I'm surely the only American ever to participate here who is planning to retire to the former Soviet republic of Belarus when I retire at 62 in 20 months. After losing my wife of 33 years to breast cancer, I met a woman in Minsk (by e-mail) through a weird series of family/friend connections. After having been warned by the American dolt who is married to her sister about the horrors of the KGB, the current dictatorship, and the general hellhole that he thinks the country is, I visited Belarus three times and absolutely loved it. The people and values seemed to me like the America I used to know. My wife's family could literally audition for the remake of Leave It to Beaver if they could speak English. And Minsk, a city of 2 million, is so clean that it seems impossible -- I am constantly apologizing to my wife for the condition of America, her principal observations being that America is unbelievably dirty and the people are unbelievably fat. The President of Belarus may not be Mr. Warmth and Political Correctness, but with all the atrocities going on around the world, it's hysterical to me that Belarus is one of the few countries on the U.S. hit list that prevents Social Security from sending your checks unless you go personally to the embassy in Minsk and pick them up each month. However, since my wife (a supervisor of social workers for 20 years) and her daughter (a government attorney) lived on a COMBINED income of less than $650/month, I don't foresee our finances as a major problem. My wife can't quite believe I actually want to do this and is mostly concerned that I'll hate the weather, but I'm pretty excited. There is a possibility of RV-ing around the U.S. for a year so she can see some of the national parks, but then we're definitely off to Belarus. Actually, we're off to Belarus in October, so I can investigate some practical aspects that I didn't previously. I don't mean to offend any gung-ho patriots, but I've lived in Arizona 62 years and am ready, as the Monty Python crew would say, for Something Completely Different.