Monthly Archives: June 2024

Nigel Farage Election Hope for Migrant Invaded UK

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Nigel Farage shakes up election in a bid to rescue Migrant Beleaguered Britain

Update 30 June 2024 | First published: 11 June 2024 ~ Nigel Farage Election Hope for Migrant Invaded UK

30 June 2024: Thought for the day: A ‘carefully selected’ BBC Question Time audience, Woke cries of Racism and other tricks to incense the brainwashed and get the liberal sheep barking, demonstrates how terribly frightened Britain’s fifth column is of Nigel Farage’s mission to take on the establishment and save the country from its dystopian fate. A vote for any other party other than Reform is a vote to put the last nail in the coffin of your country.

You cannot trust the mainstream media. You cannot trust the UK’s old political parties. It’s the usual dirty tricks time as the pseudo-libs go running scared …

Nigel Farage: Not frightened to speak out

Imagine waking up the day after the election and finding that the only truthful man in British politics, the one that the pseudo-left are knicker-twisted about, has won the General Election. Yes, Nigel Farage is in! Not only would the UK have someone in office who means what he says, who is a true patriot, who is not frightened to speak out about the iniquities and threats of socially engineered immigration, who would enforce his call for net zero migration and put British people first, but he and his Reform party would change the landscape of British politics forever ~ and forever for the better.

First off, the immigration problem would be kicked into touch. Farage recognises, or rather is willing to state what other politicians are too frightened or too self-interested to acknowledge, that immigration, particularly illegal migration, is the single most important issue of our time.

Nigel Farage Election Hope

In this YouTube video, the ‘Negative Impacts of Immigration’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYHOmT0f13c  footage is included from the topical debate programme Question Time, in which Nigel Farage spells out the negative impact immigration is having (and remember, this address was made in 2016!) on local school placements, GP access and young people’s chances of getting on the housing ladder. More importantly, he makes a case that the globalist fallback on the economic advantages of never-ending, uncontrolled and unvetted migration is not nearly as significant as the negative impact it has on quality of life.

Hitting the immigration nail firmly on the head is Farage’s forte, but he stops short in his definition of quality of life of including the deleterious effects of an increase in serious crime and terrorism, the loss of safety on our streets and the disintegration of social cohesiveness*. An interesting point, however, flagged in this video is that  the population of the UK has risen by 10 million since 1997, when Tony Blair came to power, 85% of which is directly due to immigration.

“A foreign court in Strasbourg [is] telling us how we can control our borders”
*Nigel Farage*

Comments accompanying the video, ‘Negative Impacts of Immigration’ provide a consensus of opinion of what ‘quality of life’ entails:

@yamyam3905: Why do you think you can’t get a council house ? Why do you think you can’t get a doctor’s appointment, Why do you think it takes you hours to drive anywhere. Why do you think you can’t get your child into a school. Why do you think people are too afraid to go out at night ??????

@veronicapetersen8915: Welcome to South Africa since 1994. This … happened in South Africa since and we were silent we just went with the flow.
[Note: Good comparison. Another good comparison would be Sweden, which owing to its open-door immigration policy is rapidly descending from dysfunctional to dystopian.]

@garyfallows1123: If Enoch Powell had been listened too, Britain wouldn’t have this problem.
[Note: Ah, Gary, the Usual Suspects are as frightened of Enoch’s ghost as they are of Farage’s presence]

@bobcat2378: It is high time the house of lords was abolished!
[Note: And with it the dictatorship of the European Court of Immigrant Rights and the Europhiles Convention on Migrant Rights and any connection we have with these two manipulative networks.]

The question “Why do you think people are too afraid to go out at night?” and allusions to South Africa derive from the routinely unpublicised perception that UK society largely is, and UK streets predominantly are, unsafe.

Suit or amour needed in the UK because the streets are so violent

Just off to the local shop, dear, to buy the Guardinistan

To put it bluntly, the economic argument for supporting immigration palls into insignificance against the perceived need to wear a stab vest whenever you walk up the street, and the pragmatic need to weigh the odds of survival before attending a concert, theatre production, before participating in a major event and assembling in any crowded place for fear of nutters brandishing knives and detonating bombs*.

“Our towns and cities are literally becoming unrecognisable in every way.”
*Nigel Farage*

Let’s rerun the intro to this post> Imagine waking up the day after the General Election to discover that the Reform party had taken office with Nigel Farage as leader. Nigel Farage as Prime Minister of the UK. Wouldn’t that be handsome! It would truly herald a new dawn, not only for British politics but for the positive fate of our once, but no longer, glorious country.

Sadly, however, as Nigel Farage points out in his recent Talk TV interview, such is not possible [see video]

Mike Graham, the host of the show, asks Nigel, why they, Reform, “are not looking at going all out and winning?”

Farage replies simply and honestly that it is impossible. The political voting/electoral system does not permit it.

“If this was proportional representation … an Italian-style system, a Dutch-style system, I promise you, I’d be sitting here saying ‘I can be Keir Starmer’,” says Farage. I trust he did not mean that in the literal sense!

