It’s been a strange few years, for just about everyone on the planet.
The world’s a bit of a mess right now in many ways, not least geopolitically – Russia-Ukraine, China-Taiwan, UK-EU, and seemingly America-America.
The climate crisis is more urgent than ever, and though more world governments and major corporations keep on making big promises and plans for the future, very little seems to be changing in the present.
Oh, and then there is the fact that we are just entering the third year of a global pandemic which means nothing at all is normal in any way. Just a few years ago needing a ‘possibility passport’ to enter a supermarket and wearing a mask everywhere you go would have seemed like something from the plot of a movie set in some dystopian future, but today it already feels like the new normal.
Our last few years have been strange as well, as plans were made and then changed, and changed, and changed again. Some things inevitably suffered as a consequence of that, including this blog, which hasn’t had nearly enough love or posts recently.
As the perfect example of that, I actually started to write this post at the start of January, and it’s now the 2nd of February and I’m only just getting around to posting it, so arguably we aren’t off to the greatest of starts to the new year either, but hey, y’know, we’ll do better.
It really is time to put that right, pandemic or not, so from now on we will be posting more recipes, more adventures, more random thoughts, just more in general, or at least we will try very hard to.
They will be European adventures mostly, because after a longer than ever intended period of time spent in North America, that’s the continent that we are back in and choosing to call home for now.
So, this is where we find ourselves, little more than 100km away from 54°54′N 25°19′E, the geographical centre of Europe. There is heavy snow falling outside the window as I write this but not a single hill to ski or snowboard down since the highest peak in Lithuania is just 293 metres 65 centimetres above sea level (and yes the 65cm is important).
At least there is snow though, we are just two days away from the start of the winter Olympics in Beijing and that is using 100% artificial snow. That is just one of the contributing factors that make it one of the strangest Olympic games in living memory, as their Covid bubble (which isn’t really working) and the current Western dislike for China also play their parts.
On the other hand, China isn’t a big fan of Lithuania right now either because they dared to let the Taiwanese embassy be called ‘Taiwanese Embassy’.
As I said at the start it’s been a strange few years and that doesn’t seem about to change anytime soon. Regardless of that, welcome to the new chapter of our Lithuanian and Baltic adventures, let’s see where this year takes us all!
Thank you for all of the articles, hope for more soon?