Chapter the Sixth: Lithuania

WEDNESDAY

When we arrived in Lithuania on Wednesday afternoon, it was snowing. Hard. And it wasn't even the good kind of snow, with fat clumps of soft snowflakes drifting haphazardly from above and landing gently on you. You know, the kind of snow that makes you feel like a kid again, makes you believe in the beauty of existen--yeah, okay, I can't keep that up. It was snowing and windy and awful, is the bottom line.

Corinne, being very smart, had the foresight to copy the directions from the bus station to each hostel, as well as sketch out a rough copy of the map provided by the website. The problem was that she did this with a cheap notebook she had bought for class and ended up not really using. Notebook paper is notoriously weak against water attacks, as is the water-based ink of the fine-tipped marker she'd used to write down the directions, so things got interesting very quickly once we exited the bus.

We ended up walking up and down a 50-meter stretch of sidewalk two or three times while Corinne tried to get her bearings, as her notebook paper grew increasingly soggy and the directions increasingly illegible. We soon figured out where we needed to turn, and would occasionally stop to check the directions again, using alcoves in buildings as well as our own bodies to shield the delicate map from the ravages of wind and weather. We did, gradually, slog through the icy onslaught across the city center, and managed to find the hostel in about half an hour.

This hostel, called Jimmy Jumps House, was pretty much like the others. We booked here specifically because the owner makes and serves free waffles every morning from about 9 to noon. Not only does the whole place smell awesome every morning, but hey, free waffles. The waffle iron made heart-shaped waffles, too. Five hearts stuck together to form a circle. Delicious and adorable! Of all the things we took pictures of, I don't believe anyone took photos of the waffles, though. The only thing I didn't like about the place was that the beds were of significantly lower quality than those of Cinnamon Sally or the Monk's Bunk, but in a few days I would be returning to an even worse bed, so I guess it was better to gradually transition back to a terrible mattress and more terrible pillows.

The owner told us about a bar in town holding a karaoke night on Wednesday, so that's where we decided to go. We got lost the first time we set out to find it, which sucked because the streets were still covered in half-melted snow. All of our feet were soaked by the time we managed to locate this place, called Bix. We got some dinner and drinks, and waited for the karaoke shenanigans to begin.

I got sweet and sour chicken for dinner. I'm not sure what I was expecting; I knew it wouldn't be like whatever my idea of "sweet and sour chicken" is, but it was pretty close...which was even weirder than getting some kind of bizarre eastern European interpretation would have been. It was as if I had plunged right into the uncanny valley of sweet-and-sour chicken: almost "the real thing," but just different enough to be unsettling, without being different enough to qualify as something else altogether. The little bits of meat I was served did look and taste like they had all come from one animal, though, so there was that. The sauce was good, very garlicky and faintly reminiscent of an Asian-inspired barbecue sauce. That's something I really miss over here: Chinese food. There are Chinese restaurants around Petersburg, but they're so formal! They use things like plates and silverware. Chinese food comes in a box, gosh darn it, not attractively arranged on a tiny plate! The food is OK, but just not the same. I'm keeping a list of foods I want when I get home; right now that list consists of "Chinese food" and "bacon," because apparently I'm in some kind of God-forsaken region of the world that doesn't believe in the delicious, artery-clogging almighty Crispy Bacon.

The karaoke shenanigans began around 9 or 10; I don't really remember because I forgot my phone charger, like a chump, so it remained off for much of our Lithuanian adventure to conserve battery life. I went up a few times and didn't do too great, but most of the crowd was drunk enough for it not to be a problem. Corinne went up a few times and rocked it, even winning a free beer for her performance of You Can't Always Get What You Want. She didn't manage to actually cash in on that (I think she was supposed to give the coaster the DJ gave her to the waitress?), but later on some guy who was celebrating his birthday handed her a bottle of some kind of mystery beer, so whatever. It worked out. There were also a couple of Lithuanian girls who were absolutely amazing, and one funny guy who just hammed it up at every opportunity, death-metal growling the stuff on the intro screen and during musical interludes and stuff. He grabbed a friend and rapped in Lithuanian instead of actually singing Because I Got High, then said "I was gonna sing this song, but then I got drunk!" Because he was very clever, you see. We stayed at Bix until closing time, then made our way back to the hostel because it was still cold and slushy outside.

THURSDAY/FRIDAY

 I'm lumping the last two days together because one of them was very uneventful for me.

Thursday, we did some city exploring, because the weather was amazing. It was approaching 50 degrees outside, and sunny! After a delicious lunch at an Indian restaurant, we went into town and visited this old tower on a hill. The ascent was pretty easy; walking on the old cobblestone was like a free foot massage with every step, and hey, cardio. At one point I saw a little winding path up the side of the hill next to the main path; I popped up there to see where it led, and found an awesome little semi-secluded mountain spring dribbling into a well. There was graffiti all over the rocks--mostly couple names and dates. So, yeah, I found Vilnius' Makeout Point, NBD. I'll remember it if I ever find myself back in Lithuania, which is unlikely, but who knows?

