Some interesting pieces were wooden shoes for the wet weather. They were platforms on two-inch thick blocks to walk above the rain or snow. Mark got a chuckle from a cradle with a built-in drain. That seems like a good idea somehow.
After that we just walked around the peninsula leisurely. We saw from the outside the Kenessa, the prayer house of the Karaites, but it was not open to visitors, so we don't know if the inside looked more liked a synagogue, a mosque, or what. We finished up with the Peninsula Castle, pretty much still in ruins though they seem to be building a historical museum there. Things here are taking less time than we've allotted. For example, we almost always overestimate how long a museum will take. We probably could have made do with five and a half days in Vilnius instead of six and a half. Still, we can take an extra day in Riga and another in Tallinn if we want without being late for our scheduled meeting in Turku. Then again, it's likely we'll have already scheduled more time than necessary in those places.
We took the 16:00 bus back to Vilnius. This was a 'local' bus, rather than a 'long-distance' bus, so the seats were not as comfortable, but it was cheaper. In any case, that was what was going at the time we wanted to go. It stopped at Vaduvos (near Paneriai) so people who wanted to combine the two could take a local bus (listed on the *blue* board in Trakai rather than the red), get off at Vaduvos (right after the trolley lines come in from the right), cross the street, and catch the number 8 bus to Paneriai. Just a suggestion, of course.
We were not really hungry when we got back, but we've wanted to try cepelinai and a bistro we passed had it, so we figured we'd give it a try. (A bistro is like a kavine, except that you eat standing at a table instead of sitting down.) Mark's initial impression of cepelinai was 'Lithuanian Dim Sum.' It is ground meat, not too different from kibinai but wrapped in a ground potato paste and topped with gravy (actually butter or bacon fat) and mushrooms. Mark thought it was pretty good. Evelyn thought the kibinai were a lot better. Mark also had a glass of cherry juice and that was really good. It was like liquid cherry pie. Two cepelinai, two glasses cherry juice, and a coffee came to 6 Lt (US$1.50). The coffee, by the way, is more like Turkish coffee, in small cups with grounds at the bottom, than like the coffee we get in the United States.
Local fashion seems to dictate that young women wear sunglasses with stickers on the lenses. Local fashion is stupid, no two ways about it. Mark hopes this fad does not spread to the United States. Why limit your field of vision to advertise your brand of sunglasses?
Back to the room at around 18:00 and we've been writing in our logs since.
May 12, 1994: Mark writes, 'I figure that this trip is 609 hours long, but only 434 waking hours. 101 hours, 12 minutes, and 51 seconds of these waking hours are gone. That means we are 23.32% through the trip, according to Thing. In a couple of minutes we will be 7/30 done with the trip. (Thank you, Thing.)'
He continues, 'Thing has become to a small extent a hobby. I spend most of the evening writing. When I want a break I try adding features to programs in Thing. I wrote myself a program today to give me good simple fractions for currency conversions in my head. I have improved my program for giving percentages through the trip and where I should be in my logs, film, and chewing gum (hey, I'm serious). If my mind wanders when I write, I've even got a program which keeps my nose to the grindstone. It tells me what page I should be on if it takes me six minutes to write a page. It will even sample my writing speed for, say, half a page, and keep me going at that rate. It's about the only way I can get through all the notes, also written in Thing.'
'Most people I have talked to who have the 95LX don't use it and cannot figure out what they would use it for. I find that with a little imagination it is part of nearly everything I do. I wish it were smaller to make it easier to carry and I wish the keyboard were bigger to make it easier to type. But for something about the size of a pencil box, I think it carries its weight.'
The other thing we do in the evening is listen to either the BBC on the shortwave or the Voice of America on the Walkman. VOA tends to have unpleasant rock music but it is decent for news. The BBC has even better news, and the rest of its programming is a mixed bag with some good stuff thrown in.
As Mark told Evelyn earlier this week, 'Stick with me, kid, and I'll have you in Latvia.' Well, today is the day he will make good on that promise. Well, maybe tomorrow is more like it. This is our last day in Lithuania. Sausage and cheese for breakfast. We said goodbye to our hosts without ever learning their names (well, they're on the receipt, but we can't read the writing very well). We packed our bags, dropped off the keys and walked to the train station. The Lithuanian word for railroad is 'gelezinkelio.' That has the word for iron in it, and Mark figures it probably means 'iron horse.'
We put our bags in the lockers. The lockers are an experience in themselves. They are 0.7 Lt (70 centai) each and work as follows: Pay the attendant 0.7 Lt. Get two 15-kopeck coins and a receipt. (The fact that they are 15-kopeck coins is meaningless. Think of them as tokens.) Save the receipt--you will be asked for it when you return. Find a free locker. Set the dials on the *inside* of the door to your combination- -one Cyrillic letter and three numbers. Memorize or write down this combination. Also memorize or write down your locker number. (Good security practices indicate you shouldn't make them both the same, but it probably doesn't matter a whole lot.) Insert one token. Close the door. Randomize the dials on the *outside* of the door. (Well, you couldn't do the inside if you wanted to at this point.) When you return, set the *outside* dials to your combination. Insert the other token. Open the door. (Note: one saving grace is that it won't take the second token unless you get the combination right, so if you can't remember which of two numbers you used, you get to make multiple tries.)
