Day 5 – Settling in

Today was a pretty uneventful day. Irina picked up the kids in the morning and took them to the park while we worked. We joined her for lunch at Gusto’s. It seems that she was the only Lithuanian in the room – everyone else was a foreigner. It is probably because there is a 4-day national holiday going on and many of the people are away on the coast or on their dachas.

In the morning Georgia worked poor unsuspecting Irina to buy her water and snacks.

After lunch the apartment owner came in to take a look at the dishwasher that was not working and make us the list of the English-speaking channels reached by the huge satellite dish between our balconies. The only ones that have a strong signal and readily come up are Vesti and Al Jazeera. I thought there would be a secret method but he simply went one by one through the hundreds of channels recording the numbers on a piece of paper. I hope they have a printout somewhere.

He spent hours trying different settings on the poor 14-year-old dishwasher that just wanted to die in peace. It became clear that his family never used it in other than the rinse mode while living at the apartment. That also explains why the dishes are so dirty. He also followed us around and tried to turn off the light after us, teach us how to use the washing machine, and in general offer useful advice. He has a special attachment to the rag made from a former towel that he keeps outside on one of the balconies. He said it was really amazing and I should just “try it.”

This thriftiness is in sharp contract to the attitude about the water – they pay fixed fee for hot water and he and his wife advised us to not worry about using as much as we want, and if it does not come out hot right away just wait as long as necessary. Not only Belgians have their mysterious ways.

We walked around a bit in the evening. Saw few more potential eateries. Lots of locks on the bridges to Uzupis. And more pregnant women on the streets than I have ever seen. I guess you have to do something. Incidentally the wealth gap is much more apparent this year. There are now more people on the streets with the “fresh out of Bentley” look and more drunks as well. That being said, lots of regular looking people are outside enjoying the nice weather, the restaurants are full, so there must be some things going right here.

The apartment owner came back later again; this time with the technician. They spent hours until finally finding the problem. They will be back again tomorrow to replace the pump. Dishwasher would be really handy. The owner asked not throw out the rag, which, being the active participant of the dishwasher molestation, by now had changed the color quite substantially. I’ll give it another 10 hours. To be fair to him, he spent a big portion of his day off chasing after this problem.