Day 3: Independence Day in Kaunas

Today was a non-standard start to the day. Although historically I veer away from emails when away, lately I've been checking as routine, and did so on my phone as soon as I woke up. There was a message in there for me sent from a Lithuanian friend at around 02:00 about our mutual friend, the man whose wife contacted me yesterday to try to track him down.

He isn't well at all. He'd lost his suitcase yesterday, got lost after wandering away, and had had a fitful night: he wouldn't stay in his hotel room because there was a stranger in there. That was actually true, but he'd signed up to share a room, as he usually does. He wasn't unwell before. Our mutual friend had booked him into a private room, and then she and other friends locked him inside to prevent him wandering away overnight.

This morning was therefore spent booking him the earliest possible flight home, which is on Tuesday morning, whilst our mutual friend tracked down his passport details. Once I'd done that and booked him assistance at the airport, I contacted his wife, who them phoned me for a chat. He should never have come here, having rapidly become unwell at home, but was fixated on a presentation he'd agreed to give.

Once that was out of the way, it was back to fixing the Esperanto Association's website. The fix was surprisingly simple, although made little sense: it was necessary to switch off a setting which is automatically enabled in all instances of the software, and has been present since I created the site in 2018. What went wrong? I couldn't say.

I spent time working on the presentation I'm giving on Tuesday. It doesn't matter that I've already given it twice. I never re-read anything I've written because I know that I'll always find something I didn't like. The same is true with presentations. The version I gave the second time was a re-working of the first one, and I took the same approach today, getting perhaps half-way through.

Opening ceremony

The event I'd come for opened in the afternoon, so I set off to the university under bright sunlight. This is the 59th installment of the Baltic Esperanto Days, which was started during the days of the Iron Curtain as an alternative to the annual World Esperanto Congress. My first impressions were that it shared similaries. For a start, there was a formal opening in a large lecture theatre:

It filled up a little bit more prior to the start. A shade over 200 people have signed up, although not all are here yet. The president of the Lithuanian Esperanto Association is also the chief organiser, and he started the ceremony from the dais:

Every person sitting besides him gave a speech. There were:

• Juozas Olekas, a vice-president of the Lithuanian Parliament, in the role of “Alta Protektanto”, the “High Protector” of the event, which is a direct imitation of the World Esperanto Congress. He spoke in Lithuanian. Every other person spoke in fluent Esperanto.
• A member of the EU Parliament.
• The president of the Lithuanian Journalist Association.
• A vice-president of the World Esperanto Association.
• A board member of the European Esperanto Union.
• A retired diplomat from Germany.
• The president of the Latvian Esperanto Association, who invited everybody to next year's event, which will be held in or around Riga.

Several ministers would have been there but today is Independence Day, which means that they have other priorities. Their messages were printed in a book which was distributed to all participants.

With that, the event was declared open. It was timetabled for an hour but lasted 40 minutes, with a 30-minute break before the following act, so I went for a walk.

Strolling on Independence Day

I walked the minute or so required to intersect the main boulevard I walked along yesterday. This time I walked eastwards, in the direction of the Church of St. Michael the Archangel. Clare would have been happy that one restaurant had cactuses as part of its direction:

Including a plastic one which provided excellent foreground material to a shot of the church in the distance:

Within a minute I had full sight of it:

It has the rounded domes we always see in this part of the world:

I did a tour of its square before heading back to the boulevard:

And then I walked whence I had come, with a column of flags guiding the way. They were here yesterday so they might be a permanent feature rather than something put up specifically for Independence Day:

I was hot in this heat so say outside a restaurant to get a drink. When nobody came out to serve customers within five minutes, I left, heading back to the lecture theatre. It was clear that refreshments were coming our way after the next part, anyway:

Gintaras entertains

The next part of the programme was a performance by a Lithuanian choir called Gintaras. We were asked to stand and join them in singing the Esperanto anthem:

They sang it very well, and with minimal support. We hadn't been issued with any lyrics, so barely any of our people were singing it. I happen to know the lyrics but have gone my whole life without singing it, and didn't plan on starting now. (The most common word in it is holy / sacred, in three separate places. No thanks.)

The choir seemed to go down very well, generating plenty of movement among the Lithuanian Esperantists:

They deserved their round of applause!

After that there was supposedly a reception by the Rector of the University, referring to food and drinks just outside the main lecture theatre. As always happens at these events (not exclusive to Esperanto) it was far too compacted and noisy, so I disappeared with a drink and sat by myself downstairs, popping back for a top-up a few times. After a beer, champagne and a few wines, I decided to be disciplined and not get any more. I also had no intention of sitting bored for more time so headed home, skipping the group photo, which we'd been informed about but which wasn't timetabled.

Tomorrow will be the first full day of programmes. I'm going to spend it in the company of my friend, doing my best to keep an eye on him. Aside from an event I was hosting in Edinburgh last year, which didn't allow for a conversation because I was running things, I haven't seen him since before the pandemic, even though we were colleagues for ten years. I'll certainly have had less pleasant jobs than spending the day with him