The reason the 15-kopeck coins are used, of course, is that the lockers were built during the Soviet occupation and used those coins. It's easier to keep the coins around as tokens now than to re-tool all the lockers. People are willing to put up with the hammer-and-sickles on the coins rather than spend as much as it would take to re-tool.
One slightly confusing aspect is that the combination on both the inside and outside go left-to-right (letter on the far left), so the corresponding letter/numbers are *not* back-to-back. If the door were hinged at the top, or the dials went top to bottom, then associated letter/numbers *would* be back-to-back. (You probably don't even care.)
We stopped at a couple of bookstores on the way. They were number 22 and number 10 on Pilies gatve. There seem to be a lot of stores here with no names, just a description of what is being sold--or sometimes not even that. (They may have names, but they're not visible on the store front.) But books in the window means a bookstore. In number 22 we got a pamphlet in Lithuanian and English about Darius and Girenas, and in number 10 Evelyn found a Lithuanian edition of Sherlock Holmes. She thinks it's THE VALLEY OF FEAR, but with our ability to read Lithuanian, it could be VALLEY OF GWANGI.
That accomplished, our next stop this morning was to see St. Anne's Church. St. Anne's is a very nice church built between 1570 and 1572 of thirty-two types of bricks, and is called 'the jewel of Lithuanian Gothic architecture.' It has a high arched ceiling. It is maybe half again as wide as it is tall so it feels very spacious overhead. At the front there is a high decoration indicating levels to heaven and at the top are clouds with light beaming through and the eye of God in a triangle. On either side of the altar are paintings of Christ on a cross and around are lucky charms. There are two chandeliers suspended by cords longer than the church is wide. Napoleon supposedly saw the church and said he wanted to take it back to France in the palm of his hand. He was something of a diplomat. I don't quite remember the story, but he came to Vilnius with some gift for the Jews to show his positive intentions. I think in the United States we tend to think of Napoleon as a tyrant, perhaps because of our ties with England *after* the time of Napoleon. In fact, many people still think of Napoleon as a positive force. Today we would probably call him a liberal reformer. He was also a man of immense charm. Most Americans today who even know there was a Napoleon remember him almost as fascist and that is just not true.
On the way into the church, an American tour group passed (the first tourists we had seen other than a half dozen Japanese). One of the women saw Evelyn holding the 'Lonely Planet' book and said it was the best guide to the Baltics. Evelyn responded that it was the *only* guide. The woman said it wasn't the only guide but it was the best.
From there we continued on to the Museum of Decoration and Applied Arts (your translation may vary). We had the whole museum to ourselves. There were two floors, a ground floor for pre-20th Century art and a second floor for 20th Century art. The lower floor is mostly decorative items like furniture, tapestries, chairs, and cabinets. The second floor is more decorative pieces without function. There was a tapestry on the first floor of a king looking at what looked like a city burning. We could not place the story, but it could be local history. Evelyn preferred the 20th Century pieces: they seemed more Lithuanian and individual and less like French/German/Austrian pieces from the same period. Oddly enough, Mark liked the older pieces better.
For lunch we went back to the temperance restaurant, Baltu Ainiai. Mark had herring again. That stuff we get in a jar back home is garbage. The Lithuanian word for herring is 'silke' and it is very apt. The consistency of the fish is silky. The taste is a little like anchovy. But unpickled and with sour cream it is good stuff. He also had a thin slice of beef that had some melted cheese and an indeterminate sauce. It came with good fried potatoes. Evelyn had herring and pancakes, along with a cup of tea which turned out to be herbal tea. The meal came to 27 Lt (US$7).
From there we went to the Vilnius Art Museum right across the street. (Most things are very close together in Vilnius.) This is all art by Lithuanian artists, but many interesting styles are represented. There are six paintings from someone's (Juozas Mikenas's?) 'Jewish Ghetto' cycle commemorating the Jewish ghetto and its destruction. They were striking in themselves, and also in the fact that here was something with a Jewish theme in a regular (i.e., not specifically Jewish) museum. There are some nice sculptures. But the piece Mark would most like to own was the very last piece we saw. As he describes it, 'It is a nighttime scene on a rolling ocean. There are mountains and valleys and snowy whitecaps to the waves. In the upper right corners, in fact going off the canvas, is a fanciful image of the back end of what could be a pirate ship with bright sails. It has a terrific story-book feel. The artist is Fernandas Ruscicas and the painting is 'Nec Mergitur.''
We were done there about 14:00. We had some postcards to write and send, so we went to Cathedral Square. The one problem with sitting in a public place is that beggars come to ply their lack of trade. One fellow sat down next to us and tried to talk to us, first in Lithuanian, then in German. 'Essen,' he'd say, pointing to his throat. His German did not serve him well, since each time he said, 'Essen,' he aspirated out alcohol vapor, easily detectable. One aspirates far less with the English word 'eat.' English is generally accepted to be the international language of panhandling. More money is obtained panhandling in English than the total of the next three languages combined. |
