Thursday, May 26, 2005
Vilnius
The bus ride from Warsaw to Vilnius was very uncomfortable. In part due to the bumpy road, and part to my jetlag, I got only one hour of sleep. The bus arrived in Vilnius at 5:30 A.M. I walked five minutes to the Old Town Hostel. After checking in and freshening up, I met an Australian couple who had also just arrived. Named Richard and Melanie, they were pretty friendly and very young, just nineteen years old. They had been working in England for a year to save money for an extended trip throughout Europe. (They were going to travel until they ran out of money.) It was nice to meet people like these two who work for travel, not travel for work.
Icon of the Virgin ("Black Madonna"), Gates of Dawn
Later that morning I continued my day in Vilnius by going to the Old Town. There are a few churches located in the southern end. I stepped inside a Catholic church that houses an artifact called the Black Madonna. (Many Poles travel to Lithuania to see this.) While I was walking around Old Town I noticed a lot more stares from the locals and other tourists. I suppose I stood out like a sore thumb in this smallish city of 600,000. The residents of Vilnius were more likely to interact with foreigners like me than were the folks in Warsaw. For instance, outside the bus terminal I was accosted by a Lithuanian girl. She began to speak to me in her native tongue, but after I told her that I only spoke English, she surprised me by switching to perfect English. What she had to say didn't interest me, though; she asked me for money to buy a bus ticket. Two more times that day I was asked for money, and once I was asked to buy someone five liters of vodka!
Old Town
Fashion here is a poor man's Paris. There is a long promenade of trendy boutiques, but the brands are local names that are vaguely evocative of designer labels. Girls tend to wear colorful nylons with short skirts. Men are more unruly than in Warsaw. I saw a girl wearing a sexy outfit walk past a bunch of men in a cafe, and one of them actually grabbed her by the arm and propositioned her! Lithuanians look less Slavic than the Poles, but they are a lot taller.
Gedimino prospektas, main boulevard in New Town
Vilnius is a fairly compact city; you can tour it in one day. I spent the whole day walking around and saw everything I wanted to see. Around 4 P.M. the combination of jetlag and lack of sleep caught up to me. I fell asleep on a park bench.
Despite the city's small physical size, it's very lively -- at night people were out and about, filling the squares and main streets. I noticed a fair number of Russians, mostly in service sector jobs or selling arts and crafts on the sidewalk. I wonder if they have been around since the days of the Soviet Union or if they are more recent arrivals (maybe from Belarus?). You can find Russian cuisine here. At the supermarket I bought a tasty pirozhki, a pork-filled pastry.
Church of the Saint Virgin's Apparition
The hostel I'm staying in, Old Town Hostel, costs 36 lita ($15) per night. The people I've met here are friendly. It's a hodgepodge: the Australians I met in the morning, a couple from Canada in town to sightsee, a group from Brtain looking for a party. As I'm meeting more travelers it seems commonplace for Brits and Aussies to travel in Europe at a young age. I was interested to learn that no one wants to visit the U.S. until they turn 21. Guess why.
