Wu Wei

The sound of one hand clapping

The well-known Buddist koan is now solved in Belarus.

Однорукий инвалид оштрафован в Минске за аплодисменты | В мире | Лента новостей "РИА Новости"

Однорукий инвалид оштрафован в Минске за аплодисменты
Сюжет: "Молчаливые" акции протеста в Белоруссии

A one-handed invalid was fined in Minsk for clapping during the recent silent protests.

Shakespeare Hotel, Vilnius

Yet again, the best service no matter what the request.

I was home for the weekend and on Sunday needed to print a 30 page report for editing, but suddenly no ink left in the cartridge. What to do?

I consulted the oracle, Vilnius in Your Pocket, (now available on the iPhone) and found the nearest internet cafe.  In fact practically the only internet cafe in the centre, since Vilnius is maybe 10 years past the stage where teenage boys have nowhere to go and nothing to do but sit in internet cafes all day (unlike Pristina and Lefkosia).  Lack of business custom meant it was closed on Sunday even in the tourist season.

Again what to do?

Needing lunch (it was 3 pm), I decided to try my luck at the Shakespeare, since I could guarantee a good lunch at least and maybe they would help.  Aurimas the receptionist instantly offered to print, and when we had difficulty printing from my USB, lent me a laptop to get at the file another way.  After 15 minutes, the problem was solved, I had ordered lunch and was busy proof reading over a glass of wine. 

I did feel a bit cheeky, using a smart hotel as an internet cafe,  when I wasn't even staying there. But it wasn't a problem for them, as usual they were happy to help. Their computer even listed which rooms I had stayed in, in the past, which we found, when they made me an invoice. 

After all that help, I was amazed to be offered a big discount for lunch because it was Sunday.

Better value I doubt if you can find anywhere.  Highly recommended as always.

Why Dubai?

Carpet blogger has the answer  here.

Relieved to find I'm not missing anything but the social anthropology.

Suddenly got an urge to blog again when I read this

Suddenly got an urge to blog again when I read this, cut and pasted into a newsletter, but originally posted here

In the evening, Tom took me into those hills, to a hotel bar where his fellow aid workers and expats hung out. They seemed a lost collection of latter-day Graham Greene characters, floating around the world, two years here, five years there, dispensers of aid while living off aid themselves, heavy drinkers and psychologically scorched, relieved to be posted in a relatively safe country for the time being.

 
We sat at an outdoor table near a tiny swimming pool and were immediately joined by a succession of diplomats and human rights watchers, as well as a middle-aged Dutch backpacker who had become romantically involved with a woman working for a British NGO. Weathered and ingratiating, the backpacker had difficulty finding listeners for his travel strories. He grew sullen and withdrawn; this crowd had seen more than he had, and from the inside. His girlfriend patted his hand reassuringly. A rotund midwesterner staggered over, exaggerating his drunkenness, I thought, granting himself the license of inebriation. Apparently, he had recently been in Darfur. He had just come from one of the low-rent casinos that dotted Tbilisi like strip joints. Throwing five hundred bucks on the table, he said, "If you match this I'll take all my clothes off and pound on the door of the French ambassador's house down the street." He tore off his shirt. "How about now?" The backpacker took the money. "You're on." The midwesterner grabbed it back from him, shouting at the top of his voice that he had been robbed. Chris, the owner of the hotel, came over to calm him. No one acted as if this were anything other than a nightly occurrence. Conversation rambled on. Chris sat down at our table. A pleasant, sleepy-looking man from Provo, Utah, he had fallen for a Georgian girl twelve years ago and stayed on. I asked him how Georgia continued to remain afloat. "Donor countries," he said. "The IMF, the EU, the US, the World Bank." He explained that he paid 20 percent on his loans, not because of inflation but because the government had borrowed the money first. "You have to pay their interest, then the bank's interest, then the profit. The vig on instability."

See what I've become after 3 years in Tbilisi.  Time to be moving on, probably.