What Nigel does not say, but he could have, is that the UK ‘first past the post’ voting system is rigged, insofar as it ensures that the grossly imperfect status quo of British politics goes virtually unchallenged. In this respect, the UK’s democratic system is no different from any other: it is a managed one. The Old Guard, Liebour and the Cons, will stop at nothing to keep the seesaw going, ensuring that every five years the same two tired, past-their-sell-by-date parties jockey for prime position.

Nigel Farage Election Hope

On the issue of immigration, the most important issue of our time, the Tories have proven themselves to be woefully inadequate ~ fourteen years of woefully inadequate. The explanation that they have been too busy fighting amongst themselves to run the country properly is a credible one, but methinks it is only half the story.

To give the Tories their due, the one thing that they were successful at was drawing the British people’s attention away from the real threat to our society, immigration/migration, by instituting mass hysteria, first with coronavirus lockdowns and calls for successive jabs and then with Ukraine.

INCOMING!!!

In both cases, instead of listening to the siren warnings that Farage & Co were sounding, apprising us of the threat to social stability and British values posed by the migrant invasion, our sorry excuses for leaders were urging us to change our avatars, first to ‘I have had my vaccine’ and then to the colours of the Ukrainian flag. Whilst the majority of Brits were falling for these ploys, our streets were becoming steadily more dangerous, terrorist plots and acts were increasing and the economy nosedived dramatically.

Coronavirus costs and the wasteful moral and economic extravagance of arms shipments to Ukraine became the government’s get out clause for price hikes on almost everything. Migrant hotel bills of £8,000,000 a day is a lot of money to find. It has to come from somewhere folks! Isn’t it all so wonderfully liberal!

Meanwhile, Labour, the party without any policies, who opened the floodgates to mass immigration in 1997, looked on dumbfounded: Could the Conservatives really be beating them at their own game, upstaging them in the race to divide and rule and inflict grievous racial harm on a moribund British society? They could hardly believe their left-wing binoculars as boat after boat of migrants romped in.

Pirate Ship Migrants from France. Nigel Farage Election Hope for Migrant Invaded UK

The most important issue of our time, immigration, is a good yardstick with which to measure how closely aligned the agenda of the UK’s main political parties has become under the auspices of the globalist-liberal cartel.

It also discloses how crucial the ‘first past the post’ system is for ensuring the permanency of a two-party political system.

“The national debate on immigration has gone so far to the left during 14 years of Conservative rule“
*Nigel Farage*

This raises the question that If our ‘first past the post system’ is a deliberate bar to any small party making significant headway against the old two, which it is, then what can Farage and his Reform party hope to achieve by standing in the election? Farage claims that he is not ‘back’ just for the election but for the long haul, to build Reform into an effective opposition to a Labour government, which I suppose means a political entity that is capable of holding a Labour government’s every suspect bill and anti-British policy to account, especially with regard to immigration.

“The Conservatives are going to be in opposition, but they won’t be the opposition”
*Nigel Farage*

Imagine how mortified Liebour and Cons must be, recalling Farage’s superlative performance in the European theatre of politics. There he will be, in the House of Commons, meting out the same indomitable and no-holds-barred Farage treatment that he visited on the despots of the European Union. The thought of Nigel in the House of Commons asking awkward questions about failed immigration farces and every other wokist kowtow must already be giving his enemies in and out of Westminster the most collusive shit fit. How entertaining it is all becoming. At last a ‘reality’ programme worth paying one’s TV licence fee for.

“It’s like D-Day in reverse!!”
Nigel Farage, commenting on the UK’s migrant invasion

We must all by now have grown accustomed to the lead-in-to-election blackmail that a vote for another party other than the establishment twins is a vote for the twin you least like. Within the straitjacket restrictions of the ‘first past the post’ system, this perhaps is the most honest thing our politicians tell us.

From the word ‘Go’, even before Nigel Farage threw his cap into the ring, the Tory party were falling back on the old tried and tested mantra that a vote for Reform will be a vote for Labour. And what? It’s worked before, but who cares now? The miserable performance of the Tories in the past 14 years has clearly demonstrated, particularly with regard to immigration, that apart from the old school tie there is fundamentally no appreciable difference between the mainline politics of Cons and Labour, most of whom are Europhiles, and, one would have to be daft not to suspect, in the globalist paymaster’s pocket. As for ‘throwing away your vote’, Liebour and the cons are so much and so often in the same bed together when it comes to globalist policies that you will be buggered if you do, and buggered if you don’t, merely, I hope, in a manner of speaking.

So, the message this time around is don’t worry about ‘throwing your Tory vote away’, because in their present form they are Tweedledee to Labour’s Tweedledum, and the foregone conclusion is that Starmer and his crazy gang are going to get in anyway  ~ that is the nature of British seesaw politics.

seesaw politics of the UK electoral system

See Saw Everyone’s Sure
Brits will have a New Master
Democracy is a cross in a box
But it’s always a liberal Disaster

The net result of this farcical catastrophe will be a doubling down on all things detrimental to British values and our British way of life. But take heart, the cloud may yet have a silver lining ~ of sorts.

Will Labour bring it on!

