Wu Wei

Soviet nostalgia

2009-11-21T19:40:54+00:00

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

2009-11-16T10:48:05+00:00

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?

2009-11-05T19:14:32+00:00

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.

Is it raining everywhere?

2009-10-31T05:13:24+00:00

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

2009-10-16T12:26:51+01:00

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.

Blog Action Day: Climate Change: Georgian journalists learn about energy efficiency

2009-10-15T12:08:32+01:00

After nearly two years in Georgia, I can say that climate change does not register much over the horizon here. Our work requires us to do marketing and publicity for energy efficiency, which also gets rather poor coverage in the press in Georgia. So last weekend we offered a group of Georgian journalists the chance of 2 days in the tourist spot of Sighnaghi in Eastern Georgia, while having some training on the topic of energy efficiency and climate change.

Previous attempts a year before had been a bit too technical for them. So this time, the training was mainly carried out by two journalists, who could give tips on their craft as well help to find interesting angles for stories, whilst I explained some of the problems of energy use in Georgia.

We are required in our project to make sure that the training is open to both sexes and that wherever possible equal numbers of women and men are trained. Normally we have to take photos to prove this. This time we had 14 women and 1 man (who disappeared the second day). This is pretty typical for journalists in Georgia.

We also listened to what the journalists had to say:

What is news in Georgia?
There is no doubt that politics drowns out most of the other news in Georgia. The antics of the government and opposition are covered ad nauseum. And news drowns out investigative journalism (we only know one journalist from a monthly publication), in depth journalism might imply criticism of the government and the loss of a job. There are no columns devoted to new technology, or science "as these are not of interest to the people". Descending into stereotypes, this may be because journalists tend to be recruited from the humanities, and tend to be women, with little science or engineering background. It may also be because professions are recruited directly from the universities and there is little opportunity to move for example from business to journalism or from science or engineering to journalism.

Environmental issues are seen as a luxury for a poor country like Georgia, and no one realised that CO2 reduction could provide big investments for Georgia through JI and CDM. Nobody knew much about the Kyoto Protocol or the big Climate Change Conference coming up in Copenhagen in Georgia.

Energy Security
This has been the real issue in Georgian news. After independence there were many difficulties with power supplies (not to mention civil war). In 1995/6 when I visited Tbilisi and went out to eat, you could either see the menu but not the food when it came, or vice versa, as power supplies were regularly cut off throughout the day. In those days, it was more important to get some energy at all, and saving it made no sense. Industry could not get raw materials so was hardly working at all, so had no incentives to save or replace equipment.

Happily times have changed and one of the successes of Saakashvili has been to stabilise and build up the energy supply. The economy is developing but with a bias towards high risk strategies: a construction boom based a property bubble, luxury hotels and shopping centres hardly affordable or needed by ordinary people; plus a dependence on transit: oil and gas, food imports and other goods going going further east. Who knows what the effect of the Turkey-Armenia rapprochement will be on transit routes in the region?

So what is energy efficiency?
Journalists did not distinguish between energy and energy efficiency. Energy prices are considered high, till we pointed out that the prices were quite low compared with Europe (electricity is mainly hydro, gas comes from Azerbaijan now). It is the consumption in Georgia that is high because ex-Soviet countries generally use three times more energy than western developed countries. Some other reasons are:

Soviet legacy equipment in factories is worn out and inefficient now, but was never designed with energy efficiency in mind
Bank interest rates are very high (just beginning to come down below 20%) so loans are expensive
Lack of knowledge of what is available on the market: not much on the internet on this topic in Russian and even less in Georgian
A government whose policy of ultraliberalism (inherited from Bush advisers) has removed any regulation which set standards for construction or inhibited the free reign of wild capitalism (suiting some of the government businessmen masquerading as politicians)
So no building codes requiring insulation and double glazing, or shading for summer.
Heating even in modern buildings (like our office) is still often by individual room heaters, not central heating.
Even people building their own new villas do not know about insulation, let alone where to buy it.

