Truly wonderful. I imagine that Belarus' would have been similar to how Ukraine was when I went there a year later. I too found the general populace to be more intelligent than what I was used to. For example, almost everyone I encountered were conversant in Pushkin and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Might have been the circles I was moving in, but I doubt it.

There were a lot of Africans in Odessa and I spent time with a good number of them when the semester class came over and I met Alec. Good times!