Two other things of significance happened to us in Nida: I was introduced to pickled herring, which was surprisingly tasty, and we discovered a slightly scary evangelical Christian American TV channel (there's only so much BBC World News you can take) called Heaven TV. We got strangely addicted to this, as a series of elderly male preachers exhorted us to invite Jesus into our lives now, or, as they assured us with twinkly smiles, we would burn in hell. The whole thing was a bizarre and slightly addictive cocktail of hellfire sermons, descriptions of poverty stricken people in South America who were helped only when they converted to this particular brand of so-called Christianity, shiny television reconstructions of near death experiences in which people met God, and a nauseating children's programme in which unnaturally clean looking children sang songs about forgiveness. Perhaps the best moment was when they urged their viewers to donate money so that they could preach the message of Christ to Europe. Thanks, but we have had Christianity here for quite a while-just the last 2000 years or so. I'd love to see them trying to preach to the Poles......
All of which added up to one of the more surreal moments of the trip: sitting in an incredibly obscure Lithuanian village, eating pickled herring out of the jar and being thanked for our role in helping Heaven TV preach Christ and populate heaven. Perhaps it's time we started to think about coming home?
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