 

Google - Moscow-Vladivostok: virtual journey on Google Maps

As the website says:

The great Trans Siberian Railway, the pride of Russia, goes across two continents, 12 regions and 87 cities. The joint project of Google and the Russian Railways lets you take a trip along the famous route and see Baikal, Khekhtsirsky range, Barguzin mountains, Yenisei river and many other picturesque places of Russia without leaving your house. During the trip, you can enjoy Russian classic literature, brilliant images by photographer Anton Lange and fascinating stories about the most attractive sites on the route. Let's go!

via www.google.ru

It's fabulous, especially if you set the music to the balalaika, which then is just like the radio that couldn't be turned off in the carriage. 

In 1975, I went from Moscow to Khabarovsk with a stop off for a week in Irkutsk.  Photos on Flickr here.

I got so tired of managing only simple conversations in Russian that when I came back, I gave up my yuppie job in London and went off to do a one year full time Russian course and then started a PhD in Birmingham.  At the time it was just a gamble which didn't pay off till the break up  of the Soviet Union.

But it sure paid off later, as anyone reading this blog would realise.

Update on small claims

A sudden vast  increase in traffic to my blog (no, not another war in Georgia) has been caused by someone spotting the post (here) about how we successfully sued Easyjet in the Small Claims County Court, but did it online which was very easy. Thank you lightbluetouchpaper.

It only works for suing British firms or firms with offices in England and Wales. 

However, a friend has also found there is a European version for crossborder claims.  You can find out about it here.  To get the form, you need to download the Regulation, (the form's an appendix) but it seems to explain what you have to do.

It only applies to claims up to 2000 Euros, which is not a lot,  but enough to be helpful with budget airline problems.

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 it raining everywhere?

My week in Cyprus has been spoilt by the lousy weather: deluges every lunchtime, and grey skies most of the rest. The hail stones like tennis balls missed Nicosia.   It seems the weather forecast is not much different in Tbilisi.

Turkish Cypriots are getting qualified to join the EU.  They are already skeptical and able to point out the inconsistencies and stupidities of some of the legislation.  On the other hand they are not able to recognise the difference this makes.  Some of them seem to prefer poverty and isolation "in" Turkey (and no changes) to economic development and a higher standard of living with the EU.  Changes are difficult. 

The public sector earns more than the private sector in Turkish Cyprus, so why should anyone change?

AirBaltic pays more attention to Georgia by learning from Aeroflot and Ryanair

It seems AirBaltic is now been made Airline of the Year by the European Regions Airline Association, and is inviting us to celebrate this by booking cheap flights. Eventually it becomes clear that this only applies to flights starting in the Baltic States, which is not much help if you start in Tbilisi. It’s not clear what the criteria were for this prize but to me it seems their service is deteriorating rapidly.

Because the Lithuanian national airline flyLAL went bankrupt at the beginning of the year, AirBaltic is now the only affordable and sensible route between my work in Tbilisi and my home in Vilnius. So I have been travelling regularly on this route.

I have got used to being in cramped seat conditions on the longer overnight flight between Tbilisi and Riga. The flight is usually full, causing even more cramped conditions.  The alternative flights  to Vienna and Istanbul, the main alternative routes out of Tbilisi, are usually half empty. On these flights, you also get food, blankets and a whole row of seats to yourself, if you are lucky. On my last flight back from Riga AirBaltic tried to charge me 2 Euros for a bottle of water, until I complained, when they produced free water from the back cabin!

But it is the tricks they are playing with baggage that really upset me on a recent trip home that included a side trip to Helsinki. It was impossible to book 6 consecutive flights on the website so I went to the local AirBaltic office down the road in Tbilisi. The flight seemed much cheaper than I was expecting after looking at the costs on the website. Only later I realized that I had to pay an extra 13 Euros for each bag I checked in, on every leg of the flight. This was not mentioned when I booked the ticket. So the flight actually cost 78 Euros more. If I had just turned up at the airport without paying on line, it would have cost me 15 Euros, or 90 Euros in total. While writing this article I was checking my facts, and I find that, had I paid at the same time as the ticket, I would only have been charged 10 Euros per leg.

