Being a tourist to me means going somewhere, enjoying it and going home. Being a traveller, meanwhile, to me means a bit more.  Going some places, experiencing different foods, cultures, experiences, learning and challenges, finding all those in between’s.  With that in mind, I looked back retrospectively on the events of not being able to get to go see Lithuania, as a character building day that you can only get in the mix of this traveling thing. Nowhere else in life experiences can you have to deal with crossing borders, unable to communicate and dealing with things just being different. I was of course sad not to get to Lithuania, but maybe it just wasn’t meant to be, and maybe Lithuania is just for another time.

I say all this as a new personal disaster loomed, OMG.  On getting ready to leave Minsk I was packing all my things together and had that sudden realization that nobody wants to experience… no ATM bank card.  My heart sank amidst the panic that ensued as I flipped out every conceivable piece of clothing that was in my luggage.  Turned out every pocket, emptied every possible nook or cranny in my North Face backpack.  Then the moment of realization, “yes, it is gone”.  I had used the card the previous day at an ATM in Minsk, and it seems that I did not collect the card at the end of the transaction.  All the stresses of yesterday had me not thinking clearly.  A simple mistake, but one with big implications.  In the next 20 minutes I had to leave for the airport, so there was nothing I could do this direct minute, and fortunately I had enough cash to get me to the airport.

A long time ago, I had bank cards etc in Japan, but could not get currency out, it was quite the ordeal.  It was 2001, so technology was different back then, but that incident brought a lot of challenges I found it hard to solve.  This time, having gotten to the airport and in the land of wifi I was able to start taking steps.  I could not directly connect with my bank in USA, too complicated to explain, but I rang my mum in England in Whatsapp, and she rang my USA bank on her land line.  What ensued was a Chinese Whispers conversation between three people across Belarus – England – USA, it was quite the conversation amid the noisy Minsk airport.  Happily, that card was stopped, and my new card would be sent to my home address.  My heart sank, on realizing that I was able to stop my card, this didn’t help the next step of being able to get money for the remainder of my trip. I have a credit card, but have had intermittent success of being able to use it, especially in taxis.  My flight was to Kiev, Ukraine, and once there I was hopeful that I would be able to secure a solution.  That part of was ok, though only at the 2nd time of asking.  I traipsed to the 14th floor of my hotel in Kiev to once again start taking steps to find a solution to the next piece of my jigsaw with my USA ATM card now part of the past.  I do have another bank card with me, this is one piece of advice I did follow.  The other one, carry an emergency stash of US dollars, I unfortunately did not.

The problem was my UK card was not active for here in the Ukraine, and I needed to make some calls to make it usable in the country.  I connected to my UK bank via Twitter…oh, modern technology is such a wonderful thing, and so I am hopeful that as I head into Sunday that I will be back ‘with currency’, but I have one last step to solve the the cash machine in the morning.  I will keep my fingers crossed until then that the bank say that likes to say yes, does so.

I still cannot help but really like Minsk and Belarus, and therein lies traveling, it is not the just the country, but is is also the life experiences, or the draniki, or the sites and sounds that make it Belarus, or Belarusian.  I like the place a great deal.