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Vilnius: Airport to city travel delays

A bridge in the main road that links Vilnius airport and the city centre will be closed from June 1. It's expected that travelling between the airport and the city will take twice as long as it previously did. It's also going to roughly double the cost of a cab to or from the airport. Keep it in mind if you have a plane to catch.

Poles revive eight-year-old gay Teletubby probe

As reported on just about every news site, Poland is investigating whether Teletubbies, especially that one that minces about with the handbag, might be gay. So, that means it's only taken Poland eight years to cotton on to the Tinky-Winky women's accessory subversive make-the-kiddies-gay story. It's old news.

Lithuanian honey wrestling on Australian TV

I can't believe I've been living in Lithuania for over two years and, until yesterday, knew nothing of Lithuanian honey wrestling. I guess I don't hang around with the... erm... right sort of people. It's also amusing that I discovered honey wrestling while watching The Chaser's War On Everything, a comedy programme on the ABC (Australia's national publicly funded broadcaster). (Don't ask me how I got to watch an Australian television programme while living in Lithuania.)

I don't know if the 'Amber Lady' honey wrestling competition is still going - most of the references I can find to it are at least a couple of years old - but it's still watchable on YouTube. It is actually a pretty obvious idea, as it combines two of the things that Lithuania is famous for producing - honey, and girls.

Most amusing are the names the competitors choose for themselves. There's Brown Salamander, Militant Angel, Poisonous Lilliy, Wayward Anaconda, Red Daybreak and Bronze Thumbelina.

No, hang on, even more amusing is the commentary:

"Militant angel ... is unmercifully submerged into honey"

"Poisonous Lilly has just lost that so hardly earned point for pulling her rival's hair. Sometimes Poisonous Lilly can't control her burning temper and gets penalty points for that. Meantime, Militant angel keeps on resisting honourably"

... and on it goes. It's quite funny if you hear it with the accent.

"Hygiene procedures are executed promptly this time."

Anyway... if you're at all interested in seeing girls wriggling around in a bath of bee spew, take a look. Me... I'm off to a museum or a church or something.

Honey Wrestling picture from binarydistortion on Flickr.

Americans invade Romania. Awesome!

Americans are about to hit Eastern Europe in a big way this summer. The AAA, America’s largest association of travel agents, claims that while bookings to Europe are down 2.4 per cent, booking to Eastern Europe are up 55 per cent. The stats cover booking for travel in and between June and August this year.

Romania seems to be set to cop the greatest onslaught of the yank attack, with figures showing a 700 per cent increase in American travel.

That might sound scary as American’s have a reputation of being loud-mouth, barge-arsed morons with no dress sense. Another recent survey, however, has revealed that Americans are in fact the most civil travellers, second only to the Japanese. But they’ve still got no dress sense.

Source: Travelmole (registration required).

Vilnius bans EU gay rights parade

So much for freedom of speech in Lithuania.

An EU-sponsored gay rights parade planned to take place in Vilnius has been banned by the city council. Rather than supporting the right of a minority to express an opinion, they have simply banned it. They are affraid of angry protests and strong reactions and just can't be bothered organising and supporting appropriate planning and protection for an EU-supported campaign aimed at promoting tolerance.

Vilnius is the only city to have banned the parade so far. That says so much.

Why Bucharest and Motor Racing do not mix

Bucharest (a city famous for its 100,000 stray dogs) tries its hand at hosting motor racing. We think it will be a one-off. This kind of thing never happens at Silverstone...

Romania's Poor Deserve Better Than This

First off, read the article, which appeared in the Guardian (where else) last week:

http://travel.guardian.co.uk/article/2007/may/12/saturday.romania

Then tell me, have you ever read a more condescending, patronising and downright insulting article in your life?

A couple of choice quotes:

'Not much happens in the village. Depending on the season, most people are in the fields tilling or harvesting small plots of hay, oats and potatoes with horse-drawn implements handed down through generations. The most common form of transport is the horse and cart, designed to carry crops, logs, people, sheep, tools, and pretty much anything else that needs to be moved.'

'One English visitor who had a room to himself is Prince Charles, an enthusiastic patron of the trust who has bought a property in the village to be donated as a guesthouse. Following one of his visits, he wrote: "The area represents a lost past for most of us - a past in which villages were intimately linked to their landscape."'

What the area in fact represents is pitiful poverty. Most of the old Saxon villages of Southern Transylvania lack almost every basic amenity that we take for granted: running water, sewerage, reliable electricity, telephones, paved roads, good schools, public transport... the list is endless. The reason that such a past has been lost for 'us' is because we were lucky enough to have the opportunity to drag ourselves out of such poverty and move on. For reasons many (war and communism being just two) much of Romania has not had this opportunity, until now.

Alas for Romanians, groups like the Mihai Eminescu Trust have plans for them that do not involve sewerage, running water, paved roads; indeed, anything that may involve growth, and development, is a no-no:

'Patrick Holden of the Soil Association, a patron of the Mihai Eminescu Trust, suggests the old Saxon ways of Transylvania could be a model for the development of green agriculture throughout Europe.'

Notice that Patrick Holden is not a local. Patrick Holden (nor the author of the article, Gavin Bell) does not live in a house that lacks running water. I doubt he has to make do with a horse and cart either. Most Romanians in the region are not so lucky.

The irony of this is that people like Holden and Bell (no doubt both from very comfortable backgrounds) can take such a mystical view of poor rural villages precisely because of the development they now want to desperately prevent taking place in Southern Transylvania.

The realisation that the 'happy peasants' whose lifestyles they now seek to preserve may actually not particularly enjoy subsistence farming has yet to hit them...

Beer Today, England Tomorrow

The BBC reports on how Polish beers Tyskie and Lech are taking England by storm, and how Romania's Ursus could follow...