Now these days when we are all trying to cut down on carbon emissions, I can’t really complain about paying for baggage, but AirBaltic check-in desks are really inconsistent on how they apply their policy. Usually my bag is overweight by a few kilos. Sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn’t. When it does, I take out my big bag from the suitcase (I carry it specially for the purpose) and fill it with the books and papers I need for my work, until my suitcase is an acceptable weight. Usually this is enough to satisfy the check in person, who recognizes that the excess weight is still being carried on the plane and that this is really illogical, and we laugh about it.

In Helsinki, I was informed by an apologetic check in person that AirBaltic now weighs the baggage when it is offloaded and any overweight bags are contra charged to the airport at the check in end. Although the shift from hold to cabin at check in results in no less baggage being carried, and so no less fuel being used, AirBaltic still tries to earn extra money by charging when the weight is not shifted to the cabin. I don’t think even Ryanair has tried this trick.

In addition to this bag, I always have my handbag and computer. If the check in desk gets really fussy, I am ready to demonstrate that this bag possesses magical properties. It does not look very big, but I can always get the computer, handbag and items with excess weight inside it, and it will still always fit in the frame which airlines use to define the maximum size of hand baggage. Occasionally this all even gets weighed and is passed by AirBaltic.

To my surprise when I left Vilnius this last time, my boarding card was stamped “approved as one piece of hand baggage”. I have never seen that before. On this occasion, we had not even gone through the bother of proving everything would fit in one bag in the frame. So they had seen that I had 3 bags.

On the AirBaltic website there is no mention of restrictions on hand baggage above the usual one bag, with weight and size restrictions. Yet on this same return flight, when we were trying to board the Riga Tbilisi flight, a big row occurred at the front of the queue to board the bus.

The girl in charge of checking boarding cards announced she was charging 10 Lats for every piece of hand baggage over the single one allowed. Not only that but she spoke in Russian in a tone of voice reminiscent of Aeroflot’s best charm school (barking like a dog at us), and actually said “take it or leave it” (which in Russian sounds much worse). As she strode up and down in a long coat and knee high boots, she was missing only a whip and she could have been ready to work as a Nazi concentration camp guard. It was clear she was enjoying her work, and the other girl with her had the decency to look embarrassed.

Now in this part of the world when people invent rules like this, (usually traffic cops) you know it is because they have low salaries or haven’t been paid recently. Usually they do not create a big fuss in public. So what do we assume, that she was especially stupid in trying to earn some extra money or that AirBaltic has a new unwritten baggage policy. And 10 lats (14 Euros) a bag? Who has Lats on the way home to Tbilisi?  And you can be sure she wasn’t giving change for Euros or dollars.

Nearly everyone in the queue had bags that had already passed a check on an earlier flight to Riga where they were in transit. Or they had shopping that they had bought in the duty free shops in the airport. So some people had spent a lot in Riga airport and had a lot of shopping bags. Since when did an airline penalize customers for shopping in its home airport?

This woman was ruthless and rude to everyone. We were all tired, since the flight was departing around 10 pm. I crammed my bags into the frame and showed that it had passed a previous boarding check. I asked for her name. “968” she snarled. So now AirBaltic staff are reduced to numbers to protect them for complaints it seems.

Eventually the flight took off. The journey was spoilt for everyone. Next day I opened the English language paper Georgia Today. With the headline "AirBaltic looks to pay more attention to Georgia", a local journalist conducted an interview with Vice President of Sales Gregory Pomerantsev.

AirBaltic may have won a prize as best European Airline, but their agent 968 collected her own prize from the passengers on the flight from Riga to Tbilisi on Tuesday 27 September. I hope Mr Pomerantsev finds the right reward for her.