We tried to order the Armenian dishes, but only about half of them were available. (If there is no price next to an item on the menu, it's not available, or at least that's what the guidebooks say.) Busturma was what Evelyn ordered. It turned out to be the word that our word pastrami is a corruption of. Our pastrami may also be a corruption of theirs, but theirs is at least decent. It seemed to be in little chips reminiscent of butterflies. We each had borscht, which was very good. Regarding borscht, Mark comments, 'I think when I was growing up the whole idea of borscht was disgusting, but I am smarter now. It was at the holiday party at work last December as an example of Jewish ethnic food. Nobody was touching it. It had been many years since I'd had borscht, but I felt it was a shame that nobody was eating the Jewish food, so I took some to save the maker's feelings. That was why I took the first cup anyway. I had better reasons for the second cup and the cups of borscht after that. Just so it would be a little festive I put in some sour cream. Okay, so now I have a better idea why anyone would eat borscht. This was odd borscht since it was also a little piquant. I don't know who brought it, but I do hope they found out that I and others actually found it to be pretty good.'
Mark's main course was shaslik, made with mystery meat (perhaps chicken). Evelyn's meal was salted cheese, which is an appetizer, so was served before Mark's main course. The salted cheese was like feta cheese, only not as dry. With lime sodas, this all came to 36 Lt (about US$9) for the two of us.
Returning across the Neris we were pan-handled by a beggar wearing two very fancy crosses who shook them at us as if to say, 'Look, I am a religious Christian. Give me money.' We won't say we were less disposed to give him money because he was a religious Christian, but it didn't make us more charitable to him either.
Mark would say that the degree of being pan-handled here is on a par with what you'd have in Manhattan. On the whole you are left alone when you walk around. The experience was very different from India. There you often literally have to fight off the beggars and street hawkers. It is a very daunting thing to have to tell people 'no' thirty-one times in ten minutes.
Something else we saw on the way back was a motorcycle procession. There was some sort of biker convention (we had seen the posters earlier) and maybe three hundred motorcycles drove down the main street of town, preceded and followed by police with flashing lights and blaring sirens.
Next stop was the KGB Museum, a site intended to keep alive the hatred for the Soviets. (We're not sure if this is an official museum at this point or not. Posters on the wall said something about exinmates occupying it since February to try to get the government to act against former KGB agents. Also, there is no admission charge, but rather a box for contributions.) This was a prison built by the local police and used by both the Nazis and the KGB to hold suspected enemies in the philosophy that an enemy deserves no mercy. Apparently the facility was somewhat larger, but somehow the one hallway one walks down had a large variety of cells. The tours are led by former inmates. The guide we had was an older man, certainly of an age to have been interred here, who spoke no English, but guided us around by letting us read the printed sheets he had describing each room--he's point to a paragraph with headings in English and Lithuanian but with the description in English and then to the room. This made the tour even eerier for its silence than a spoken tour would have been.
They show you the little boxes where people were held many hours to be processed, and rooms where people were finger-printed. The actual cells were about fifteen by eight-and-a-half feet (five by tahalf meters), and into this area twenty people would be crowded together. That gives each person an area about tahalf feet square (six-and-a-half square feet). There are stories of the monthly showers with nearfreezing or scalding water. The exercise area was fourteen by ten feet (five by three meters). There were padded rooms used for mental torture. Before being shipped to Siberia you were held in a holding room in cold water over your feet. It was pretty barbaric and brutal. (Mark says, 'I hate those words since this kind of torture would rarely or never be employed by either literal barbarians or literal animals.')
Maybe in purposeful contrast to the Soviets' attitude toward the Jews (pretend they didn't exist and weren't specific victims of the Holocaust), the signs in the KGB Museum specifically say that these tortures were performed on Jews as well as partisans, and that the Jews were rounded up by the Gestapo when they used the building during World War II--and the mention was in the Lithuanian version as well as the English version. (Evelyn has heard that Jews are specifically mentioned on only the English-language tours of Auschwitz, not on the tours in German or Polish.) If we are to believe the 'Insight' guide, it was more often Jews than partisans despite the fact of their relatively low numbers. And of course the partisans often did not get along with the Jews, blaming them for the coming of the Soviets. There are also boards of photographs of partisans who were killed and pictures of people who'd been beaten.
After this we walked back down Gedimino prospektas, the main street of the New Town, to Cathedral Square, on the boundary between the New Town and the Old Town. Gedimino prospektas contains many government ministries, shops, and restaurants. We stopped by a bookstore and sounded out the names of authors of books printed in Cyrillic--names like Poul Anderson, Samuel Delany, and Sidney Sheldon.
Earlier we had seen trucks from Lithuanian Television and Radio arriving at the Cathedral, and now we saw why. There was an international concert of religious music to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's elevation. We went inside and listened to the beautiful music, including the 'Hallelujah Chorus' from Handel's MESSIAH, for a while. We did get to see the inside of the Cathedral this way, which still looks a bit like an art museum.
