No problem! How kind of you to help the lorry driver!

Actually I'd be very surprised if you English was not a lot better than that of a Finnish lorry driver.
I usually speak Swedish when I go there, but sometimes people prefer to speak in English instead. Then it turns out their English is terrible. Finnish is really different from English and it's hard for them to learn it well. I think it might even be harder than for Russians.

You don't make a lot of mistakes when you write. I know native English speakers whose grammar is a lot worse (seriously!)
The problems that you have when you are speaking are just because you don't get a lot of opportunity and practice.
If you spent a month in an English speaking country that problem would be gone, I am almost sure.

The status of my trip is that I am now nervous about registering (for foreigners) in Belarus. The bureacracy around registration is enormous.

And what's more, the rules are not communicated to the tourists (for example, they could give an information sheet about the rules to people who enter the country). One has to find out oneself, by searching the internet and asking people.

Apparently I might have missed a few days, and also it might not be possible to register the type of visa that I have, at a private flat. I got a business visa because it offered the most flexibility on timing etc.

I will speak with the agent for the flat letting company, hopefully he can help, it's his job, I think.
But there is never going to be any serious tourism from Western Europe with this amount of bureacracy... People just don't want to deal with such things on their holiday... And it's not nice to be feeling like a criminal when you are in fact a tourist with nothing but good and honest intentions. It's strange really: The country says it wants tourism... but then when tourists arrive and want to do normal things that tourists do, then they have problems like this.

I again ate something with milk in it by mistake, so I am feeling rather bad.

Yesterday evening I met up with a guy who is a sort of a guide, pending qualification. He spoke very good English, although in a very "stiff" and formal way. We went for a long walk on town, he showed me the sights and gave some advice about the visa issues. Minsk is very beautifully lit in the evening, and the architecture is very impressive. It's called Stalinist neo-classical.

The guy I met was very anti-government; he doesn't like the government at all; thinks they are guilty of serious economic mismanagement, and possibly even staging the recent explosion in the metro. He also thinks that the current president will be in the job until he dies because it is impossible for him to lose an election - it's rigged, he says. I don't know what to believe, but there is definitely more than what meets the eye, with Belarussian politics. Apparently the economical approach is called "market socialism".... Is that a contradiction of terms, or not...? Not sure! Also there is clearly a small group who has a fair bit of money to spend. The shopping here is not worse than Ukraine or Romania - there is a really impressive 3-story shopping mall under the Lenin Place, for example.
At the same time, the whole town is full of Soviet/communist monuments and lots of reminders of those days in peoples daily lives.