I am going to read the manual for this camera now.
The quality of my pictures is terrible.

I hope you got something from the pictures anyway.
Minsk is a very pleasant and impressive city in many different ways.

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EDIT: Apparently you are supposed to first focus on the object by pressing the button halfway down.. Then when it's focussed, you should actually take the picture.
Hm....

COMING SOON:
Pictures of places I am about to visit:
-Botanical Gardens
-Minsk, the City of Heroes - War memorial
-Troitskoe Suburb - an area restored to look like several hundred years ago.
-and Dudutki Village (a traditional Handicraft village - if I can figure out how to get there...)

I also want to find out where the Russian embassy is, and submit a visa application, since I have finally got my Minsk registration sorted out, thanks to Yuri's (landlord) dodgy contacts...(according to the registration, I am staying at a hotel called "Turist".)

There is a really horrible memorial which I don't want to go to alone, just too sad. It is called Khatyn, and it's about war crimes by the Nazis in Belarus. Among other things, inhabitants of several villages were locked inside of buildings and burnt alive.

Almost 3 million Belarussians died in the war - that's 1 of 4 people in the country at that time. All of Minsk was destroyed. It IS surely a small miracle to rebuild and recover so quickly.