Emigration etc.

What's new? Toefl failed to send exam results to the university where I'm applying for studies, even though I'd paid for it, will have to send the copy I got. I'm quite stressed, so I picked up a few new activities. Started to make videos and upload them on You Tube. They're in Lithuanian so far, but I promise to make something in English. My Lithuanian blog was nominated in the Lithuanian Blog Awards as the best blog in Society category. In the meantime I'm continuing my project for NCAD. This is part of a minute on O'Connell Bridge. Holgarama.

I have a feeling that the reason for the backache I've been suffering for over the past few weeks is my laptop. My table is too high, the bed is too soft, while the floor is uneven and the night stand is too low. So most of the time I'm curving and bending in front of my window on the world. Anyway. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to my new template, for which I've been surfing today for about 10 hours. After falling in love with the way Bloggeruniversity is using the space I decided I want more columns and different colours, which Blogger should update on their templates more often. So the result, after looking through one of the long lists is this one, which I've found on Jackbook. In the middle of copying the template I forgot to save my blogroll, so I'm scraping together the bookmarks I've saved and what others have posted, and apart from a few minor/major misunderstandings with html I seem to be enjoying this facelift, buttox enhancement and the rest of the procedures. I just need to continue posting a bit more often, I guess.

This post is ridiculously behind time, but I wanted to say thank you to the organisers of the Irish Blog Awards. The post is late due to the fact that I've been ill recently, nonetheless I managed to hobble my way through to Alexander hotel and in case you heard somebody coughing in the very back of the hall for about two hours, that was me and I wasn't protesting.

Of course, I didn't win anything, not when some real journalists from The Irish Times are rivalling me. Congratulations to all who won, congratulations to all who participated and to all who make the blogosphere alive and thriving in Ireland. I have to admit I didn't know half of the blogs that were talked about and it's a shame - that's what happens when there's no internet access at work. Information void.

On the other hand, it was odd to get out of cyberia into reality. If Lithuanian blog awards tend to focus on the analysis and improvement of the blogosphere, Irish Blog Awards seemed like a good party and a celebration of blogging. So Irish, when you think... I wasn't in my Sunday best because I felt like shit on that evening - struggling with the cold and awful backache - but the blokes were drop-dead-gorgeous, they looked nothing like stereotypical IT geeks (or maybe my fever should be blamed) and the girls were just as dazzling. Whoever is combing Dublin pubs and bars for hotties should go blogging.

Unfortunately it wasn't my night and I didn't even get drunk. So here I am on my own in cyberia again, desperately waiting for the second chance. Do you guys ever do some kind of meets?

Many thanks to everyone who was voting! :D

Thanks to you guys, I seem to have been nominated in the Irish Blog Awards, Best Blog by a Journalist Category, as was kindly informed by Primal.

So who is playing God now and making the pivotal vote? :)

Anyway, thanks again, I'll try to keep up the good work.

Here's a photo from Vilnius yesterday - I'm trying to sort a few things back home. I haven't seen it snowing for more than two years - this was the best birthday present I could get (after the nomination).

When I saw Primal's suggestion to nominate my modest reflections on living in Ireland in the best "Blog by a Journalist" category for Irish Blog awards 2008 I was obviously flattered. Hell, yeah.

Of course, as Primal admits, you can have doubts on whether I could qualify. I have some doubts as well - I believe out there, in the Irish cyberspace, there must be more journalists with more articulate English and plenty of time to ponder about zillions of issues. Yet it is up to you to decide and come to a conclusion in a debate what criteria define you as a journalist in this era of blogging, Current TV, You Tube, etc. Do you have to belong to the mainstream or can you be a voice in the wilderness while remaining independent? If everything goes well and I have a bit of luck, as of September I might plunge myself into a more academic research on this subject. Or continue a life of a mongrel with occasional posts on this blog...

On the other hand, Primal mentions the fact that there are not many non Irish journalists working in Irish media.

Amelie Mouton in her story "Why no news isn't good news for Ireland's ethnic journalists" published in 2006 in the annual magazine of Metro Eireann - Ireland's multicaltural newspaper - points out that the National Action Plan Against Racism asks for "positive actions" towards the recruitment of journalists from cultural and ethnic minorities. Yet a well-known Irish journalists, who's name is not disclosed, observes in the story that "Irish journalism does seem to be drawn from the white middle classes nearly exclusively - unless you count Protestans and Scots, there are not ethnic minorities represented in my staff".

In a way it is understandable - a little more than 20 years ago Ireland was almost exclusively Irish. I remember and Irish woman once told me that when she went to London about 25 years ago she was startled by the variety of people over there - never before she had seen so many shades of skin and heard people speaking English in so many different ways.

For the past five years Irish society has been experiencing vast changes. About 10 percent of the population today are foreigners. It is widely seen in cafes, "Penny's", construction sites and supermarkets. But not as much in the media.