In Georgia households account for about half of all energy used in Georgia, unlike most countries, where it is around 20-30%. District heating from a thermal power station was abandoned in the early 90s, leaving people to fend absolutely for themselves, burning wood, kerosene or even petrol inside their buildings. New blocks of flats are still being built as "white shell" with the new owner supposed to provide himself with insulation, double glazing, central heating as well as finish the shell. In contrast, Russia already has legislation similar to the EU on building energy performance.

In the countryside where the poor live, the situation is even worse. Many villages are without electricity and even small towns lack gas networks. So people survive with heating using illegal wood burnt in metal boxes on legs (I will not dignify them with the name of stoves), which are horrifyingly dangerous.

Climate change
Freak weather does not much affect Georgia. Snow in October was unusual this year, but had the merit of keeping the Caucasus mountains inaccessible for Russians. So climate change is not much of a news story either.

What is to be done?
Generally the journalists thought it was the government's job to sort out this mess. So we gave them the example of the grassroots activism of the 10:10 campaign in the UK.

Single issue activism and greenery is not yet a force in Georgia. Even parliamentary activism is low key. Issues are just expressed in terms of whether Saakashvili's resignation will help or not, and on the streets, rather than in Parliament. Developing rational choices between concrete actions and debating written policy proposals, is too tame for the fiery and emotional Georgians.

Not a very hopeful story. But we are running a competition for the journalists in the hope that this will create incentives for them to write more on the topic.

I leave you with details of our latest project being developed for a loan: 60 tons of poultry manure a day has to be disposed of somewhere beyond a large poultry farm, as disposal is now getting beyond the scope of the farm. With this manure and a biodigester, plus a modified diesel generator, it is possible for the farm to be self-sufficient in heat and electricity, sell gas to the local network or bottle it for selling in gas stations. The manure residue turns into organic solid and liquid fertiliser which commands a higher price than ordinary chemical fertiliser. This project also reduces methane emissions from the manure and CO2 emissions from electricity and heat generation so could get an income from CO2 reductions.

A happier prospect? Not quite. The farm is busy developing battery hens and broilers just when UK supermarkets are boasting about their eggs laid by hens who have never seen a battery cage.

Who decides what country you are in?

2009-10-04T19:59:50+01:00

Eternal Remont has pointed here to the problem of Abkhazia on Facebook. It seems Facebook recognises states not nations. So groups are now developing for Abkhazians who consider they are not in Georgia.

It's also a big problem for Kosovo. If you find yourself in Pristina, on Googlemaps somehow you passed the Kosovo border and ended up in Serbia, which is illegal in the real world. I tried to put my favourite bookshop (which is in Pristina) on LibraryThing, but it wouldn't let me put Pristina in Kosovo, so I had to leave the state blank.

Dopplr isn't much better. I haven't been to Pristina lately but this is what it offers me:

1. Priština, Serbia (also known as 'Pristina') Near Kosovo, Lipkovo, Novi Pazar Verify on a map. and if you do verify on a map, it's not clear whether Pristina is in Kosovo either. Very confusing.

It seems that some time ago, Podgorica moved from Serbia and Montenegro (as my old Outlook version insisted) and is now in just Montenegro, according to most software I use.

My iPod Touch thinks I am in Kiev. It doesn't allow me to be in Tbilisi, but I can be in Yerevan.

Just out of interest, who is it who decides which countries go in those drop down boxes. I assume most people use boxes from a standard programme library. But who decides when it is time to change the countries?

With Bee to Arcadia

2009-09-20T13:16:38+01:00

I was having a wet Sunday afternoon organising my photos when I came across a Greek set which I couldn't find any clue as to where they were. Then I remembered there was a draft post lurking somewhere which identified where we had been.

So here is a post from Spring 2005 when we were still living in Athens, and I had just started my blog. Arcadia seemed such a nice place to make a trip to. I wasn't sure why and I only just now looked up what I had at the back of my mind: et in arcadia ego. It seems it's an inscription on a tombstone, implying that the person too once enjoyed the pleasures of life on earth. So somehow Arcadia is the place to go for the pleasures in life.

Anyway Bee needed a field trip for her history class (after the failure of the Jewish Museum in Vienna) and I needed a Sunday outing for Easter. Bee hates outings to see old bits of rock (as she put it), though she loves history. We both needed a Sunday lunch by the sea.