The socio-political situation in the UK is so dire now that it can only get worse and in one sense ~ Hobson’s choice ~ the quicker it does the better. In other words, if there is going to be a ruck, best get it over with, and at this point in time, the advantage is yet to be lost. Give it another decade, however, and if things in politics don’t radically change, there will be nothing left to fight for.  So, the completely favourable thing about Liebour coming back to power, albeit a grim but realistic one, is that by facilitating the migrant invasion and pushing all those ‘ists’ and ‘isms’ to the top of their agenda, they will be sure to stoke division faster than the Tories ever could through culpable indolence and sheer ineptitude, and up will go the powder keg one way or another. Let’s face it, the question of the end game is a question of ‘sooner or later’. It is not as if it will not happen.

Hourglass: Time is running out for migrant-invaded UK. Nigel Farage Election Hope.

Time for the UK is fast running out …

A peaceful, but Britons-first resolution, is clearly what is needed. But that can only be brought about by a strong and determined leader with strong and determined leadership skills. Wishy Washy no longer washes. The UK has past the tipping point.

Nigel Farage Election Hope

So, if you want more of what we already have and don’t want, such as millions of third-world migrants, draconian tax increases to pay for them, more street crime and candle-lit vigils*, more division in the name of diversity, destabilising sectarian politics, more houses, roads and cars and more hypocritical soundbites about environmental issues and saving the poor old planet, less money in your pocket, less valuable items left in your homes after visits by Burglar Bill* and no Old Bill to follow it up as they are all too busy monitoring tweets, no-go areas in towns and cities, even no-go towns and cities, and a suffocating smog of woke ~ if you want, in effect, your once great country to look and to be like South Africa, with a distinctly  Swedish flavour, then put your ‘X’ in the box for Labour.

What’s that I hear you say? “It can’t get any worse!”

Really?

Migrant invaded Britain

👌VOTE ROUGH SPEAKING PARKER ~ He’ll Get The Job Done!💪

*Reference
https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefing-paper/520/is-immigration-a-threat-to-uk-security

Copyright © 2018-2024 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Moreover
Is the UK in multicultural Meltdown?
How to deal with a Vaccinated Liberal Family Member at Christmas
2023 UK Woke Hits an All-Time High!
Frozen Peas in Bedford Supermarket is no Woke!
Lies and democracy, are they now the same thing?

Image attributions
Union Jack: {Karen Arnold} https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=37271&picture=union-jack-flag
Suit of armour: https://clipart-library.com/clip-art/219-2190705_armored-knight-png-transparent-image-knight-transparent.htm
Pirate boat: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Silhouette-of-a-large-pirate-ship/35818.html
Binocular view: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Volcanic-island/82732.html
Seesaw: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Kids-on-a-seesaw/75311.html
Hour glass:  Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1100724   [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hourglass.svg#/media/File:Hourglass.svg]
Diverse faces: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=112189&picture=diverse-faces

Balt Restaurant Zelenogradsk Russia

Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT a Lesson in Harmony

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Balt Restaurant Zelenogradsk Review

Updated: 30 June 2024 | First Published: 29 January 2023 ~ Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT a Lesson in Harmony

I’m sure, almost certain, that it was not there 18 months ago, when I last visited Zelenogradsk (doesn’t time fly!), but it was there now. I am talking about a new restaurant ~ new to me ~ that sits smack bang at the midway point of Zelenogradsk’s serpentine high street: a large, impressive, luxurious establishment set back from the street inside a broad paved plaza, its plate-glass single-storey extension forming a scaled juxtaposition against the taller building to which it is attached, the latter meticulously refurbished to a grand and imposing standard.

In the winter months when we were in town, the first impression of this restaurant from the outside looking in was PC; that’s not politically correct, but plush and cosy.

It was bitterly cold that day, and if the hallmark of a successful bar or restaurant is principally defined by the pulling power it possesses to tempt one off the street, then rest assured Balt restaurant has it.

Oh, did I forget to tell you? The name of the restaurant is Balt.

The first impression from the exterior of the building, which is so categorically  bourgeoisie  that Lenin had turned his back to it, was swish. I made a mental note, a simple equation: plush+posh+impressive+coastal-resort+town-centre = expensive. So, let’s jump to the bill. We had three dishes, nothing elaborate, a speciality tea and a glass of beer. It didn’t break the bank.

Mick Hart with Lenin in Zelenogradsk

The second impression the Balt conveys is ‘big’. “It’s so big!” say your senses, when perhaps they should be saying, “It’s so tall”! In keeping with the modern trend in bar and restaurant design, the Balt is undeniably big, but, initially and accurately, this perception of spaciousness is confined to the height of the ceiling. The restaurant area leading away from the entrance hall is in fact limited to the perimeter of the building; it forms the letter ‘L’, being a long, but slightly more wide than the word implies, corridor. This is because, conforming once again to modern predilections, the restaurant has been built around a central kitchen, in other words built to a plan where kitchen is King.

In the olden days, restaurants concealed their kitchens as though they were the black sheep of the family, the philosophy seeming to be ‘out of sight, out of mind’. This closeted mentality was an excellent way of keeping the eating-out fraternity on edge, since they never knew, having enjoyed an excellent meal the night before, whether their friends would treat them the following morning to a ‘You didn’t eat there, did you!?’ story, involving the latest hygiene scandal.

