Are Belarusian towns planned in the same way as British towns?

 

     Every country has its century-old traditions in planning and buiding its cities and towns that may seem curious or even weird to foreigners. This is mainly due to the cultural diversity that exist among the nations. That is why it would be ludicrous to assume that the Belarusians plan their towns in the same way as the British do, since our cultures have practically nothing in common.

    Many people claim that the British way of building towns dispenses with the reasonable comfort enjoyed by all other peoples of the world. However harsh and critical this point of view may seem at first, yet it’s possible to find a grain of truth in it. Whereas in our country doctors, lawers etc. are sprinkled all over the city, so that you can call on a good doctor in any district, in England the idea is that it is the address that makes the man. Top notch doctors in London are crowded in one street, tailors in another one and so on. But it’s not the only thing that may embarrass a foreigner. Many people spoof the following vagaries of British townbuilding traditions. First of all, they make the practice of planning streets the butt of a joke. The thing is, it is not customary of the English nation to build a street straight. The English have a fancy for privacy and do not want to see one end of the street from the other end. For this reason they make sudden curves in the streets and therefore build them curiously shaped. Besides, one can also observe a muddle in the numbering of houses. In our country we put even mumbers on one side, odd numbers on the other and we’re also aware of the fact that small numbers start from the north or west. In England you have this system too, but in England you may leave out some numbes if you are superstitious, and you may also continue the numbering in a side street. But this is far from the end. Many people are reluctant to have numbers and they choose names instead. It is indeed embarrassing, for instance, to find a street with 3 hundred totally similar bungalows and look for the house named “Bungalow”. Or to arrive in a street where all the houses have a stunning view of a hill and try to find “Hill View”. All this may easily put a foreigner in dismay. Furthermore, this nation is prone to giving a different name to the street whenever it bends, but if the curve is so sharp that it really makes two different streets, they may keep the same name. You may also be perplexed by the fact that they call their streets by a great variety of names: street, road,place mews, crescent, avenue, lane, way, park, etc. whereas in our country the number of such names is limited to a few words, that is: street, avenue, square and lane.

     Nevertheless, some common features of the British and Belarusian townplanning can be possibly traced. In England, they place a number of streets of exactly the same name in different districts and therefore may have about some 20 Princes Squares and Warwick avenues in the town. And in this country we have a number of streets, lanes and squares that carry the same name but are sitauated in different parts of the city which flusters not only the visitors of the city, but its city-dwellers as well. But still there are some common features in planning and building towns like for example both British and Belarusian towns are devided into districts. On the whole, however, Belarusian and British towns are planned in an absolutely different way.

 

 

20. How to plan and prepare your “dream wedding”

 

     A wedding is deemed to be a wonderland of dreams and perfect memories that will endure through the hardships of life. Noone wants to mis-plan their wedding and no one wants to get so involved in planning the wedding that they have no time to savour the ceremony. Becky Bloomwood can be called a lucky girl- not only was she dispensed from all the worries about organizing her wedding, but she actually had 2 wedding parties instead of one, and both of them can be called dream weddings.

     To begin with, the very way Luke proposed to Becky was charming and fairly original. At the wedding of Becky’s best friend Suzy Becky managed to catch the bride’s bouquet (in point of fact, she was without a rival as she was the only bridesmaid at the wedding) and when Becky took a closer look at the bouquet she accidentally noticed a little envelope there addressed to her. There was a ring and Luke’s message with a proposal. No need to say that Becky answered “yes”. At first she put her mind to a simple, elegant ceremony. No fuss, no bustle, no hoopla. As Becky puts it, the uppermost thing is not the dress, or the shoes, or what kind of flowers we have. It’s making the promise of lifelong commitment. The vows are what really matters, nothing else. However, we know Becky pretty well and know that her good intentions are seldom put into practice. Albeit her mother has already started organizing her wedding in Oxshott, Becky can’t discard the offering of Luke’s mother Elinor concerning holding an engagement party for them, since the advantages of having a wedding in New York are tangible and evident. It will be indeed a dream wedding: first of all, it will be organized by Robyn, one of New York’s finest adepts in wedding planning; secondly, both the ceremony and reception will take place at the glamorous Plaza Hotel, which purports to be unsurpassed for weddings. As Elinor puts it, wedding is the most important social event in all our lives and therefore it must be done properly, i.e. lavishly. Becky is mesmerized by an opportunity of having such a top-notch wedding and tries to convince herself to accept this alternative and at the same time to get rid of the twinges of conscience as she knows that her mom will become bitterly resentful of such a betrayal. She says to herself that it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It’s not like a birthday, or Christmas.You only have one wedding day. And therefore she deems that if you have the chance to have it somewhere really amazing, maybe you should just grab this eventuality. And Becky is sure it will be amazing: walking down that isle in front of 4 hundred people, to the sound of string orchestra, with fantastic flower arrangements everywhere, and then sitting down to some incredible dinner. Moreover, she will be wearing a wonderful dress – one of those gorgeous, amazing, Oscar-winner creations, but not her mother’s wedding dress which Becky calls a frilly monstrosity. She relishes the experience of visiting a wedding dress shop and trying on dozens of dresses- starkly plain dresses with dramatic trains, simple dresses, glittery dresses... Becky and Robyn also visit a top-notch cake-maker’s studio where Becky becomes really impressed by a stunning variety of wedding cakes ranging from traditional six-tier cakes decorated with sugar tulips to cakes that represent something you like- a favourite painting, or a sculpture, even a Louis Vuitton trunk, each starting at a thousand dollars. It’s no wonder that Becky is loath to get married in a garden of Oxshott. In point of fact, she feels exactly like someone who’s going to have a huge, luxurious wedding at the Plaza. She wants to be that girl who swans around expensive cake shops, and has people running after her and get treated like a princess. She is aware that if she calls off the wedding in New York, then it’ll all stop. Everyone will stop making a fuss. She’ll stop being that special, glossy person. Nevertheless Becky gathers herself up and, having mulled everything over, decides to cancel her Plaza wedding in order not to hurt her mother’s feelings. It transpires, however, that in this case she will have to pay amends of 100 000 dollars. And she contrives the following plan: to arrange 2 different weddings on the same day in different continents. And it works! The point is, she finally fathoms that it is the wedding in Oxshott that turns out to be her dream one, despite the thing that it stands no comparison with the glamorous the Plaza wedding. It is the company of her family and friends that matters.