Georgian Elections?

Have the Georgian elections gone well? Too early to say, I suppose. Not all results are in yet; some small localities could not vote due to excessive snow, but the voting and the counting and early announcing of partial results went ahead. Not sure that that is quite total democracy. Foreign observers seem, at first sight, to be content with the voting process itself, though the opposition say that exit polls have been falsified - but then, folks, exit polls are totally irrelevant - people can tell you what they like; it all depends on the crosses on the pieces of paper.

What went on during the election campaign is a different matter of course; unfortunately that is not observed by influential foreign bodies (not sure that any foreign body, unless it is inside his body, can influence Mr Saakashvili...).

The result so far, just over 50% for Saakashvili, is at least not indecently high as it might have been in some other countries. Still, it might be (have been?) good for him not to win an outright majority at the first attempt, just to put him in his place a bit.

The Irish Ambassador's Residence

It should be said that the current Irish ambassador, if he is still the same one who started up the embassy, is actually a very good guy - he goes to lots of concerts and supports the arts greatly. He also shows great taste in his dress sense and the make of his glasses.

I wonder, then, what he thinks of the architectural merit of his residence, located in a very rural-seeming neighbourhood with low-rise, often wooden individual houses. What would Prince Charles say? (Then again, what does he know about modern architecture?). This building sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb. It screams 'nouveau riche' - which I suppose Ireland is, nowadays on the backs of many Lithuanian workers. The Irish coat of arms above the door, which unfortunately has a strong resemblance to a Guiness advert, does not improve the tone of the place either. Thankfully the guard at the gate should resolve any misunderstandings.

We have good architects in Lithuania, who can design some very interesting, sometimes daring buildings (not sure about the one in Filaretu gatve that has the shape of a grand piano). But this? It's Russian Baroque meets the 21rst century in a fishtank.

Lithuania is cleaning up....

Environmental consciousness is slowly arriving in Vilnius. On glass bottles you now have to pay a deposit, and there is talk of increasing the price of plastic shopping bags (though we always paid for them anyway).

Across the street from my house three new domed containers have appeared, in the play school style of design - a blue one with a rectangular slot for paper, a little green one with a round hole for glass of any colour, and a yellow one with a round hole for plastic. Not sure if these gadgets were made for Lithuania, or for a warmer country. It's easy to insert hard bottles into the bottle one; with the paper one where I insert cardboard as well it's not too difficult, but see the one that eats the plastic? The rubber around the hole is so hard (due to the cold?), and the plastic is usually so soft that you risk losing your hand in the process! (Minds dirtier than mine can insert their own comments here...).

Having lived in dirty countries all my adult life where you just chuck stuff in a bin, and watched with fascinated awe the way people in Germany sort their rubbish, I'm now also faced with making decisions when I chuck stuff away. Jayzus, now nothing in life comes without a management decision!

So there are the plastic milk-bags - easy. Is tetrapak plastic or paper? What about the plastic-lined paper that some of the bread comes in? I suppose I should start washing the yoghurt cartons the way Germans do, and folding juice cartons.....

But now the problem of storage arises - where do I store all this stuff? Already with every piece of paper, eg a teabag packet, I run to the waste paper basket under my desk.... In Germany I noticed that if you are a one-person household eating lots of vegetables, that leads to a lot of vegetable waste. In a heated kitchen. But far from enough to empty the bin daily or even every two days. In a heated kitchen. What happens to vegetable waste? In a heated kitchen? It composts all by itself. In a heated kitchen. Actually, it does not compost. In a heated kitchen. It rots. In a heated kitchen. It stinks!

So you need to take it out more often. What is the best way of taking out wet smelly rubbish? In a plastic bag.

Er, what was that about saving the environment?

Gooooood Luck, Georgia!

Tomorrow (today, as it is already in Georgia, 5 January) the presidential elections will take place, called at short notice, after a week of uproar and a week of a state of emergency, in November last year.