Of course, immigration issues are being covered. The usual ones: possible layoffs, abuse of immigrants as cheap labor force, accidents, caused by drunk Eastern European drivers, other criminal offenses, etc. Yet apart from these clichéd news there is so much more worth feature stories, photographs, broadcasts and documentaries.

Seamus Dooley of the National Union of Journalists in a story mentioned above said that the main barriers preventing the mainstream press from taking on ethnic journalists are language barriers and a possible lack of knowledge about Ireland's socio-political background on the migrants' behalf. I'll tick for the language, yet many migrants have experienced that socio-political background themselves, therefore the last argument could be disputed. On the other hand, why not give a chance for foreigners trained as journalists and with previous work experience to gain more knowledge of that kind while they carry in-depth research? Many of them speak more than one language and know plenty of personal stories. Besides, we all know that journalists are jacks of all trades, yet masters of none and they all learn as they go.

I'm no expert in immigration and I am not a typical immigrant myself. A virtual friend of mine in Lithuania expressed a wish for a blog that would describe emigration process from day zero in a foreign country. As she said, the first slap in the face and the first applause.

A blog of this kind would be immensely popular. There are still many myths associated with emigrants in my country: hearsay about pay, living conditions, Irish, etc. If blogged honestly (therefore probably anonymously), it would offer the best chance to satisfy virtual voyeurism. If blogged in proper English, it would be phenomenally popular in the British Isles. Either way stories we - virtual voyeurs - would like to hear would probably never reach that blog. If blogged honestly and in the native language, most likely it wouldn't come from some mushroom factory. Even if internet access was available, blogging still requires some sort of ability to write. As another virtual friend of mine has observed, ability to write quite often does not coincide with the capability to tell something and vice versa. In terms of blogging in English, although I am convinced there are more people capable of doing that than we encounter today (non-native speakers), again those things we would like to read - everyday immigrant stories - would probably never make it to such a blog, just because they wouldn't happen to somebody who emigrates with more than basic knowledge of English. It would become a boring blog - with no bad news.

At first my blog was an attempt to highlight some of the issues Eastern Europeans have to face in Ireland. I should probably write more about the likes of my friend who came over to Ireland in November. For the past three months she had been working in an Eastern European grocery shop for less than the minimum wage, doing about 60 hours a week and without a single pay slip. I could also mention that they sell spirits from behind the counter and whoever speaks Russian can ask for a pack of 200 cigarettes for half the regular retail price. But I'm sure these stories will get to be covered someday by those who thoroughly know Ireland's socio-political background.

On the other hand, as I say in my profile, getting stuck in the topic of migration is easy, therefore I try to cover other issues as well, resisting the temptation to become too serious, too issue-focused. I'm learning to respect the readers - the second keyword bringing readership to my Lithuanian blog is "boobies" (because of a story about a character played by a Lithuanian actress doing it in "The Tudors" , shall I say, in a very open way - my suspicion was no English actress would have signed up for it). Therefore you might encounter more juicy material in the near future on this blog as well.

Whichever was the reason, a few weeks before Christmas I received and email from the deputy editor of Metro Eireann deputy editor offering to write about Lithuanians in Ireland. She said she had found my blog and thought it was very interesting. It wasn't all in vain, I guess... :)

If you think this blog deserves the spot in the nominations for the Irish Blog Awards 2008, mention me in any of the categories you think I qualify for. Or otherwise, please come back. Thanks for stopping by.

Thanks to Primal Sneeze I happened to come across the fact that the nominations for the Irish Blog awards 2008 are now open.

Nominations close on January 18. Good luck to everybody, especially new faces on the block.

I need to do more research before I make my choice, but hopefully by the end of this week I will make up my mind.

Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Desmond Tutu, Andrei Sakharov, Martin Luther King, Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa, Al Gore.

It is hard not to start feeling god-like when you make it to the list above. Love him or hate him, as Times Online remarks, you have to give credit to Mr Al Gore, the man who introduces himself "I used to be the next president of the United States". Although, as "Guardian" notes, 2007 is his annus miraculous with Oscar for his film "An Inconvenient Truth", Emmy for his Current TV channel and now the most prestigious prize on Earth in his pocket, everybody remembers his over the top moments, as for instance, when he told to CNN that "during service in the United States Congress [he] took the initiative in creating the Internet."

As today is Blog Action Day with about 15 000 blogs pondering about the environment and over 12 mln readers consuming that information, Al Gore's subject seems to be rather relevant.

It takes a while of googling in order to find out speculations about how much he charges for giving a speech (with somebody in the Letters to the editor section in the "Toronto Star" mentioning 125,000) or the origin of his wealth. There isn't much about the latter in Wikipedia, is there?