Today, there is no need to be told by ‘well-meaning’ friends, family or media, what goes on in restaurant kitchens, because all is laid out for the eyes to see. Restaurant kitchens have come of age. They are open, accessible, uninhibited, something to be admired not hidden away like a seedy back room in the depths of a mucky book shop. Restaurant kitchens have been emancipated, and a large part of that liberation lies in the transformation from cautious propriety to unabashed exhibitionism.

Some bar and restaurant designs tend to OTT this. Displaying a kitchen in all its stainless steel and hygiene-oriented, busy, industrious, functioning glory is one thing, but it is quite another and quite inexcusable to overdo the exposure. Thankfully, Balt’s kitchen is a far more sophisticated centrepiece, enabling it to escape comparison with a man in a mac on a hill surrounded by precious little foliage. I think the word I am searching for is ‘subtle’.

In fact, everything about Balt restaurant, not in its individual accoutrements but as a job lot, taken in its entirety, is subtle. How this works exactly is a rather clever feat, because Balt is not without novelty.

Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT

We were able to appreciate both the component parts of this dichotomy and its overarching effect from the favourable location of the table we were escorted to. Our seats occupied the latter portion upon the longer extension of the room’s ‘L’, almost at the inflection, thus availing us of a first-class view of each and all the different elements, which, when taken together, add up to the Balt experience.

First off, we were only a few feet away from the serving area: a long, curved counter from which waiters collect ‘meals to go’ and on which chefs add the finishing touches to the dishes they are preparing before popping them into the tandoor oven.

Chef Balt Restaurant Zelenogrask

From our vantage point, we had a privileged view of the kitchen and the floor-to-ceiling tandoor, a large cylindrical-shaped oven used for baking unleavened flatbreads and for roasting meat. Once the open oven door and blazing fire beyond had ceased to remind me of crematoria, it was fun to watch the chef at work, sliding the various dishes and breads into the wood-fired oven with the help of a peel, a long-handled shovel-like implement with a flat metal pan attached to its furthest extremity.

Chef uses tandoor oven in Zelenogradsk restaurant Balt

Looking straight ahead, I noted with satisfaction the high-backed wooden chairs belonging to the nearest table. The back rests consisted of two vertical ebonised planks slightly angled toward one another. Close to their highest point a pair of semi-circles had been cut out so that in alignment they formed a circle. The only other concession to decoration was the seemingly random inclusion of small, pierced motifs ~ simple shapes which donated a touch of mystique without disturbing the minimalist balance.

Ebonised plank chair in resturant frequented by Mick Hart

My forward view also provided examples of ingenious lighting styles, including a heavy, orange tassel-roped pendant and lampshades mimicking small sheaths of straw.

Rope lamp shade in Zelenogradsk restaurant

The tables to the left and behind me were objects to be marvelled at. They had thick, ragged-end marble-apparent tops, were supported on a small cluster of angled posts, former wave-breaking poles, some of which had been allowed to protrude through the table’s surface, and hovering above them with remarkable pendulosity a clump or cluster of shell-like bowls, off-white and almost asymmetrical, which had me wondering out loud if they were really made from pumpkin skins or moulded from papier-mâché.

Zelenogradsk restaurant tables Flintstone-style.

Every item in the Balt’s atmospheric makeup is an imagistic letter in the word and the concept of ‘Natural’: wood, stone, fire, rope, straw, vegetables. At one end of the subtle spectrum, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble would not look out of place, but the Balt’s natural is a polished natural that borrows as much for its appeal on down-to-earth and back-to-nature as it does on chic sophistry. 

Following the line of the floor, a patchwork quilt of natural-look tiling in a crazy-paving composition, my eyes discovered the bar (they would, wouldn’t they!), all wood with top-shelf liquor brands set smartly against undressed brickwork.

Crazy paving restaurant floor Baltic Coast
Balt restaurant bar servery

For all its emphasis on the natural world, and for good fashionable measure, Balt’s designers’ had hedged their bets, choosing not to preclude but artistically include the draw factor of a tried, tested and much approved formula: the distressed industrial look.

This approach has become so prevalent that it has gone beyond ‘must have’ to enter the realms of ‘can’t do without’. In the Balt, it has gone one further, becoming ‘Would you Adam and Eve it, it actually works!’; thematic principles such as rocks, marble, stoneware vases, corn plants, vegetables and pieces of tree, rubbing shoulders with gnarled brickwork, whitewashed slat-board, old beam ceilings, exposed ventilation ducts and suspended arty farty spots.

Zelenogradsk Restaurant BALT old brickwork

It is a tribute to Balt’s interior designers that they have managed to pull off a subtle, seamless fusion between modern chic and reclaimed-rundown and then wrap it up in an eco-friendly ethnicity.

Harmony at the Balt restaurant, Zelenogradsk

In a nutshell ~ and I am sure that Balt would approve of the use of such natural imagery ~ the key word to Balt’s come-hither and dine-within appeal is harmony. Everything, including things that would normally be at odds with each other, are wedlocked. It might be a marriage of convenience, but one that is no less perfect for it. Even the ethnic music, with its emphasis on tom-tom beat and repetitive chanting, is low-key, Sade-like and subtle.

