Wu Wei

Beware the Ides of April

This time, it's neither March nor the Ides (which it seems can only be in March, May, July, and October, and always on the 15th according to Wikipedia).  But definitely the warnings are coming thick and fast about April 9 in Georgia that something will happen.

Burjanadze has been fingered supposedly bringing in illegal weapons (exactly like someone else last year, only the actors have changed, said a friend).  Marshrutkas have been told to stay at home and not to go to Tbilisi with demonstrators.  Police have been told to bring in their weapons so they can't use them on the day (in case they actively support the opposition or refuse to use weapons on their friends).  Television coverage is limited in Batumi so nobody knows what's going on in Tbilisi. Banks are saying they will decide everything after April 9.

It's not that anyone thinks things will happen on April 9 itself, it's just that no one will be satisfied with a one-day peaceful demonstration, and so things will gradually build up, till someone either gives the signal on one side or loses their nerve on the other. 

Fiddling while Rome burns

The BBC is busy wittering on about the Patriarch increasing the birthrate in Georgia, by his own personal efforts.  Not by the usual methods (no nephews or nepotism) but by offering to be Godfather to any baby born this year.  The Georgians, being a religious lot, have taken this seriously and upped the birthrate this year.

Meanwhile ....

Mezzo doesn't get it

Mezzo "your favourite music tv channel" offers a free newsletter. 

Today (24th) I got the March version, advertising programmes on 19, 22 and 24 March.  Eventually I found the only programme I could probably watch on 27.

Surely if you are going to bother having a March newletter it should be sent out at the beginning of the month not the end.

Ominous April 9th

Next weekend I'm off on my travels, (Vilnius and Oxford) and people are warning me to make sure that I come back either before or after April 9th as nobody knows what will happen on D day (D for demonstration).

What is clear is that nobody will be satisfied with an outcome of peaceful demonstration and no concessions.  Nobody meaning the Opposition, the Americans, the Russians and Saakashvili himself, not the Georgian people themselves.  So the expectations are for something like November 7 again, when the demonstration was broken up violently.

We have discovered that Alasania (ex-Ambassador to the UN) who has resigned and set up his own party has apparently rented the office next to ours, so life could be interesting when I get back.  Alasania is currently a potential replacement for Saakashvili, though under what conditions a replacement could take place without a united opposition, with some appropriate policies, and elections, is not at all clear.

100,000 visitors

Thank you everyone who has been reading my blog.

I started it in January 2005, as something to do while l was living in Greece with a gap between projects.  Since then it has visited the UK, Lithuania, Slovenia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, North Cyprus and Georgia. 

Coming up soon: Montenegro and North Cyprus, more Lithuania, Georgia and Oxford, plus a possibility of Ukraine and St Lucia (a bit out of my usual region).

Sighnaghi

This is a new tourist attraction in Kakheti, East Georgia.  Sunday was a wonderful clear day so Sloph (visiting for the week from Moscow) and L, my Bosnian friend, who also appears here from time to time, and I bagged the office car and driver and set off on a day trip.

We didn't know much about it, except that it had only recently been "done up", so the guide books had little to say.  The website is here. When I got there I found my camera wasn't working and so I had to take these photos on the mobile phone.

    

The mountains in the background are the Caucasus and beyond them is Chechnya or perhaps Dagestan.  It gives you some idea how open Georgia is to Russians coming over the border, once the snow on the main passes has cleared.

As you can see, Sighnaghi looks pretty similar to French hill towns in the south, and clearly they though so too, as the only restaurant we could find which was open had a French menu (in French).  We sniggered about profiteroles au lardons.  Perhaps there is such a dish, but it doesn't sound nearly so good as pissenlit au lard or profiteroles au chocolat.  We were the only people in the place, so we just had coffee.  We were disappointed to find that there was no terrace to sit out on the square. 

The buildings have been beautifully renovated, with the nice timber balconies (that are rotting away in Tbilisi Old Town).But the place was empty, on a beautiful spring Sunday when it was only an hour and a half from Tbilisi, and most shops and cafes were closed.  Before Easter is not prime tourist season, so I suppose we were cheeky expecting too much.  We finally found a map, but the brochure was in Georgian.  "English coming soon" they said.  There seemed to be a lot of donor money around (USAID did the museum, rather nicely we thought) and GTZ seemed to be doing the souvenir shops and SME advice.  But who on earth allowed them to make such an out of place French restaurant?

  

Some places were clearly for show as these shutters and windows in front of an open staircase show:

Front                                     Back

In fact we got to wondering whether this was something out of the  Truman Show  or another of those Potemkin villages built for Catherine the Great, which were all facades like stage sets.

There were some interesting touches like this portrait of Stalin hanging on a nice shady balcony:

And it wasn't clear whether these hens were tied up like dogs and horses, next to a supermarket while their owner was inside, or were actually for sale.  Perhaps you got one free when you took money out.

