Cue cucumbers: It's Lithuania's wackiest vegetable festival

Those facing a what-to-do dilemma this weekend might like to consider one of Lithuania’s wackiest festivals – the Kėdainiai Cucumber Festival.

Of course there will be pickles aplenty, plentiful lashings of an alcoholic cucumber concoction, cucumber cooking and of course the crowning of the annual King or Queen of the Cucumbers.
Potential monarchs vie for the cucumber crown by both demonstrating an advanced knowledge of cucumber cultivation (they must actually have a 300-square-metre hothouse full of frolicking vegetables, which counts me out) and excelling at amusing but as-yet undefined cucumber antics.

The festivities will be led this year by local celebrity Mama Rock ‘n’ Roll who, perhaps appropriately, has the approximate proportions of a watermelon.

We Are Two

Photos from Belfast In Your Pocket's second birthday bash...





Belfast's Lord Mayor Jim Rodgers is presented with a framed cover of the second anniversary issue by publishers Heidi McAlpin and Sinead Faulkner.



Belfast In Your Pocket second birthday party guests set on their bus tour of the city.

Belfast In Your Pocket's Heidi McAlpin and Sinead Faulkner with Childline NI's Corporate Fundraising Manager Leona McEvoy

Heidi and Sinead with the Kopparberg Premium Cider girls.

Radisson SAS's Lisa Scott with Sinead Faulkner.

Belfast In Your Pocket Managing Editor Heidi McAlpin presents BBC Radio Ulster's Alan Simpson with a framed photo of the H&W cranes won at the auction.

In Your Pocket on Radio Ulster

As part of the celebrations for Belfast In Your Pocket's second birthday, founder Heidi McAlpin along with Martin Kitson and myself were invited onto the Alan Simpson show last week on BBC Radio Ulster.

You can listen to our mumblings here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

We look good on Radio.

Time to call a spade a spade:easyJet is a great airline

In a desperate attempt to fly from Bucharest to Belfast and back at reasonable cost last week (to help Belfast In Your Pocket celebrate its second birthday: more on that soon) I was forced to call on the services of no fewer than three budget airlines: Romania's own Blue Air, the UK's easyJet, and Hungary's Wizzair.

Let's deal with the chaff first:

Blue Air, a Romanian private equity company which began operations in 2004, has a long history of generating bad press in the local media in Romania, mainly because of the safety record of its aircraft. Though a Blue Air plane has never been involved in a serious accident, in its early days the number of planes forced to make emergency landings was startlingly high. Lately it has been long delays that have generated bad press. I have now flown three times with Blue Air, and on each occasion I have had nothing to complain about. Planes have left promptly, and flights have been crash free.

In my experience Blue Air is an airline with a bad reputation is does not deserve. It's website needs work, and its prices are not always what could be called 'low cost,' but these are minor gripes.

Wizzair is a different matter. Don;t get me wrong: Wizz are cheap, fly a reasonably new fleet of aircraft and have a great inflight magazine that now features content from In Your Pocket... but I have taken five Wizz flights this year, and not one has departed on time (or anything close to it).

The latest mishap came at Luton on Friday: we were told to board on time, were feet away from the plane when we were told that Wizz had decided to change cabin crew... and the flight would be delayed at least an hour.

As we had already handed in our boarding passes, they had to be given back to us; they were, but in a very willy-nilly way. I got Mrs. Dumitrescu's boarding pass for example. As a result, when we did finally board, we were further delayed because two passengers were missing... and as nobody had the correct boarding pass Wizz had no idea who those passengers were. That's just amateur (though in Wizz's defence the boarding passes were returned to us by Luton Airport staff, not Wizz's).

So to easyJet. Again, everybody has different experiences with different airlines, but I have yet to hear too many complaints about easyJet's services. Their flights get delayed, just like everybody else's, but the whole easyJet experience, from reserving your ticket (on the clearest and easiest to use airline website around) through checking in to boarding is so efficient and comfortable that you don't mind so much.

And above all they are cheap. Again, might just be me but easyJet always appear to have the best prices on any of their routes. And now they are coming to Romania... only from Milan at the moment, but I am sure more services will follow. Competition for Blue Air and Wizz at last.

Easyjet to fly to Bucharest

From Milan to begin with...

http://www.easyjet.com/EN/News/austria_romania_winter_schedule.html

Lay off the Brut, Vladimir Vladimirovich

Great story on the BBC website today about the preferred tipple of a growing band of desperate Russian drunks...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6752515.stm

Putting Albania on the Map

George Bush - though it cost him his watch - might well like to think that he put Albania on the map this week, with his historic visit to Tirana.

In Your Pocket begs to differ. We've been publishing city guides in this terrific Adriatic country for more than seven years. You can download the latest issue of Tirana In Your Pocket here, while we also have Shkodra In Your Pocket for you too. By the end of the summer Korca, another wonderful Albanian town, will also be getting the Pocket treatment.

For some further reading on Albania, follow the Economist's Albania Diary all this week.