We even took off our coats because the weather was so nice, and the energy we needed to climb was enough to keep us comfortable. Inside the tower was a small museum; one floor had a model of the city in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the next had displays of arms and armor. There was one more (very steep) winding staircase that goes up to the top; we thought the door at the top of the staircase was locked at first, but then realized we just weren't trying hard enough to open the door, and felt pretty silly.

The view from the top of the tower was incredible. Practically the entire city of Vilnius was visible, in all its red-and-white glory. It was sunny, just a bit windy, and warmer than it had been in a long time for us. We hung out, took silly photos, sat and talked and generally just passed the time up there for about three or four hours before deciding to head back down. There was a mechanized lift set up to make the descent easier, but we decided we didn't want to pay for that and walked back down. The trail is very steep in some places, the cobblestones have been worn smooth over the years, and the soles of my boots have absolutely no traction whatsoever (I slip and slide on tile floors in these things), so it was kind of an adventure on the way down.

When we checked into the hostel on Wednesday, the owner guy took out a map of Vilnius and marked the location of some interesting things we might want to check out. Among those things was a bust of Frank Zappa, located across town from the hostel. The statue is there for basically no reason other than "well, why not?", and here is a page explaining it in more detail. The art on the walls in the surrounding area is pretty amazing--too amazing to call it "graffiti." It is definitely street art. But then, that's to be expected, as the bust was erected near the art academy. We went to find the statue, and were successful; many photos were taken:

And I made a snowfriend! There were just these three perfectly-sized chunks of snow lying around. I couldn't help myself. (We neglected to take pictures of the snowfriend.)

Liz had managed to leave her toiletry bag on the Riga-Vilnius bus, and got an email telling her that it had been found, but she had to go to another city, Kaunas, to pick it up. I opted not to go, figuring it would be a quick jaunt out there Friday morning and then they'd be back to explore more Vilnius by lunchtime. Everyone was operating on that assumption. Not only did Liz fail to rendezvous with Ecolines in Kaunas, but the Kaunas-Vilnius train does not run nearly as often as they were counting on, so they ended up being stuck there all day while I was left to my own devices at the hostel. I didn't get the memo until about an hour before they were due back, though, so I wasted the day on the Internet, instead of exploring a strange city in a foreign country alone, like a sensible person.

That night, two girls who worked for the hostel kept trying to get us to go with them on a pub crawl (which was a regular hostel-organized event and apparently there was a minimum number of guests required for it to actually happen; if less than 5 guests want to go, it is cancelled). We declined, on the grounds that our bus was going to leave early the next morning, and we were rapidly running out of money. So we stayed in and played drinking games with the other Americans in the hostel instead.

The other Americans were actually pretty cool. There was one guy who turned out to be a Redditor, a 22-year-old PhD student (he skipped first and second grade) who spoke Finnish. The other guy was a middle-school geography teacher; I don't remember his name, but he was more involved in talking to/hitting on the Australian and Spanish girls who were also staying at the hostel than he was in our conversation. AJ (Dr. Redditor) was kinda hitting on the three of us, but it was all pretty lighthearted and he didn't actually try to pursue any of us seriously. Liz and Corinne had a lot more to drink than I did, but we all hit the hay around 1:30-2 AM anyway, because we still remembered that we had an early bus to catch.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY

And then we proceeded to miss the bus.

No one thought to set a second alarm and Liz's alarm was inaudible, so we all overslept. In a panic, Liz scoured the internet for buses to Riga that would arrive before 10 PM, and successfully bought us bus tickets for a ride that left at 4 PM. Then we all went back to sleep and spent the day leisurely packing and saying our final goodbyes to what turned out to be our favorite country. We managed to catch the 4:00 bus (after Liz had to practically sprint to the ticket office to print our things, even though the email said all we would need was ID, but okay), and then had only about an hour and a half to kill in Riga, instead of the 10-hour layover we would have had if we had made our morning bus. Really, it worked out for the best; Latvia was expensive, after all, so we wouldn't have gotten to do much in Riga besides buy some food and walk around all day.

The final leg of our journey--the eleven-hour, three-country-spanning bus ride from Riga to Petersburg--was the most trying. It was an overnight bus ride in a vehicle badly in need of new shocks; we shook, rattled and rolled our way across Estonia, stopping around 4 AM to go through customs at the Russian border. The bus felt and sounded like it was minutes away from just falling apart, and while we did manage to get some sleep, it came in snatches and was rudely interrupted by the bus attempting to fly (at least, that's what I choose to believe was happening when the bus lurched and bounced like that).

We got back to Petersburg (where it was snowing, on Easter) around 9 AM on Sunday, setting foot back in the apartment by 9:30. I started a load of laundry, set an alarm on my phone, and took a well-deserved nap in my squeaky, pokey, generally terrible, but at least stationary, bed.

The spring break vacation was great, and I had a lot of fun with my roommates, but I'm almost glad to be back in Petersburg. The semester is more than halfway over, now, and I'm both sad and relieved. I've made some good friends here, and there are still some interesting culture-class-related things on the schedule, and I have to leave just as the weather starts to get really nice...but, at the same time, I've kind of been looking forward to coming back home since the day I left. I'm more of a homebody than I ever suspected myself to be, I suppose.