We were rather disappointed not to have a leisurely dinner out, so we dashed back to Tbilisi and went to our current favourite restaurant, The Mill.  Despite being enormous, it has about 4 dining halls, it has excellent food, you always feel welcome even if you don't come in a crowd, and it's just far enough outside Tbilisi to feel in the country.  It's on the river, but I've never been in the summer, so I'm not sure if you can sit out.

Technorati tags: Sighnaghi, Georgia, Kakheti

Please push me over

For a long time I never thought I would get over the 50,000 visits to my blog, but the August war managed to get me past 60,000. 

Now Neocounter has me at 99679 when I write this.  So hopefully I shall hit the ton by the end of the week. 

But no need to start a war to do it :)

The truth about Ukrainian men

In Kyivpost here, Alina Rudya regrets what she calls “Slavic man syndrome.”

This is what happens to a man in his 30s when he doesn't engage in sports very much, when he drinks and smokes heavily, and when he eats a lot of unhealthy food. It appears that 80 percent of Ukrainian men have this syndrome.

It also gets worse when a man is married. He stops thinking about his looks and health altogether, it seems, and at the crucial age of 40 he turns into a balding, beer-bellied unattractive creature with yellow teeth and bad breath. My father was not like that. You are probably not like that either. But I am not writing about you, remember, so don't be offended. Nevertheless, I didn't invent this term. Moreover, I've noticed a tendency among my 20-something male friends to get this syndrome.

The reason men develop this syndrome is obvious. For every 10 girls, there are only nine guys in Ukraine. So, no matter how bad you look, you still have a chance to find a girl. This is why you can see so many cute girls with not-so-attractive guys on the streets. And since some girls are not satisfied with this deal, they go looking for a husband or a boyfriend from somewhere like New Zealand, where there are 10 guys for nine girls. But that's a different story.

Some might say that leading a healthy way of life requires a decent amount of money, which some men don't have. But please, quitting smoking and drinking and starting to jog every morning doesn't cost money – it saves money.

My observation is that most Ukrainian men think that a guy has to look just a bit better than a gorilla, an attitude that sets them apart from most European guys I've met. I also think many Ukrainian men tend to be a bit homophobic, so caring too much about one's appearance is considered too gay.

Some guys don't even take a shower more than once a week, let alone get manicures or shave their armpits. If you don't believe me, walk into a stuffed metro car during rush hour in the middle of summer. The smell is so bad that sometimes it feels as if you're under a chemical attack.  more....

However the headline is: People of Ukraine: Part 1 – Men.  So presumably Part 2 - will give men their revenge.

Russian Federation will break up, like the USSR did?

So says a Russian professor quoted here on the Jamestown Foundation web site, with an interesting metaphor:

As a scholar, I establish the fact that the Russian Federation is developing signs of the initial stage of a breakup," Professor Alexei Malashenko, Scholar-in-Residence of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told Jamestown on February 12. "Not unlike the case of the USSR, the current economic crisis threatens to bring already badly strained internal ties to the breaking point."

The first parts to break away, Malashenko believes, will be the Kaliningrad enclave, wedged between Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus and firmly oriented to Europe, and the Far East on the opposite side of this country, firmly locked economically to China, Japan, and South Korea.

The Kaliningrad region and the Far East have as little in common within the Russian Federation as, say, Estonia and Turkmenistan did in the Soviet Union. No viable economic ties exist between the extremes of this large country. There is nothing like Route 1 from Key West, Florida, to Fort Kent on the Canadian border to link Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.

Only centralized control, known as Putin's vertical of power, has kept Russian regions together like hoops on a cask. As the systemic crisis loosens the hoops, however, the decayed cask will start falling apart.

There's no reason at all why Kaliningrad should want to be linked with Vladivostok really.  Kaliningrad, and indeed some corners of the Baltic States, would be quite happy being linked to Moscow or St Petersburg, rather than somewhere on the other side of the world. 10 hour difference in time zones is quite a lot more than in the US, not to mention other differences.  These days Vladivostok and the Russian Far East is far more focussed on the rest of the Far East, where its trade links are likely to be found, rather than a railway link and a poor air service. 

 In a recent kerfuffle over Japanese car imports, Putin called in OMON not the local police, since they were probably just as keen on the car imports as the rest of the locals. 

I wonder how much of the Russian army is stationed in the Far East, these days, to keep control.

Uzgavenes

Better late than never, I am posting some photos from the last trip to Vilnius. 

Here are some photos of the exhibition of Uzgavenes "dolls" on display in the Teachers' House courtyard.  Uzgavenes signals the end of winter around the beginning of Lent. 

    

In  the meantime in Georgia, the devout amongst us are already fasting, with lunch consisting of lobiani every day till Easter.  I rather like lobiani, a sort of Khachapuri with kidney beans instead of cheese, but every day? Too much.

Technorati tags: Uzgavenes, Lent, Lithuania