It's the same story every time, and nearly every place. Over the last few years I've done my best to travel as much as I could and broaden the
old horizon for myself by seeing different places and races whenever humanly possible. And thanks to cheap airlines and airfares, the world is turning into a much smaller, faster place everyday.
With the amount of emigration that takes place these days, main cities of countries that were once a mono-culture, are turning multi, which brings a lot of new flavors, sights, sounds, and attitude changes. Mainly this is reasonably new trend happening in the smaller European cities and not so much the capitals and now that the E.U. has expanded, it means a good chunk of eastern Europe is free to travel from the ex-soviet bloc apartments and unemployment, to a new visa free western Europe.
After being occupied by the Germans first and then the Soviet Union, until eventual independence in the early 90's, I arrived at a still very fresh and sensitive time for the country.
Still pretty much untouched by the west back then, I felt an enormous presence of pride by the locals, for all things national, but not such much love for anything they considering to western or out oft heir reach. Their pride was and is their identity, and the fact it was lost for many years, they are more than happy to show it off.
The first few months were not easy, as apart from freezing my ass off in the glorious minus 20 degree's snow storms, It was pretty difficult to gain friendship and contact with the all to suspicious locals, but eventually it worked out.
During the year I stayed, not many left the country as Visa's were few and far between, and even if you did manage to leave, it was going to be the same old shit in the west except the weather and money was different. You could rest assure you would be doing a job, that the locals deemed not good enough for them any more, living in the instant ghetto's created by the town planners, and saving up the little you made to go home and live it up for a couple of months.
I used to go home from time to time whilst living in Vilnius and the departures lounge in the airport was like a ghost town, only pre-E.U. cash hungry businessman, with a glint in their eye of things to come, and the occasional holiday maker.
But now that the gates to Europe have been flung open, and on a trip back last summer, the airport was full to the brim of young crying locals handing their departure tickets the vegetable green uniformed stewardess, the city was emptying fast, except for the same businessmen, sticking up as many high rises as they can, and inviting all the western brands in as quick as possible to create another boring haven for the travelers to gawk at on the tourist trail. While the identity is being stolen at home to the big name companies, the Eastern Europeans are fueling the western economy with hard labor.
Pride starts at home, and prejudice begins in others countries in terms of nationality, so when you have no choice but to travel somewhere else to survive, its difficult to have your pride and identity respected by many a developed country, who in turn should be in your depth for giving many a city a new lease of life.
Text by Rick Heffernan | Layout by MushMaster
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Copyright © 2005 Evil Monito; Photo credit © MushMaster