Here it says that Saakashvili, the former president, ex-democrat turned...autocrat...?, had 50% more airtime for his campaign adverts than his nearest rival, Levan Gachechiladze. I think Europe has Rules About This Sort Of Thing, but I don't what these depend on - I can't imagine that the Scottish National Party would get the same amount of airtime for the Westminster Parliament as, say, New Labour. But the hierarchy of airtime must depend on something transparent - or is it just the ability to pay for airtime? Mr Patarkatsishvili, the billionaire candidate with the stories of potential assassinations, got about a sixth of the paid airtime of the president (and he could have bought much more), but probably quite a lot of unpaid airtime due to notoriety.

I've blogged extensively (mostly) here about events preceding the election, but now I am not in Georgia. Observers from many countries are, however, as well as my friend Helene. Lithuania has sent over 100, including MPs and young activists, and even Tajikistan has sent young observers - given the patterns of Tajik presidential elections I'm not totally convinced who is supposed to benefit from that....

Let's pray that these elections go smoothly and calmly, and that the events currently going on in Kenya and Pakistan do not repeat themselves in Georgia. Let's pray further that the President the country gets will work hard to ensure that the whole population shares in the increasing prosperity in the country.

But not all is well out West either.....

specifically Germany where it ain't easy to be different.

1) On New Year's Eve an Afghan family in Berlin was attacked with baseball bats by a bunch of 'Rechts-radikale' (neo-nazis).

2) A multicultural community centre in (former) East Berlin, hence a proud member of post-Sovietistan, is regularly attacked by the NPD (the neo-nazi party), who as their most recent effort left a (cooked and half-eaten) pig's head outside it. The leader of the institution is a Turkish woman.... The centre works with migrants from various corners of the world, who often have come to Germany as refugees or as those Germans from the FSU who Germany (in a probably much regretted moment of generosity) allowed to migrate to Germany in the late 1980s and 1990s. This experience should be enough for Germany to reconsider seriously the silly rule about nationality being in the blood forever, over many generations, rather than in the soil of the country someone lives in. (Remind me to blog about refugees and IDPs.)

3) Musafira, who blogs here, is a Muslima (a muslim woman) of ethnic German descent (see above, there are not that many Germans who don't look, well, pink), married to a chap of Kuwaiti descent. Recently married. So, as is young married couple's wont, off they went for a honeymoon, to an idyllic little cottage which they rented in some rural area in Germany. All was well, until one evening they heard a knock on the door. When they opened, the police stormed into the cottage, up the stairs, into the living room, four armed police officers were in the garden.....what had happened? The inhabitants of the 200-soul village Harnwiede ('soul'? - they don't deserve the term) had given the police a list of reasons why they were worried about the tenants of the cottage:

• they were of 'southern' appearance
• the wife spoke very good German (what about all those integrated Turks who also speak excellent German)
• they arrived late in the evening by taxi
• they are supposed to have recently married but appeared distant to each other
• the house is at some distance from the village, and near a motorway service station
• they paid the rental in cash
• the curtains were closed constantly

All very very serious crimes, obviously. OMG, my tenants also keep the curtains closed all the time, and the husband looks southern (he's Italian). These were obviously enough reasons to make the police think this was a serious terrorist risk. The case is now subject to court action; it has now, two months after the event, finally hit the press. Musafira, whose first name is Kathrin, in her blog makes it quite clear how fed up she is dealing with people's pre-conceptions about who she is: 'Wow, she rides a bike?' People photograph her when she does, in muslim dress. I can relate a little to how she feels - the one thing I hate when I go to the UK is when people tell me what is my nationality, which is not the nationality in my passport and of my choice. But for me there's little danger of being mistaken for a terrorist - I'm too old, for starters.

4) But of course in the UK we have our own problems with people who are different, though nowadays, who is different at all? Just when Musafira's event happened, the Guardian reported an engineer on holiday in Northern Ireland being detained because he was black. He ended up spending two nights in a high security prison. I suppose Northern Ireland is like rural Northern Germany, both rather provincial and not used to different people (though in Norn Iron, I mean, come on....). The Northern Ireland Equality Commission took on his case and got him 7,500 GPB compensation.

5) Coming back to Eastern Europe.... in Lithuania last week, while walking past some skinheads with a dark young man, one of the skinheads was heard to utter 'monkey'. Luckily it was day time, he was smiling (about what?) and we know what Lithuania is like in this respect - totally unreconstructed!