At the centre and everywhere else of this is lighting. I’ve said it before; I’ve said it again; I’ll say it again and keep on saying it: from Restaurant Guy Savoy in Paris to The Four Seasons B&B in Brightlingsea, if the lighting is not right everything else will be wrong. Lighting is the magic drawstring that pulls everything together.

Balt’s lighting is soft, suffused and artistically modulated: a harmonising integration of ambient-sensitive ceiling spots and downlighters, overhead table pendants ~ each paired with its own novel shade ~ soft-glow wall lights, natural fire and candles. It’s good, because it works. It works because it’s good.

At this juncture, I know what you are thinking: So much for the Balt’s design; what about the grub?

Those of you who have read any of my bar/restaurant reviews will know that when it comes to food I’m hopeless. Why do I go to bars? To drink. Why do I go to restaurants? Usually because the company I am in wants to go to restaurants, and so I tag along, but also because, as you may have deduced, I am an ardent fan of interior design and atmosphere. 

As a baked-beans-on-toast man, a man who likes simple food, I cannot provide you with a gourmet breakdown of what the Balt has to offer or the quality of its meals, and neither shall I try. However, a quick twirl around the internet should satisfy your curiosity. It might even tell you all you need to know.

Balt restaurant Zelenogradsk menu cover
Menu Balt Zelenogradsk
Menu from the BALT restaurant

Our order at the Balt amounted to a snackette: a spicey vegetable platter on oven-baked bread ~ a white leavened flatbread similar in texture and taste to naan ~ and some exotic-looking poppadoms. It was not in the least expensive, but I will say that presentation took precedence over quantity. Now, were you to indulge in a main meal, the situation may be completely reversed or, like everything else at Balt, a happy medium struck.

Snack at Balt restaurant

I had a beer, naturally. It was palatable but served up in one of those peculiar ‘neither here nor there’ glasses, ie glasses that are neither small nor large, which frankly I find irritating. Half a litre, fine; half a half litre, fine; anything else exceeds my mathematical ability (see Soul Garden post).

Mick Hart at the Balt restaurant in Zelenogradsk
Olga Hart at Balt restaurant in Zelenogradsk
Mick Hart with waiter at Balt Restaurant, Zelenogradsk

The Balt, I am told, offers a range of dishes based on Indian subcontinent fare, which is something of a luxury in this part of the world. The prices are so-so, but not so expensive that they will tear the lining out of your pocket, and the carefully choreographed atmosphere, which is as restful and relaxing as it gets, beats anything I have experienced anywhere else in the Kaliningrad region or for that matter in the UK. Recommend the Balt? I’d buy it if I could!

The main thing
Balt (restaurant)
Kurortny Prospekt, 16, Zelenogradsk, Kaliningrad region

Tel: +7 906 238 99 74

Website: https://balt.rest/

💚 Around the Kaliningrad region

Angel Park Hotel > An inspirational rural recreation centre on the site of an East Prussian settlement
Amber Legend Restaurant > Amber Legend Yantarny, a jewel in the coastal town of Yantarny
Fishdorf Country Guest Complex > A family-oriented retreat, secluded and steeped in nature
Fort Dönhoff (Fort XI) > An evocative 19th century redbrick fortress, part of Königsberg’s labyrinth defence network
Polessk Brewery > Beer, history and German-Gothic architecture (that’s my personal order of preference!)

Copyright © 2018-2024 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Hotel Mercure Gdansk

Hotel Mercure Gdansk reasons to stay there!

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Hotel Mercure Gdansk a Welcome Oasis

23 June 2024 ~ Hotel Mercure Gdansk reasons to stay there!

You may recall, if you were listening to me (“Now, pay attention, as I will be asking questions later!” ) that returning from the UK to Kaliningrad, I made the fatal mistake of booking via Booking.com the apartment Tawerna Rybaki in Old Town Gdansk. To all extents and purposes, the apartment never existed, and I was left on the streets of Gdansk, me and my faithful laptop, with nowhere to lay my head for the night.

The subsequent hunt for alternative accommodation was a long and arduous one, eventually culminating, not before time, at Gdansk’s Mercure Hotel.

Although I appreciate that my positive affirmation of the Mercure’s finer points may be tinged by the fact that at the time I was desperate and ‘any port in a storm’ had become my alma mater (original use of the term), in reviewing the Mercure Hotel, I have attempted to put the object of my misfortunes, the bogus Rybaki apartment, as far behind me as I can and write with objectivity.

So, here we go: My first reaction to the Mercure was “Oh, it’s a tower block”; my second, “It looks a tad upmarket for a chap who just wants a bed for the night”; my third, “Bugger this for a game of soldiers, I have been walking around for hours. I need to book in somewhere and head off to a bar!”

Getting the feel of the place

On the other side of its perpetual revolving door, the Mercure’s interior is TARDISial. It’s grand, it’s palatial, it’s swish, say your senses, but once you have checked in and taken a second look your senses qualify your first impression with ‘it is also rather passe’.

