First Half

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I left the Saturday before Easter. The flight to Vilnius from Frankfurt is just two hours. We had a little delay, though, because the pilot got sick. As compensation we got delicious, expensive chocolate. I was satisfied. I sat next to a very nice Lithuanian woman, who helped me a little with my Lithuanian. We talked pretty much the whole time (in German), which made the flight go very quickly.

My cousin Danas picked me up at the airport, and we drove to Kaunas. I stayed with him in his apartment for four nights. Kaunas is not a beautiful city, but it has potential. While it was a little run down, it was not poor. Apartment buildings were kind of unattractive on the outside, but the insides I saw were more than livable. Danas’ mother cooked for us the first night, very nice of her. Danas and I went for a few beers afterward.

Later I tried a home-brewed beer that I can only describe as having tasted like perfume smells, or like flowers.

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Easter Sunday I got a tour of Kaunas’ main boulevard, called Freedom Alley. Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral on the one end wasn’t especially impressive from the outside, but it was gorgeous inside. The Church of St. Michael the Archangel on the other end, however, was very beautiful on the outside. In between were a number of shops, restaurants, museums and memorials. That night I went bowling with Danas and a few of his friends. That was the first time I had gone bowling in a decade. I did all right considering. After bowling, we went to a casino. I didn’t spend any money, but I did find it interesting to watch the others play roulette.

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Monday Danas and I drove to Rumsiskes, a beautiful park and open-air museum. The Monday after Easter, all of Lithuania visits the park for folky exhibitions, beer and meat. It wasn’t even noon yet when we had our first beer. Later I tried a home-brewed beer that I can only describe as having tasted like perfume smells, or like flowers. That may sound disgusting, but it was actually really good. We looked at the old farmhouses representative of the different regions of Lithuania, watched people do folkdances and sing folksongs, and then we walked through the beautiful forest. There were molehills in almost all the fields. That night Danas took me and a friend of his to a point overlooking Kaunas, very pretty, and to the shore of Kaunas Sea.

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Tuesday we drove to the Baltic, Danas, a few of his friends and I. Very long drive. We stopped in the city of Klaipeda, had a bite to eat, and then we took the ferry to a strip of land of the coast of Lithuania over which one had to walk to see the real Baltic. I liked it a lot and could imagine it being fun in the summer. It was a long ride back, rained a little, but it didn’t rain in Kaunas.