Lithuanian TV

Now that I have a flat I have a TV, but can only pick up Lithuanian channels. There was quite a bit of singing and dancing,

some American and Russian programmes

which were not really dubbed - they had a voiceover in Lithuanian but you could still hear the English or Russian dialogue underneath. There was also a trailer for Jamie Oliver,

which they didn't bother to translate, and a documentary that appeared to be on Uzupio.

Uzupio Kavine, Uzupio

Sitting in the Cafe de Paris yesterday drinking a coffee and old Lithuanian guy sat next to me and started talking to me, in Lithuanian at first. He asked me if I was writing a book on my laptop, and then started talking about rock music. He said he got lots of emails telling him the latest rock music news. I asked him what kind of rock music and he said the old stuff. I said like what and he said donovan. But then he mentioned Steppenwolf, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Nazareth. Nazareth were Scottish, he said. I looked up their website - www.nazarethdirect.co.uk - and found out they are indeed Scottish. I'd vaguely heard of them and always thought they were American. The old guy also said they were jewish, but I'm not sure what point he was making about that. He said something about Gershwin. Possibly anti-semitic but I'm not sure. His English wasn't that good.

He said he was a drummer. He was into John Bonham, the Led Zeppelin drummer I think. He'd played in a band during Soviet times. Half their music had been rock n'roll and half of it had been the sort of things the authorities wanted them to play. I'm not sure exactly what that was. The authorities would check up on them every so often to make sure they weren't playing things they shouldn't be playing. I asked if he was able to get hold of Western music then. He said he was, though it sounds like it wasn't easy. He said a friend of his in those days, also a musician, kept talking about escaping to the West, but never did. I never tried to leave, he said. I stayed here, and now capitalism has come to me and I'm free. I was tempted to ask why he thought capitalism rather than democracy represented freedom, but decided it wasn't worth getting into.

He'd asked me earlier whether I liked the pretty Lithuanian women, to which I didn't give a yes or no answer, not wanting to get into where that was heading, but then as I stood up and was packing away my things he asked me how tall I was. 175? No. 170. Why are you asking me how tall I am? Well, he said, some men have a complex about women who are taller than them. And then he's saying he'll be in the cafe tomorrow at 7 and will I be there? I'm there most of the time, I said. But now it is tomorrow, it's 6 o'clock and I'm sitting by the river Vilnelé with a beer. Maybe I'll pass by later and have a look through the window, just to see if he's sitting there with an attractive young Lithuanian woman.

When I came out of the café the French were coming out of the French Cultural Institute next door where they'd been watching the election on TV and drinking wine. Apparently three people had been seen applauding Sarkozy's speech, but it's not clear whether or not they were French.

One of the French asked me why the English had a complex about Napoleon. You have Trafalgar Square, Wellington Place... And Waterloo Station. Napoleon was a great leader! I think he was joking.

There were some other nationalities there. I sat at a table outside on the unmadeup road with a Spaniard, a couple of Lithuanians, some French, a French-speaking Belgian and a Spaniard. One of the French guys was hammering away at one of the Lithuanians, asking him what Lithuania would say when it started to speak, because at the moment Lithuania wasn't saying anything it was just trying to integrate and was run by the mafia anyway, which the Lithuanian strongly objected to. he said when Lithuania starts to speak what it says will probably be quite conservative: pro-family, anti-gay, traditional values etc..

Explaining Lithuania's point of view he talked about how during the Soviet occupation (which is how he put it, though the old guy earlier said during Soviet times) Lithuanian men were fighting the Soviets in the woods and Western Europe didn't do anything, and nor did America. He agreed there wasn't much they could do, but another Lithuanian was saying that after that their attitude was reality that everyone just looks after themselves. Any idea of there being a community, either in Europe or in the world is just an illusion. So we just want to make some money and make things a bit better for ourselves, and we should pollute more and more because business will come up with a solution for global warming eventually.

Kavine Uzupio, Uzupio

It's French election day. I got an email from a French friend here attaching a cutting from a newspaper about a couple of French kids, 8 and 11 years old, who were arrested for some petty crime and told they would be photographed, fingerprinted and also their genetic "fingerprints" would be taken - "empreintes génétiques" in French - thanks to a law presidential candidate Nocholas Sarkozy brought in in 2003, which most French thought was just to be used for sex offenders but which is actually being applied more widely and has no age limits.

I was listening to some of the French people talking outside Café de Paris the other night, which is where they stand when they want to smoke (which since they're French is most of the time so they take their drinks out with them), and from what I could pick up from their French none of them were Sarkozy supporters.

But I've never met any Americans who have admitted to voting for Bush. From reading the newspapers it sounds like there are quite a lot of French who support Sarkozy. Most of Le Pen's supporters will vote for him.

Sometimes it feels like there's a parallel universe where all these Bush and Sarkozy voters exist and when there's an election that universe, with its own laws of maths and physics (where 1 + 1 = 11 of course and quantum mechanics is a load of intellectual nonsense) encroaches on the universe that I exist in and exerts its imperial muscle.

Being here is a bit like being in Paris only cheaper, so I've decided to stay a while longer. From tomorrow I'm renting a flat for a month. It'll be good to have some stability. I've moved about four times in the last three weeks because the places I've been staying in have always been booked up so I've had to move out and go somewhere else.

The music outside the Café de Paris last night was good, on the building site that had been concreted over the day before, I think by offering the workmen a bottle of vodka. Something like that wouldn't have happened in old Europe where there would have been regulations against running cables across pavements and putting a stage on a public highway, all enforced by the police, but things here are a bit more flexible. When one of the DJs was playing a gypsy woman wearing a headscarfe and holding a blue leaflet, which she kissed at one point, started to dance and then a load of other people joined in. The DJ was playing a kind of trance reggae gypsy kind of music.

In Gedimino, the main street in Vilnius, the more official part of the music festival was happening. I stopped off there to get some food: sausages, potatos and I think what is called saurkraut, which I've had a lot of here. It seems to come with everything. There was a terrible Lithuanian rock n'roll band playing, and singing in English. When the singer started doing "I did it my way" I downed the rest of my beer and left.

I'm now sitting on the terrace of the Uzupio Kavine, by the River Vielnele down which a basket ball is floating, a guy in cycling gear running along the opposite bank with a stick chasing it.

There was a band playing here on the terrace just over a week ago. A Lithuanian ska band, with trumpets. It was packed. There was a crowd on the other side of the river and on the bridge. Someone who had been showing his bare chest to the people in the posh restaurent spoke to me in Russian. He wanted a swig of my beer. There were many blond dreadlocks, but now it appears to be tourists who are in the majority. Germans on one side of me and Americans on the other.

The lights have just come on. It's started to get cold. I took the lining out of my jacket again today. A car alarm goes off. Car alarms here sound the same as they do in other places, and seem to go off just as randomly.