The lobby, indeed the Mercure in its entirety, has a distinctly 1980s’ look and a period feel to go with it. It is not faded and jaded, on the contrary, the hotel could not be more 1980s than if it was still the 1980s. And yet, it is not unfair to say that the swish has lost its swashbuckle.

Nevertheless, there is enough of the right thing going on in its aircraft hangar interior to strike the gong of plush. The vast space is broken down into open-plan units: seating areas with big, spongey recliners, coffee-table resting points, unusual modernist sculptures, a shimmering shiny floor, downlighters, uplighters, pendulous globular basket lampshades, and, ah yes, at the back of the room, that all-important traveller’s requisite the hotel lounge and bar. Don’t leave home without one!

It had been a long day for me when I booked in to the Mercure, and I was dying to use the loo, so I was not entirely enamoured when I was given a plastic card instead of a good old-fashioned key. First off, I shoved it in the hole, and it did not work the lift; then I nipped quickly off to the toilet, and it did not work the toilet lock, then when I rushed up to my room in it went and opened the door, ruining whatever chance I had of changing my pants and complaining. Just in the nick of plastic-card time!

My opinion of the interior downstairs décor, that it was 1980s, was given a serious leg up when the lift went ching on the hotel’s sixth floor. In contrast to the capacious lobby, the sixth-floor landing and long, long corridor was a little Alice in Wonderland. I felt as if I had sipped from Alice’s ‘Drink Me!’ bottle, and now my head was touching the ceiling.

The imposing and all-suffusing chocolate browns of the carpet, which match the tones of the doors, the walls and the ceiling, and which are brought into intimate proximity thanks to the carpet’s thick and heavy mercurial globular patterns and their blotting paper absorption of the well-intentioned low-lit lighting, has 1980s stamped right through them like a piece of seaside rock, and the rooms, or at least my room, completed that turn of the retro page.

All brown in the Mercure Hotel, Gdansk

Turning back the page need not be disagreeable if, like me, you find that direction infinitely more appealing than moving with the times. Thus, although the tones of the hotel room, at least the room in which I was staying, followed the lead of the communal areas in their 1980s’ love of chocolate, the amenities therein neither added to nor subtracted from the context of backdated.

There was everything you would expect to get from a hotel of this scale and calibre. It came in spades and with enough variation to seduce you into believing that it offered more than you had expected and all with an extra air of luxury tinged with a personal touch.

The lighting alone was sufficient to do this to you. Ambient lighting, lighting for reading, mood lighting, soft lighting and lighting to get you in the mood ~ multiple combinations of it and all at the flick of a switch ~ or two.

Not the Hotel California, hence no mirrors on the ceiling, for which I was truly grateful. For I would not wish to inflict on myself a view of myself like that first thing in the morning! But the room did have its fair share of mirrors, including, above the convenient desk, a nice, big, long, rectangular one, which looks a bit like a telly? I could not tell you for certain as I have not used one for years.

The seating was also variegated to suit every type and class of bum. And there was an adequate wardrobe with sliding doors and adequate chests with sliding drawers. And a bed with a firm and comfortable mattress, on which to sleep and what have you.

The 1980s was not so primitive as to exclude the presence of an ensuite bathroom, and neither, I am glad to report, was my 21st century room. It had a credible bath and shower room and even contained a toilet, which was just as well in the circumstances, as a tower-block hotel with a lavvy out back in the yard would be mighty inconvenient.

A bedroom at Mercure Hotel in Gdansk

Ah, excuse me, I almost forgot, there was also a safe to put things in, if only you knew how to use it (I believe you put your bits inside, then close the door and lock it Mick.) (Quite so.), and the room comes equipped with its very own window, which is useful for letting in natural light, which if there was no window, you would need to bring your own natural light, and, of course, when letting in light and even when it is not, the window comes in handy when you get the urge to look out of it.

I am not about to pretend that the view from my window was actually inspiring, but equally shall not argue that it was not. As the photograph below reveals, the view does capture Gdansk; the new Gdansk and the old.

View from hotel window at the Mercure, Gdansk

Excited by the red-brick church, you swear on a pint of good beer that as soon as you have unpacked your things, attended dutifully to your reasonable ablutions and put on a different cravat, you will point your brogues decisively in the direction that you want to go and permit them to carry you off towards the architectural/historic masterpiece that those ever-inventive Poles did christen the Old Town.

Unfortunately, however, although the Mercure Hotel is devilishly close for on-foot types to the town’s historic quarter, my shoes belong to an era, as I do myself, in which modern navigation aids play no understandable part.

I could have asked the way of course, but that would have been too easy and obviously much too sensible, and so, of course, I didn’t. I simply relied on my sense of direction, and for once I got it right.

This is something else that speaks in Mercure’s favour. If, like me, never becoming a navigator was one of the most applaudable things you did in your life, then the Mercure should appeal to you. Its name emblazoned in bright white light at the very top of its tower acts like a lighthouse beacon. It can be seen from many points of the compass and therefore can be used in co-operation with other landmarks to guide you safely home in the unlikely event you have drunk too much after a night on the town.