Be afraid, be very afraid...

Bottled beers take Pole position

Romania and Moldova

Some excellent articles have appeared in the international press lately about relations between Romania and Moldova (a country we hope to Pocket soon) and the thorny issue of Transnistria. Here is my pick of the best:

EU visas for sale in Moldova (Tiraspol Times)
Moldova Diary (Economist web edition)
A Deal Over Transnistria (Economist print edition)

Happy reading.

That's Rough

I have attacked the anti-travel, anti-human environmental lobby on this blog before, but it has to be said that while their motives maybe sinister and their means illiberal, the environmentalists do at least have convictions, which they firmly believe in: human beings are evil and the planet must come first. Right or wrong, that's their opinion and few would deny their right to it (even though climate-change deniers such as myself would be the first up against the wall in a world led by them...)

Last week however the budget airlines that attract so much wrath from the environmentalists were attacked from another angle: the travel industry. Mark Ellingham, the founder of the Rough Guides series, called for an end to 'binge flying' and for 'green levies to be placed on overseas plane trips.'

Ellingham wants no less than a £100 green tax on all European flights, and a £200 tax on long-haul flights. He said "If there was just one thing I could change it would be to stop this new British obsession with binge flying. We now live in a society where, if people have nothing to do on a Saturday night, they fly to Budapest for 48 hours."

The devil is in the last sentence. Ellingham's worries may on the surface be about saving the environment, but they also betray a disdain for the kind of people who fly to Budapest for 48 hours. This middle-class student, backpacker travel snobbism, which turns its nose up at people who go abroad and - shock horror - stay in nice chain hotels, drink imported beer, eat in McDonalds and generally neglect the culture of the places they visit, is fashionable in travel writer circles.

Well, not at In Your Pocket. We think that any society that is egalitarian enough to facilitate almost anybody access to cheap air travel is a successful one. That people can quite literally go to Budapest if they have nothing to do is wonderful. Quite how stopping people doing so would make the world a better place is difficult to comprehend.

It seems doubly ironic that the people of Central and Eastern Europe - discovering cheap travel after decades locked behind the Iron Curtain - are now taking part in an activity that some very comfortable people in Western Europe consider beyond contempt.

Keep flying.

Keep offsetting the offsets.

Mile-high club

Silverjet, a business-class airline that flies between London (Luton) and New York (Newark), has women-only toilets, as their new viral ad points out:

Ryanair shocker - they quote real prices

Ryanair have shocked... well, me... and probably the entire no-frills, cheap as chips, cattle-class budget airline category by quoting fares that actually (seem to) exist.

Ryanair's biggest ever seat sale includes flights from £10, with "all taxes and charges included". The airline is also promising to refund double the difference if those who book find chaper flights elsewhere. The promotion runs until June 12, and it is claimed that 3.5 million seats will be offered for a tenner.

But this lovely looking offer starts to loose its shine once one consults the small print.

The prices with "all taxes and charges included" do not include "credit/debit card fees, baggage fees, web check-in/priority boarding fees or any other optional fees".

Furthermore, to get claim on the 'double the difference' price guarantee, you have to book a flight on Ryanair, find another cheaper flight (with departure times within one hour of the booked Ryanair flight), and then submit the claim on a special form, with a screenshot of the competing airline's offer, all within one hour of making the original booking. Ryaniar will try to pull-up the competitors website (only during business hours, of course) and try to make the same booking to verify the claim. If they can't, they won't pay.

Ryanair claim that the double the difference offer will cost them around £1 million. I find it hard to imagine that anoyne could succesfully make a claim given the terms and conditions, let alone how enough customers could make claims that would amount to a million quid.

Still, it is very refreshing to see fares quoted with at least some of the taxes and charges included.

Sources : Ryanair and TravelMole (registration required).

Bulgaria: Train drivers pivot and pee

Bulgarian train drivers have been provided with swivel chairs so that they can pivot and pee out of the window without having to stop the train. Passengers who might like to stick their heads out of train windows should be warned of possible splash-back effects. Anyone who has been left alone in a small room with swivelling furniture might also like to consider the possible effects of very dizzy train drivers.

Source: The ever-reliable and amusing Jaunted, who presented the story with a little more polish than Ananova.

Giraffe beats up girl

A 22-year-old Kaunas student has been roughed-up by a giraffe at the local zoo.

The drunk student (female) was attacked by the sober nine-year-old giraffe (male) after she disturbed it in its sleep. She was kicked in the head a few times and scored a broken collar bone. Zoo keepers say that if the giraffe and been awake, and outside it's sleeping quarters, things could have been a lot worse.

The drunk students had managed to both enter the zoo and open the door of the giraffe enclosure late on Monday night. We suspect a review of security at Kaunas zoo may be necessary to keep the animals out.

Photo 'Pucker up!' from ucumari.
Details from various sources found on Google News, and the local '15min' newspaper.

In Your Pocket in Tourism Review

Belfast In Your Pocket editor Heidi McAlpin gave an interview to the March 2007 issue of influential trade magazine Tourism Review. Download the interview in PDF format here.

Minsk: Soviet spangle galore

62 Years Soviet
Originally uploaded by Kritta.

I just got back after some time in Minsk. (We're updating Minsk In Your Pocket.) It was interesting to see all the Soviet stars getting a bit of a polish and new banners, such as this one, being whacked up in preparation for the May 9 (Victory Day) celebrations. For contrast and perspective, read the previous post. There really is a lot of hammer-and-sickle razzle-dazzle down there. There's also a good swag of new restaurants and and nightclubs. Stay tuned...

Estonia and Russia

Anyone looking for some background and no small amount of sense in the recent (and, indeed, ongoing) dispute between Estonia and Russia) should start here, at the Economist.