Marks and Spencers is here!

This week the new shopping centre at Gedimino 09, in Vilnius, opened. It's in the former municipality HQ which has been transformed quite astonishingly. Only the outside walls were left, and inside there are now four floors of shopping (not all of them used yet) including the Body Shop and Marks and Spencers. They did do a very nice job.

This is Vilnius, however, and must be one of the few capitals in the world where the city centre is almost deserted on the weekend. I popped in on the second day after opening, following a theatre performance - yes, there were queues at M&S, but nothing outrageous. You certainly did not have to fight your way through the crowds. Even today, on the first open Saturday, business was not particularly busy. Vilnius people seem to like to shop at the edge of town, at the big shopping centre at Akropolis. I am sure even the farmer's markets here are much busier on a Saturday than this shopping centre, or any others in the town centre. It's quite astonishing how quickly the shops change hands - there are now three or four shopping centres within spitting distance of each other, but not many people go there. M&S and the Body Shop are also not cheap, in Vilnius terms, though other shops are even more expensive.

I did not buy any clothes at M&S; it's not really my style, and I had also just completely reclad myself with much smaller clothes than before (to such a degree that last week in Germany I had trouble finding clothes small enough for the new me....). But they have a food department! It has no fresh foods, but it had seville orange marmalade which you can't get here, and my favourite musli! I should probably stock up a bit more on both - I just wonder how long this will last - the stuff is really quite expensive, but it's cheaper for me than shlepping it back from the UK. BHS has been and gone; it lasted about a year with its dull and dreary clothes. British companies don't realise that women in Lithuania, especially those with cash, are extremely stylish and also often extremely tall and thin. Folk don't really do frumpy!

Globalisation

Now we have two hypermarkets in Tbilisi. 'Goodwill' remains out of town (and is just developing a 'mall'); Populi is a chain of supermarkets which has now, in the town centre, opened a hypermarket. Goodwill is full of German goods, and, like today, sometimes contains the German conductor of the Caucasian Chamber Orchestra, Populi has Dutch products.

The weirdest thing is, though, that some of Populi's own-brand (??) products seem to have the same wrapping as those of the Lithuanian chain Rimi; except Populi's goods are labelled in three languages, one of which is Dutch, and Rimi's are labelled in Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian. Now, how do they all hang together? Having spent a fortune in Goodwill, I had gone to Populi because last week they had that nice 'Actimel' which is supposed to be good for the gut (mine always needs pampering - come, oh friendly bacteria). Being Georgia, the Actimel was pomegranate flavoured. Unfortunately it seems it was not a great seller - today there was none, and it seems, no matching space in the shelves.

I wish I had gone to Goodwill (a taxi-ride away) after I had been to the baths and weighed myself. In Goodwill I spotted the best drinking chocolate ever, Suchard Express, which I got to know in Switzerland.... but the calorie count seemed a bit high. After finding that I have lost another 3.5 kgs since Christmas I could possibly have afforded treating myself!

This photo is of the building of the Bio-Shop, another type of shop altogether. The shop used to be downstairs, at street level, but has moved into a flat upstairs. No customers, naturally. I am not sure how many families live in this building, though I suspect each of these doors houses one - downstairs I spotted a container with at least 25 electricity meters. The roof looks new and plastic - I suppose any renovation should start with the roof.

Settling in (again!)

In for a longer spell this time, I thought I'd check out that shop 'Goodwill' that has been praised by Georgians and internationals alike. It describes itself as a hypermarket, and has a very flashy website. I had looked at my city map, but could not find it on it.

No wonder! I had called a taxi, and found the shop to be about 10 km from my flat, very much on the edge of town. It's a bit of a small hypermarket, probably no bigger than my local Maxima in Vilnius - and it's like a big barn. As my international blogging colleague says, it's like shopping in Berlin - nearly all the goods are German, and mostly well-known brands, too. It even has a whole shelf of all those German hypochondriac teas, for this, that and the other medical conditions. Only in Germany they try to cure diseases with ....tea (or rather, disgustingly flavoured infusions). It was a bit surprising then, to find one bit of a shelf labelled 'German' ....Some of the goods, especially the frozen vegetables, come in catering size packs - my 2.5 kgs of frozen spinach will last for a long time. So now I am sorted on basics for at least a month, saving me a lot of shlepping. I did also buy Georgian goods, like lots of wine, milk, water. But then still I needed to go to the wee wumman in the cornershop to get fresh stuff, and that's quite a nice thing to do.

Later, I toddled around to the sulfur baths for a wash and a massage, passing the Parliament with its Santas on the way. It would appear that there were 4 Santas originally, but the air seems to have gone out of two of them - could that be said about a lot of things?

The baths were packed today, with a heaving mass of flesh consisting of rather rubenesque naked ladies of all ages queuing for the shower stalls. I had forgotten to take my glasses off, so I could see Georgian womanhood in all its glory. It is not so easy to elbow your way in when you and everyone else are all soapy and slippery, but people were very lovely and helpful and ushered me in the right direction to get my turn at the dribble of sulfuric walter (it's a better dribble than I have at home.)

It must be a winter thing to do, and given the temperature in my bathroom it is not surprising that people like to go somewhere where they might feel warmer, and have a good soap down. I felt rather dirty because my showergel does not create as much foam as theirs - and it looked as if I might not be washing properly.

The noise level was amazing; even in the queue in the waiting room conversations bounced round the whole room. A lovely old lady with about 4 teeth, sitting beside me, kept telling me jokes in Georgian and giggling madly. In the baths themselves everyone was chatting to everyone else - what with the tiled walls the sound was meeting itself in the middle. Seeing all those women crowding round the shower stalls reminded me of a concentration camp scene in Rabinovici's book where the naked women are herded into a shower room and they don't know what will come out of the faucets.

After that went round looking for birthday cards (not sure they were 'birthday' cards, and I had hoped to find some originally arty ones) and got some concert, opera and theatre tickets. Thank goodness I can read some Georgian letters - otherwise I might have missed a chamber orchestra concert next week (could not be bothered to decipher the programme, but we'll soon find out). Unfortunately, having bought ballet tickets, I then discovered that at the same time 'Twelfth Night' will be on in the theatre, which I would fully expect to be a riot. With any luck it will be repeated another time. I am looking forward, though, to seeing Hamlet again next weekend, and maybe this time I can work out how to get the British Council funded simultaneous translation. I see it is possible to download the script from here.

Big Ben - Big Profits!

The Big Ben supermarket in Tbilisi - you know who you are - is a supermarket for ex-pats; Georgians can hardly afford to shop there and while the quality of many goods is very high, such are the prices. Oddly, many products are from Germany, such as the finest sugar - but who would want to be 2.50 Euros for a kilo of (ok, caster) sugar, when nextdoor you can get it for 80 Eurocents. I was appalled after I did my first bit of shopping and found a bill of about 75 Euros! However, it does have some useful things such as environmentally friendly cleaning liquids etc.

If the prices are not high enough, there are other creepy ways of making a wee profit. In Tbilisi it is common that on the one hand there is a system of stock checking tills (where the operator enters a code and it shows the goods with their price), but the final till receipt comes from a separate machine into which the operator types the amount. Apart from the fact that the operator seems to type in the codes for the goods from memory (and the text is in Georgian, so only they know), today I found that for my bill of 15.35 I suddenly paid 17.35, as it said on the till receipt. The hoodlums!

The Big Ben had been at the bottom of my list of shopping venues already, once I had clocked their price differentials, but now.....nice one! Sans moi!