A chance article in Saturday's Kathimerini about turning the Roman villa of Herod Atticus into a museum gave a direction. Neither of us knew where Kynouria was, but a map revealed it had enough sights for it not to matter if one was a dud. So we set off late (forgot to adjust our clocks) with road map, Rough Guide to Greece, and various printouts from the internet to tell us what to look for.

According to our own theory of travel (still to be written down) nothing you read before going makes any sense till you see it, and by then you have forgotten what you read. By the time you get back you have forgotten what you saw but what you read then can at least bring back memories. This is taken to mean that you should forget guide books and follow your nose for what is interesting at the time.

Here’s the map

Kynouria Villages

After an hour or so down the motorway to Corinth and a drive though orange groves to Argos, we moved into the prefecture of Arcadia and Northern Kynouria. The Rough Guide claimed the villages were very tidy, in itself worth a visit in Greece, and so they were. Not much concrete or building in evidence and well maintained traditional houses, the older ones made of stone.

Archaeological Museum at Astros

A detour took us to the Archaeological Museum. This was a very smart building with high ceilings in a lovely walled garden, obviously well cared for. The museum itself was as described on the web, a few local treasures (coins, vases, statues with bits missing) but disappointing to Bee as the curator would allow no photos or sketches. So we came, we saw but we could not take away. Even the headless reclining ladies in the gardens were to be protected from us. We had to content ourselves with photos of the car park, the outside of the museum and a nearby building which took my fancy.

The Roman Villa of Herod Atticus

The museum did contain some photos and explanations of the mosaics in Herod’s villa, but they were clearly elsewhere for even more safe keeping. Then off we went to find the original, up the hill to Eva alias Kato Doliana on the map. In a spot with a good view, but not of the sea, we found the villa, fenced off in a desultory way. Nothing at the site to explain what there was, or what had been taken away, so we were not much wiser, except it was a rather big house. to Kathimerini, but this must include the grounds. Compared with the average Athens apartment of less than 100 sq m or even 3000 sq m for a large house for an embassy type, this was very big.

It contains remarkable collections that reveal the history of Herod himself, who dreamed of a happy home filled with original works of ancient Greek art and Roman copies of ancient works. But he succumbed to depression when his wife Rigilla died, children and pupils died, and turned the luxurious villa into a museum and site for the mystical worship of his dead”.

Built in around 117-138 AD, when misfortune struck in 165 AD, the villa was clad in marble from Lesvos, turning it into a mausoleum. No sign of any marble now and one wonders why he brought marble all the way from Lesvos. The heart of the villa was a rectangular courtyard with a garden surrounded by an artificial stream. It was framed on three sides by arcades and corridors with superb mosaic floors in the atrium, and on the fourth side by an exedra or platform. To the west is a small basilica, and on the south side an octagonal sentry post, baths, a semicircular Nymphaion and another basilica (a temple to Antinoos) were discovered. To the east is a series of rooms that lead to a courtyard, from which the gardens probably continued. A third basilica is on the northern side, with a library running lengthwise between it and another stoa. The house remained in use till the sixth century.

But with no plan at the site, it was hard to begin to discuss the changed use of the word atrium or how the different parts of the house must have been used. The website for the villa has little information but mentions an aqueduct (see later).

Afterwards from research we can add that this is the same Herodes Atticus who built the Odeon (open air theatre) near the Acropolis in Athens, which is still used for cultural events all summer and can seat 5000 spectators. Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes was a most celebrated orator and Sophist http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/sophists.htm. He was born into an immensely wealthy Athenian family that had received Roman citizenship during the reign of the emperor Claudius. He was befriended by Hadrian and tutored Marcus Aurelius the Emperor of the time. However the depressive version of his life is not mentioned in the standard bibliographies and most refer to his villa at Marathon, where he was born or at Kifissia to the north of Athens.

The newspaper article says there is a plan to cover the site with mesh to provide a roof to reduce erosion by the weather. It seems ironic that Herod Atticus’s own house should lie in ruins and unprotected, when he himself was a great constructor and reconstructor:

Among the great architectural works with which he adorned the city, we may mention a race-course (stadium) of white Pentelic marble, of which ruins are still extant, and the magnificent theatre of Regilla, with a roof made of cedar-wood. His liberality, however, was not confined to Attica. At Corinth he built a theatre, at Olympia an aqueduct, at Delphi a race-course, and at Thermopylae a hospital ; and he also restored, with his ample means, several decayed towns in various parts of Greece.

