our hotel was relatively newly renovated and actually located right in a wing of the restored castle with views over the small lake complete with ice fishermen. The rooms were nice enough but it was obvious that they were trying a little too hard to go hi-tech with all the electrics working through little remotes stuck to the wall where the switches usually would be. The remote above the bed (also stuck to the wall) was the master that controlled all the other remotes and to the kids delight also the motor drive curtains! At the same time they’d run out of budget for carpet underlay and mini fridges.
We settled into the rooms quickly and headed off to the city to stock up on wine, cheese and fruit that got left behind in Minsk during the usual tense moments that seem to be unavoidable before we go on any trip. Not far away from the hotel / castle there is a small town square with four little grocery stores with a selection of wines. Unfortunately there was nothing over 23,000 Rubles ($3) for semi sweet and the dry selection was limited to 15,000 Rubles ($2) across all the stores. In the end we chose the most expensive bottle we could find hoping it didn’t turn out to be overly sweetened grape juice with a hint of petrol on the nose.
Anyway, amazingly enough in all but one of the stores we were alone and the one store that had people in it had a que, at the alcohol counter. We couldn’t imagine how much of a discount they could have been giving based on the prices we had seen so it could really only be some sort of credit driving the trade. In any case either the cheap alcohol or credit on alcohol is Sad, very sad!
Here is one of the guys