Next stop was the Museum of History and Ethnology. This museum had artifacts of the area from prehistoric times through the 1940s. Included are woodcuts, paintings, and lithographs. Particularly interesting were lithographs of Vytautas and Jogaila. There were devil masks, some of them with distinctly Jewish features. Artifacts go up through the time of radio. This was where we saw the very woundedlooking wood carving of St. George after killing his dragon.
Interestingly, when you buy your tickets, they are in a big book, but the seller has to cut them out with scissors. She cuts through several pages at once, leaving only about a half-inch of the boundary uncut, then as she sells the tickets she tears them out. While Lithuania strikes me as being better off than Romania was when we visited there in 1991, it is certainly no better off than most of Eastern Europe we saw on that trip. Of course, we are traveling differently. Still, it is clear that no country did very well under the economic policies of the Soviets. Many will probably find capitalism does little better for them, at least at first.
This museum did have one gallery with English translations of the labels, but even the Lithuanian labels were sometimes understandable, since they were just names or dates, or cognates borrowed from Greek or Latin. What Evelyn noted was that although Russian and Polish works were in the displays on literature and the arts, there was no Yiddish. This was in spite of the fact that Vilnius was *the* center of Yiddish literature and the home of YIVO. In fact, the only reference to the Jewish community of Vilnius was a painting of Zhydu gatve--'Jewish Street.' As she said earlier, in the United States everyone is an American, but here not everyone is a Lithuanian, though their families have lived here for generations.
On the way back to the room, we stopped and got soda. It is 2.5 Lt for 1.5 liters. That is about US$0.84 for two liters, a standard size American bottle. We got one bottle in the morning and drank it over the day. Then we got another on the way home after the museum. Both were what we call diet soda, though we didn't realize it until after we got it. It has the Nutrasweet swirl on the label, meaning no sweetener but Nutrasweet.
Back at the room we wrote and Mark dozed off a little. Mark has been waking up at sunrise since it is tough to keep the sun out of the room. He does fine with jet lag, but lace curtains are a problem.
We went to Blynines, a cafe that serves pancakes for dinner, but we found it closed (even though the posted hours seemed to indicate it should be open). Instead we went to the recommended Lokys. There is a film called 'Lokis' that is about a bear and the symbol of the restaurant is a bear so we assumed that 'lokys' means 'bear,' especially since the restaurant features game. (Later, the 'Lonely Planet' guide confirmed that.)
The inside is all stonework with a narrow staircase eighteen inches wide to the basement where there are tables. We could see as soon as we got in the door they thought we'd have problems with language. The menu items were all translated into English and then crossed out and replaced with untranslated items. We were able to do some guessing about what we wanted and rather than pronounce them, Mark typed the names in Lithuanian into Thing. He'd written a program the previous night not only to order, but also to tally the bill. In Lotus 1-2-3 it takes all of about two minutes to write such a program, including getting the word 'saskaita,' meaning 'bill.'
We shared an appetizer plate that had sardines, a half red pepper stuffed with egg salad, a salad featuring mystery meat, and some sausage slices.
Evelyn had pork cutlet (we think) in lieu of the stewed elk meat in a sour cream sauce she had tried to order, but that they were out of. Mark's dinner featured elk sausage.
Mark had shown the waitress what we'd wanted and the program tallied the bill. Rather than us trying to explain what we wanted, the waitress was explaining why it would cost a little more. We have no idea what she said, but the whole meal was 45 Lt for two. If we go for Chinese at home US$11 is cheap for two.
We walked a little after dinner and then went back to the room, where we listened to the BBC on shortwave radio. Apparently they had just opened the Channel Tunnel and had the ceremonies. Then they immediately closed it again. Mark's guess was that it was because the French Army now had longbows and were running through the tunnel ready to take bloody revenge for Agincourt.
We have hot water! Well, we can get it only through the shower head--on a hose so we can aim it in the sink, but still awkward. Still, having hot water is a plus.
We went to bed about 23:30, but kept being awakened by drunks partying in the street below.
May 8, 1994: Mark woke up at about 5:30. Evelyn also slept a little better. We may be getting used to the cold. Breakfast was sausage and cheese again. There were also some sweet biscuits.
We had to re-arrange our schedule for Lithuania. Evelyn had managed to schedule things precisely for the days they were closed. 'Vilnius in Your Pocket' was a life-saver here, since it is more up-todate and complete than any of our guidebooks. So instead of Jewish Vilnius today (the museum and synagogue are closed Saturday *and* Sunday), we're doing Kaunas (a.k.a. Kovna) (where all the museums are closed Tuesday and the Devil Museum Monday). (All of this is subject to change, of course, but it may be helpful to some for a while.)
We left the room about 8:00 and walked to the bus station (about a half mile, or a kilometer). It was pretty quiet at this hour, especially since it was Sunday. So Evelyn suggested this would be a good time to get our train tickets, since the lines are usually very long and the reservations was only a block from the bus station.
Evelyn was right--there was no line. |