Al Gore became a senior adviser to Google back in February 2001, and is a close friend of CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt. Google shares went public in 2004, and the stock has soared from $85 a share to more than $400. Co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are worth an estimated $11 billion each.
Al Gore "owns a ton of Google and he's made enough money that he could wait until a month before and just drop $50 million in to launch a [2008 Presidential] race," a well-placed Democrat told Deborah Orin of the New York Post.
And then there are the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, who like a bunch of other famous artists and musicians during "Live Earth" kept mentioning Al Gore's name over and over again. In fact so often, that I had to fast forward the clips quite a few times.
Al Gore's supporters keep stressing that he started speaking about global warming and it's reasons long long before anybody else did. As if he wasn't doing this just in order to publicize himself.
In "Vanity Fair" green issue this May one of the most important voices among skeptics of global-warming Myron Ebell, the think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute (C.E.I.), mentioned that amount of money floating in anti global-warming campaigns is enormous.
"The major environmental groups in [the USA] have budgets of collectively over $1 billion a year," he said. "[C.E.I.] budget is $3.7 million a year, of which only about a quarter goes to global warming. Add up the other [global-warming denier] groups and maybe you can get to $10 million."

Somehow, despite these monstrous figures, I tend to doubt that Al Gore is after money. When you own Google's shares you hardly need them. In that case he's either driven by share vanity (**** you Mr. George W. Bush, I'm not the president of the USA, but the whole world is listening to me, falling for my statements and drowning me in the sea of awards) or good will.

Of course, there are ongoing speculations of him running for the post of the President of the USA. In that case this whole apparatus - the movie, the TV channel (which I thing is groundbreaking), "Live Earth" and speeches could possibly be the best PR campaign ever. Yet even if it is, it's not that hard to listen to his words and start changing the world around yourself. By turning of your PC, the lights, recycling, ditching your car for a bike (at least once a week), buying organic produce, putting waste in the bins provided, etc. As one gargantuan supermarket chain claims, every little helps. It does. Indeed. Even if you dislike populists.

My two favorite posts in Jussi's blog Everything is Mossible are here and here. Outsider stories I call them.

Outsiders are apt to compare new homes to their previous ones. Comparison is inevitable. They look for drawbacks and assets. They scrutinize people, quality of life, prices, food, cultural scene, weather, etc.

When I started writing the blog I thought I would do more of it, yet I came to realize that constant comparison can start look like whining. I have to admit that complaining is possibly one of the side-effects of Post-Soviet Eastern European behavior. Yet I pledge I am trying my best to fight this bug (quite often without any success whatsoever). However this time I would like to mention something I would miss if I was to leave Dublin tomorrow.

As I have revealed before, this weekend I volunteered in the Festival of World Cultures in Dun Laoghaire. We were sitting in Kingston Hotel on Sunday night with Grace and I found out that she came from Galway to volunteer. Aside from giving up her time to whatever might be in need of doing during the festival she was staying in a hotel and paying 85 Euro for every night. Bless her! Grace explained she's doing a course in hospitality and she thought this experience might be useful.

I don't think I've heard about anybody else like Grace, but there were about 300 volunteers of all ages and nationalities in total. Naturally the organizers did save quite a bit of cash. It is easy to make a basic calculation. Let's say every volunteer is working for about 4 hours on average (altough some worked for 10, i.e. I worked for about 8). If they were paid (let's say the minimum wage), it would turn out to be

300 x 4 x 8.65 = 10 380 Euro

Although we did get T-shirts, goodie bags, drink tokens and very generous free lunch (of which actually quite a few volunteers were not aware), organizers obviously have saved quite a bit. But despite this fact I was stunned by the amount of people who offer their spare time for carrying chairs, disassembling tables, hoovering carpets, etc. People of my and my granny's age. Girls and guys too. We're having a wrap up party on Wednesday and more free treats. What could be better?!

Volunteering is still uncommon in my country and this is one of the things we could learn from Irish. I promise to mention more! The sky is the limit.

I promised myself to stay away from my laptop after 11pm. Or 12.

The bottom line is to try to spend less time in cyberspace, otherwise I sink into it without any awareness of time and I turn into chronic insomniac. True, sometimes it helps to keep my mind occupied while the neighbors next door huff and puff their way through another rainy "summer" evening. Some say bad weather invigorates baby making business. If we encounter a baby boom as of next March in Ireland, these speculations might turn out to be true after all.

Anyway. I failed tonight. Once again. But thanks to Primal Sneeze I have discovered Annie's blonk. A wonderful blog - dynamic, vibrant, funny and personal without getting boring. How come I don't meet those fascinating blogging people in real life? Are we stuck in cyberspace?

"And thanks to Mac, I have begun reading Lina Žigelytė’s new blog, Emigration etc. Lina is a Lithuanian journalist living in Dublin. Her blog is the subjective rantings from a journalist stuck in a wine shop. The frustration of not working in her own profession shows clearly. For me, it’s a crying shame - this lady can write. She gets this week’s spot in Mo Rogha." - posted Primal Sneeze recently. Thanks for appreciation :)

I'll try to keep up the good job and express less frustration...