Mercure Gdansk the name acts as a navigational beacon

In summarising my Mercure experience, I would say “a solid hotel ~ rock solid”.  Comfortable, appealing ~ in a slightly old-fashioned sort of way ~ and supremely atmospheric, it effortlessly brings together the feel of a hotel somewhere above its station with a kindly welcome that is home-from-home. The bar, my natural habitat, has that cushty, big upmarket hotel, relaxing, come-hither air. You just order yourself a drink and sink yourself carefree into its soft and sumptuous seats. The staff are as pleasant as they are helpful; the service cannot be faulted. Everything around you is as easy on the eye as it is upon the senses, which is quite an achievement in itself as the hotel contains some visual surprises. And in its relativity to Gdansk’s Old Town and to the central railway station, if any hotel deserves the accolade of being well-appointed then that hotel is the Mercure.

I know and I do appreciate that on that fateful day when I first laid eyes upon it, the Mercure appeared on my troubled horizon like an oasis in a desert of lies and deceit, but be that as it may, from any objective viewpoint, the Mercure delivers the goods and with it value for money. What else would you expect? It is not for nothing that it derives its name from the Roman God of Travellers!

The main thing

Hotel Mercure Gdańsk Stare Miasto
Jana Heweliusza 22, 80-890 Gdańsk, Poland

Tel: +48 58 321 00 00
Website: Mercure Gdańsk

Streetmap: Mercure Gdańsk

Copyright © 2018-2024 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Keptinis (Farmhouse Beer) in Kaliningrad

Keptinis (Farmhouse Beer) in Kaliningrad is it good?

Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: Keptinis (Farmhouse Beer)

Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad

6 June 2024 ~ Keptinis (Farmhouse Beer) in Kaliningrad is it good?

“Anyone for tennis?”

Hardly!

“Anyone for Keptinis?”

I should say so!

‘Keptinis’ ~ it doesn’t exactly roll off of the British tongue, does it? How I remember the name of this beer is to think of a sport I don’t like. Problem is there are many ~ football, cricket, rugby, tennis, I have a healthy dislike of them all. But for the sake of recalling the name of a beer, and a very good beer at that, no sacrifice is unjustified.

Thus, I take the silly game in which three rackets are involved, two that are held in hands and the other that coins in money, and, by the simple cross-referencing method, I think of that common earole complaint medically known as tinnitus, but spelling it wrongly ‘tinnitis’, and I allow the tail of the misspelt word to wave in my direction. Then all I have to do, by way of association, is to think of a beer so all consuming that it would save me from anything foolish or rash, like playing or even watching tennis, and ‘kept away from tennis’ thus, with tinnitis in my ear, I say it so fast it becomes ‘Keptenis’, which is as near to Keptinis as dammit and as damn them is to a boat load of migrants steaming into Dover.

An easier, far less linguistically challenging means of bringing this beer to mind is to focus on the label. With its striking green and yellow shapes and the stovepipe hat and long moustache of its mysterious pop art poster man, it really is, to coin a phrase and in the process mix two metaphors (which like mixing race is never advisable), the ultimate dog’s whiskers, and just to please the equality conscious, the absolute cat’s bollocks. Mix your metaphors if you will, but before you go mixing anything else, for heaven’s sake think of the pups.

Beer review links:

[Butauty] [Kanapinis (light)] [Kanapinis (dark)]

Keptinis is a mixed-up beer. The moment you flip the Keptinis stopper you are nose to brew with a different species. This is no simple mass-produced, wishy washy paleface lager or bland keg-bitter fizz bomb. What you have is a subtle hybrid. So subtle, you may not know what it is, but it sure as hell smells different!

So, there I am, sniffing away like a kid in a baker’s shop. Although, I never was a kid, as I never was American. And my first reaction to Keptinis is: For what I am about to receive, will it taste like liquefied rye bread?

“Is there any body there?” I ask, like the only one at a lonely guy’s séance.

And remarkably there is. An awful lot of body. Almost too much in fact (and also too much in fiction): a crowded coven of smell apparitions which, in no one order of merit or preference, gives vent to nasal impressions like dried fruit, molten caramel, aromatic scents, spices of the orient and something not dissimilar to chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

Whiffed from within the glass, the subtle and complex combination of deep and rich aromas give way to a smell that is more pronounced, more reminiscently rounded. The jury is out on the soft drink kvas, which is, it may surprise you, mildly alcoholic, while at a stonking 5.7% Keptinis commands a virile strength that by any stretch of the wotsit is hardly soft and rarely limp.

The creamy head that flows profusely and lathers up at the top of the glass looking like old-fashioned shaving foam is a sight for proverbial sore eyes, especially eyes up North (It’s looking up at those pigeons that does it. Why are they all wearing head scarves these days?). But it reminds me more of ice cream; Mr Whippy passing his flake. It was all 69 in the ’70s. (That’s ’99’ with a bit knocked off.)

Keptinis (Farmhouse Beer) in Kaliningrad is it good?

The first mouthful revs up your kvas. Talk about turbo-charged! The taste is full-throttle and it comes at you fast, bouncing from taste bud to taste bud, like brown ale on a Friday night down at the working It’s club, and though incipiently and enduringly dry, both the finish and the aftertaste possess a hitherto secret hint of a not unlikeable sweetness.

