Sunday 23 November 2008

What Brits can't buy in Lithuania

Currants - or in Georgia; they are just not available; but raisins in various shades are. Black raisins can be substituted.
Marmalade - actually, you can get it at Marks and Spencer's, even in different varieties, thin and coarse-cut, and from blood oranges. Somehow I like to make my own marmalade; recently someone brought me over a tin of Mamade, the pulp and peel of Seville oranges.....
Lard - you'd think you would be able to buy this in a country whose diet is,er, not that easy on fat. But in fact you have to make your own. How do you do that? You buy some pig skins (with the fat on), stick them in a low oven for a few hours and the fat melts. Learnt that a long time ago in Scotland.
Mixed peel - you can get it in Goodwill in Georgia, but when you go there, you end up buying all sorts of stuff you don't need.....Here's a recipe for it; American, and typical in its large quantities.... a 'gallon bag' would almost fill my freezer. I bought a bag of oranges, drank the juice of 8 of them, made the mixed peel and probably have enough for the next year.
Bramble jam - a friend complains about that; also you have to make your own, if you find the brambles.
Baking powder - people tell me. The problem is that it comes in sachets, called 'kvepimo miltelai'. With a German background I know those sachets, from the Dr Oetker company, well. But it seems Lithuanians and Poles bake for larger families; the sachets we get here are for 1kg of flour; in Germany they are for 500g. So careful if you use them for a German recipe calling for one sachet! 'Levure Boulangere', which I bought at IKI the other day, delighted to find sachets for 500g, in fact contains dried yeast, as I discovered to my horror.....

Then again, you can buy all sorts of other lovely stuff, like zillions of sorts of mushrooms.

Thursday 13 November 2008

'Black assholes'

...is how the president of the Lithuanian Basketball Federation described two of his players.  He was not referring to the colour of their hair. With friends like this....

The chaps in question did not know about this for a while seeing as they do not speak Lithuanian. A complaint went to the General Prosecutor's office who let him off on a technicality.

Meanwhile 80% of people in a Vilnius University survey said they could not work or communicate with 'different' people (on the grounds of ethnicity, sexual preference, language or religion). I wonder who they asked and where the survey was carried out. I knew Lithuania was 'differentphobic' but that the rate is so high is appalling. No?

Skipping school for a better education

Yesterday some tens of thousands of German school students went on the streets to complain about lack of teachers and the poor standard of Germany's education system (recently the duration of school education required for university entry was reduced from 13 years to 12, but they still have to cover the same amount of work). There is much talk of parents forking out for extra classes for their darlings, huge pressure on children and so on.

Oh, I remember it well. We did the same things, for the same reasons, in the early 70s. I always felt a fraud, given that I hated school- so why was I demonstrating for more teachers? It got me out of class!

My first demo was at the tender age of 15. Which was before the minimum school leaving age and therefore not entirely legal. Which would have been fine - had I not been a smart aleck and been in the front of the demo, right in front of the press fotographers. Teachers read newspapers, you know.

But the sky did not fall in! Not that I really cared by then....

To deal with the teacher shortage I swear that half my classmates trained as teachers. Life-time job, all those holidays, those afternoons off....As must have done the rest of that generation in Germany. By the time they finished many could not get jobs as teachers, and even those who did left after a short while - either unable to procure a permanent position or just through fed-upness.

Saturday 8 November 2008

Obama and Georgia

This article suggests that Georgia may feel a little chill from the win of Barack Obama in the US presidential election. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Georgia, or rather its president, has been rather self-satisfied in recent years, only hearing what it wants to hear from foreign governments and international bodies. The article goes on to say:

"Georgia had to meet NATO at least halfway," said
Lincoln Mitchell, a professor of international politics at New York's
Columbia University. "And what it got under the Bush administration was
the constant message: 'Have bad elections? We'll cover for you. Make a
foolish decision and get pulled into a war with Russia? Here's a
billion bucks, don't worry about it. Keep cracking down on media and
civil liberties? It's OK.'"

It's about time things on human rights, social protection including health and I am sure a number of other matters were cracked down on by those bodies Georgia wishes to join. Under current performance Georgia may dream of joining NATO, but as for joining the EU - forget it!

Coffee in Vilnius

The Baltic Times writes a gushing article on coffee houses in Vilnius, and especially the chains we now have here, like Coffee Inn or Double Coffee, where you get 'a decent breakfast along with your morning coffee'.  If you have plenty of time, that is - the service in Double Coffee, whether you are in Kiev or Vilnius, is notoriously slow.  After one morning finding half the staff asleep on the benches in a Kiev branch open 24 hours a day, it kind of put me off a little.

But are these reports really neutral? Did I not hear the other day that journalists get paid by the subjects of the 'research' for writing nicely about them?

Who started the war?

Interesting article here about the Georgia/Russia war. It suggests Georgia started the war, despite Georgia's vehement protestations. International observers (in Tskhinvali?)including a Finn, a Belorussian and a Pole, describe the firing on Tskhinvali as indiscriminate, with at least 48 rockets falling in civilian areas (this is blamed on the inexperience of the Georgian military).

The Georgians, naturally, dismiss this report. 'Who counted these rockets anyway?', they ask. Would have thought it ain't that difficult to count a rocket that landed, would you?

Monday 3 November 2008

Mrs Palin at her best...

Lovely article on a spoof which she feel for hook, line and sinker...