A Roman Aqueduct

Trying to find another villa, we found an old bridge which we realised had been an aqueduct. It had been used quite recently but with iron pipes which were still lying there. But the stone walled conduits leading to the bridge were still there as well. The bridge itself had a strange fluid look, but we couldn't get close enough to see why. And the red flowers were pretty.

Red Cliffs at Leonidio

A long and winding road round the coast for an hour past houses perching on the cliffs and tiny beaches nestling at their foot indicated that this was a quite place to escape the crowds but not the Germans, as property boards advertised for them. Bee slept through it all. Eventually we reached Leonidio and headed inland looking for red cliffs and a monastery hanging to the rock. Then a long drive on a windy road where the cliffs looked they might descend any moment and great chunks already had judging by bits missing in the cliff and the holes in the road, but no signs of Monastery Elona; at least no signs for it, so we never knew where it was.

Sunday lunch at Plaka

Then we drove as fast as we could to Plaka, as we were starving. The road took us strangely straight across a wide river bed, with no signs of a bridge. We found a pretty seaside village and packed restaurants. So we bagged a table and rushed to the kitchen to see what was cooking. When we had ordered red snapper, baked aubergines, broad beans and artichoke hearts, and the usual Greek salad and tzatsiki we relaxed at a table on the water's edge, happy that it was time to eat outside again. There was a pebbly beach with a fresh water stream, occupied by a group of ducks. Bee christened a group of four white ones the girly ducks, as they went swimming round in a group ignoring the rest. Occasionally one broke away and we laughed as the others played at "don't want to be friends with you". After lunch, we moved upstairs for coffee and Bee wrote her project.

Spring Flowers

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iPhoto

2009-09-19T19:49:47+01:00

I'm having a lot of fun with iPhoto. Its "Names" feature is really cool. If you attach a name to a face it ploughs through your photos finding matching faces. It manages to find all the family likenesses at different ages, so it matches my older self with my childhood photos.

It also managed to match my father's photos under his prewar name with his postwar name, sort of confirming that the prewar photos were really him.

On the other hand it makes some hilarious mismatches, some of which are only funny if you know the people concerned.

Also if you pick an individual photo, it will try and guess who the people are, which can also be quite funny.

It pulls names out of your address book which saves a lot of typing and misspelling as well.

On the other hand it can't recognise a cat face.

Some of the faces it has found are:

5 photos of a guy whose name is on the tip of my tongue but I can't remember it (very frustrating)
Colonel Sanders of KFC fame ???
one face from a memorial to the Decembrists, at a station on the Trans-Siberian railway.

Hearing Klezmer in Vilnius

2009-09-13T17:48:23+01:00

During my moving in, in August, I spotted a 4 day festival of Klezmer Music in Vilnius, so off I went. It's good to see Jewish life coming back to Vilnius. What is Klezmer? Go here (wikipedia) and here for when I met it by chance in Oxford.

A friend pointed out that it was being held in a courtyard very close to where the Jews had been rounded up in the war. But obviously this was a much happier occasion, with good weather, lots of young people and kids (skinheads clearly didn't understand what klezmer was), and there was food and beer.

The first night there was a home grown Klezmer band, plus an American trumpeter. It was mostly dance music and everybody hopped around on the grass. There were seats but they had long been filled. It was really good.

The second night was not so lively, mostly rather formal singers singing in Yiddish rather seriously. In the photos, you can see a rather small man, paired with a rather tall woman. The songs were funny, but the pairing made it even funnier. But at the end a Russian woman singer was very good at working the crowd and had us singing along anyway. By then it was more like a Saturday night in a Russian restaurant where everybody sang popular songs. Photos here.

The third night was some new composition in the style of modern music, too modern for me. The US trumpeter ended by saying that the piece had been the most difficult he had ever played. I left early.

I had to miss the fourth night, which was a shame, when the band of the first night came back.