The contrast is right-on punchy and funky. To give it a visual translation, a kind of non-binary gender-neutral pole-vaulting limbo dancer strutting her stuff on a pinball table. Please, if you must indulge you fantasies, Keptinis them to yourself!

Some beers are disappointing. They flirt with you in the early evening yet fold before the evenings through, after parting with your money. You might just as well have sat and drank tea whilst watching some tripe on the BBC (It rhymes!) Is this something else you shouldn’t have paid for? A lie, lie, lie, lie, lie-sense. Look out, you’re being investigated! Will you be in next Thursday? You bet your wife I will, but possibly not for the rest of the week! (Sorry, that’s an ‘in’ joke.)

Of all the things on God’s great Earth that are not worth the salt of being kept in by, the BBC is top of the pops. They forgot to investigate Jimmy. But even without a TV licence, I would do everything in my power not to be kept in by a Liebour party political broadcast, or by something equally appalling and unequivocally just as implausible, which rules in coronavirus. And I never have, at least to my knowledge, been kept in by the rogue desire to watch a game of tennis. I would rather stand outside in the street and laugh at cyclists in Lycra shorts. Yet, to be keptin by Keptinis, now that is a horse of a different colour. We won’t divulge which colour (clue, it’s nothing to do with Persil) or we may be coerced into ruining our trousers, along with our integrity, by doing something really stupid like taking a virtue signalling knee. Ho! Ho! Ha! Ha! He! He!

Keptinis (Farmhouse Beer) in Kaliningrad bottle lable

Thankfully, Keptinis is 100% hysteria free: a ‘no one size fits all’ beer that bucks (Did I get that right?) the stereotyping straightjacket. It is less insane than more well-balanced, and though it does resemble kvas, in unassuming and subtle ways, especially if you smoke, has flavours hidden deep within arranged in such cunning and clever ways that the taste bouquet only glitters (all that glitters is not Gary) by slow and teasing degrees, which is all to the ‘so say all of us’, hooray! ~ for Keptinis, it is telling us, is not a one-glass beer and that in order to fully appreciate the deluxe brew it surely is, you have to finish the bottle. I suppose it is what is colloquially known as a drink that is rather morish.

They say, and they are always saying, and I suppose they always will, that the saying about the ‘good thing’ of which, it is said, ‘you can have too much’, will, if you say it often enough, get in the way of the very thing that you cannot get enough of. But shucks (and a word that rhymes with shucks), what the hell do they know!

“Anyone for Keptinis?”

Everyone, I should think.

Disclaimer: Keptinis bears no resemblance to cyclists living or dead or to anyone else not as daft as cyclists who nevertheless would not be seen dead in a pair of Lycra shorts? (sponsored by the Save Me from Being a Sheep Society and the Campaign for Corduroy Trousers in association with Bicycle Clips)

BOX TICKER’S CORNER
Name of Beer: Keptinis (or is that ‘Keptenis’?)
Brewer: Aukštaitijos Bravorai
Where it is brewed: Lithuania
Bottle capacity: 1litre
Strength: 5.7%
Price: It cost me about 230 roubles in 2021. More recently in Kaliningrad, it cost me about 399 roubles/£3.44
Appearance: Dark
Aroma: Not unlike kvass
Taste: Predominantly caramel but with other things going on
Fizz amplitude: 3/10
Label/Marketing: Pop Art
Would you buy it again? Faster than I would buy the Labour party’s policies

Beer rating

Mick Hart Beer Rating Scales

About the beer: Aukštaitijos Bravorai | Keptinis

Keptinis is categorised as a ‘Farmhouse Beer’, a rare beer, difficult to brew, native to Lithuania. It is called ‘farmhouse’ for the very good reason that it was traditionally brewed by farmers. Rumour has it that as the special kind of malt that was needed for the brewing process was cost and distance prohibitive, the crafty farmers would create a mash and then bake it at high temperatures in order to produce the distinctive caramel taste for which it is renowned.

The brewers,  Aukštaitijos Bravorai, refer to it as an ‘Oven Unfiltered Beer’ and describe its unique personage thus: “This beer stands out because it uses not only caramel and Pilsner malts, but bravura roasted malts, which give this beer a mild bitterness and aroma. Beer after fermentation and maturation has a frozen taste and a dark color.”https://www.aukstaitijosbravorai.lt/

Wot other’s say [Comments on Keptinis
 (Farmhouse Beer) from the internet, unedited]
😑Taste is close to aroma, but with harsh yeasty note.
[Comment: Yeasty note, yes; harsh, no]

😊A very rare farmhouse style
[Comment: Wellies and all the rest of it?]

🤔Initial malty flavours soon got tired, it really needs some hop bite to balance it out
[Comment: Your application for tightrope walker has not been successful]

😊 Kvassy, super bready, yeasty and bit funky, bit caramelly sweet and quite bitter
[Comment: Yesy, very goody, welly saidy]

🙂Strong, baked caramel flavour, smooth mouthfeel, interesting sweet notes
[Comment: Orchestrally correct]

Copyright © 2018-2024 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Now see this …
Variety of Beer in Kaliningrad