Wu Wei

Soviet nostalgia

Since the national airline went bust just after Christmas last year, air travel in and out of Vilnius has been quite difficult.

A travel agent in Vilnius has offered me a flight  by Eurolines  (I thought they only did buses), maybe operating (or maybe not) from December 11.  The only direct flight from Vilnius to Tbilisi.

The good news is that it's only 351 Euros.  The same flight on Air Baltic costs over 400 Euros and sometimes over 500 Euros.

But the bad news is ........ it's on a YAK-40. 

My office manager (he's young) assumed I didn't know what that was, and warned me it was the most dangerous plane of Soviet times, propellor, noisy, bad pressurisation, all the old jokes about Aeroflot.  Having done my time flying to Murmansk and internally in the Ukraine, I know exactly how awful they were 15 years ago, and they won't have got any better.

So I don't think I shall be travelling on Eurolines. Even Air Baltic looks better.

More reasons not to use Air Baltic

Yesterday I received an email to propose that I  check in online.   How nice to get a reminder in time to do it, I thought.

However, in the list of advantages for check in online was the following:

    It's free of charge. Airport check-in fee is EUR 5.

WTF!  Where did that come from?  Nowhere mentioned on the website.  Imagine you turn up at the check in desk and are asked for 5 Euros to check in, with no warning.  Absolute uproar, the best way to alienate customers.  Check in assistants collecting money with no receipts and no change! 

At least agent 968 was nowhere to be seen this time, and we all boarded with the usual range of bags.

Just as soon as I find out how to complain to the EU about this airline I will.  Any ideas?

Is election fever worse than swine flu?

It seems the politicians in Ukraine are using swine flu as just another issue for electioneering. 

Yushchenko seems to have caught it particularly badly see here and here and here he is even suggesting Ukraine has its own hybrid version of swine flu. 

Levko is pointing out that the Brits seem to have about the right level of calmness about the fact that most cases are occuring in Britain, but those who are dying are vulnerable from something else as well.

You should know that doctors in the UK now advise only to take Tamiflu if you have bad flu. People who took it said that the side effects (nightmares and vomiting) are worse than ordinary flu.  Of course this could just be a plot by the NHS to save money. 

Makes you wonder what happened to the years of testing drugs before they are safe for humans.  I don't suppose they tested Tamiflu on swine first did they?  

It's actually quite hard to get hold of Tamiflu, because the doctors tell you to stay at home and you have to use the internet or telephone to obtain permission both to register for Tamiflu and to collect it from a central polnt.  Or to get someone else to do it for you. 

When I rang from Georgia to find out what to do for my daughter, who had read the website and was convinced she had got swine flu,  our doctor's receptionist replied (in a rather Soviet way), "that's nothing to do with us here".  "And this is a butcher's, not a doctor's?" I was tempted to reply.

Faced with reports from one of her friends about the side effects, Bee recovered rather quickly.