The Russian Bear Roars Again

The Guardian reports that Russia is more than doubling its gas price to Lithuania compared to a year ago, to 833 Lt (or 354USD) per 1000 cubic metres. This is with the aim of bringing all former Soviet states in line with European gas prices. Lietuvos Dujos, our gas company, is absorbing some of the increase and has fixed this year's increase to consumers at 'only' 71%.

One might hope that once this increase is through, the spook might be over and we might get more moderate increases in the future. Then again, Lithuania is totally dependent on Russian gas, and relationships with Russia are not happy (slightly a blind spot with our diplomatic Mr Adamkus, but we've also had bad experiences with rich Russians living in Lithuania, who have attempted to buy either elections [Mr Uspaskich] or a president [Mr Borisovas who bought Mr Paksas]). But of course for consumers, given the absorption of this year's rise, it'll continue for another year or two.

It'll do wonders for inflation.....how can pensioners continue to live in the sometimes large flats that they have lived in all their lives? Though perhaps on another front the tide is turning, and while for a long time pensioners supported their unemployed adult children, now the children are often working and can support their parents?

The ownership of Lietuvos Dujos is interesting - it's owned 38.9 per cent by E.On Ruhrgas (German) and 37.1% by Gazprom. So Gazprom (Russia, with the delightful Mr Schroeder, ex-German Chancellor as advisor) is causing Gazprom (Lithuania) a considerable drop in profits while it absorbs price increases - I'm not sure that worries me a great deal. Then again, it seems the Lithuanian state owns the remaining 24%, so that's another impact on the budget. Would competition in this tiny market help, if there were more suppliers - but we can only get gas from Russia? If I were Lithuanian, I would not let Russian big business own anything in the country. Then again, if Gazprom did not own part of the business, would that make it even easier for Russia to play silly beggars with Lithuanian prices?

It's a pain, being totally dependent on someone!

Eastern European Winter

Every winter there is one day when it is so slippery that you can't actually leave the house. The last time before this that I remember was on the opening day of the Heifetz violin competition in February 2005 when the place was full of foreign violinists and their fragile instruments and hands. (I've missed large chunks of winter since then.)

This winter it happened last Friday. Lunchtime, to be precise.

In the morning I had been running - there was a slight dusting of snow, but generally it was ok. It was trying to snow, but not quite succeeding. Later that day we walked round Vilnius, popped into the contemporary arts centre for half an hour, where amongst others we saw an exhibition about an arts movement called 'Fluxus' which our Mr Landsbergis had been involved in, and which, much more to the point, appears to have been started by (amongst others) the Lithuanian-American artist George Maciunas, included the German artist Di[e]ter Rot[h] (of whose work my mother has fond memories), and which demonstrated against the 'elitist' music of Stockhausen and was involved in happenings....

I'm kind of finding it hard here to keep my art and my daily events apart.

Anyway, when we popped out again, it had rained ice. That's the only way to describe it! It still seemed to be raining ice, and the pavements were covered, even after this short period, on a fine, but oh so effective, film of ice. Everyone was walking about in that stumbling, buttock clenching walk that you do and that so holds you up.

The morning after(Saturday) the ice had settled down nicely - with very flat areas covered in a layer, no more than half an inch thick, but it was enough. And it was very hard, and not many people seemed to be engaged in Doing Something About It. It messed up all your shortcuts - not many other people used them, so they were totally icy. By Sunday at least some ice-free, sanded paths had formed.

Finally on Monday it snowed hard - out I went for a run; after all, the snow would cover up the ice and everything would be ok.

Unfortunately the snow was still very light, not compacted (all the better for safe running, I thought), and also not shovelled away. It's amazing, when fresh snow is on top of a sheet of ice, how quickly it slides away - as I found, sliding on my back along a pavement. After that, I developed a hierarchy of running:
Best - a street that is sometimes used and clear of snow and ice
then - a street that is more often used, but you end up getting covered in slush if you make the cars move over out of your way
then - a forest where you run on greenery under the snow (but you can't see the snow)
then - test the pavement that you are planning to run on
after that - don't go for a run!

Why are pavements not cleared well this winter? We no longer have the many unemployed who used to do this. In fact, businessmen (and -women) are complaining that they cannot get the quality of staff any more - they are scraping the bottom of the pool for applicants. All the good workers are abroad....