Thanks for the rest of the story of Gintautas. I had written him a letter I suppose while his father was in hospital offering to meet if he was in Vilnius, but he said Kaunas had everything he wanted. Since I am rarely in Kaunas, we never did meet. But my experience in VIlnius has been day to his night. Last May I was a couple of days away from death from a gangrenous gall bladder. The care was fantastic. I paid no bribes and it cost me about 750 in all (self employed so I paid 600 for compulsory state health insurance and we had to buy medicines. I would probably be dead if I had been in the States as I would not have seen a doctor as soon and would have been hours instead of days from death when I would have sought help, which I could not afford. 7500 dollars would not have covered the bill. 20-30 thousand dollars would have been closer to the mark.

To live in this country, you have to network. Almost everything is word off mouth.

Yes, there is a lot of black economy, but if it works, then there is no reason to fight it. For example, police were allowed to collect brines for speeding. Everyone thought that was terrible, except me. The purpose of speeding tickets is to keep those idiots from ramming my car and killing me, and to keep me from doing the same to others. So they got rid of bribes and now there are very few tickets and lots of violations. I don't know how the motorcyclist survived. No one was moving and the light was red for him, so he gunned the engine. The bike ended up under a SUV and he flipped over it. Soon after theyy changed the light system so that yellow is not concurrent and there is a pause between them.

When I came here, lending was tight and building was sparse. Then the banks started lending to everyone, Western style, prices skyrocketed, and now we have a bad economic crisis. Even so had the industry switched in the last few years from building new units to renovating old ones, then they would still be employed because they would be receiving EU funds now instead of holding worthless mortgages. That was caused by Lithuanians not understanding Western practices. It is going to take a while until people here understand the Western world enough to protect themselves.

Arturas Bakanauskas
Vilnius