Thursday, November 15th, 2007
We landed into Vilnius and were ushered right into passport control. Dermot had an interesting time at the passport control…asking him many questions about his travels as well as proof of health insurance… on the other hand, Katie cruised through without any questions, but just a raise of the eyebrow when Katie asked to stamp on a certain page, since she was running out of passport pages…
We caught the bus into town, and then the trolley to our hotel. As there is no public transport in old town, we had to walk a bit, but nothing compared to previous cities. We checked into our family run hotel (which we got an upgrade to the suite!) and made our way to dinner at Zoe’s Bar and Grill. We had a great meal, service and topped off with tasty chocolate cake.
We got a great night’s sleep, despite the ‘Bruce Lee’ Bar being below us, and we started off our morning with our hotel’s complimentary breakfast…in the ‘Bruce Lee’ Bar. Since we had a great Internet connection, we did lots of trip planning, including booking our Egypt flights and the remainder of our European Adventures! As time flew, we realized we should get out and see Vilnius.
We ended up grabbing lunch at ‘Cozy,’ as it claimed to have a ‘business lunch’ special for 16 lts (about $7.50.) Without realizing, we walked right through filming of something… with lots of actors and movie cameras. Inside Cozy, we realized that the film directors were speaking English next to us, with thick Russian sounding accents. We asked what they were filming, and we found out that instead of being in Lithuanian Hollywood, we were on the set of Lithuanian MTV… they were filming a music video. Very fun…. Minus that our ‘business lunch’ took about 3 hours. Unfortunately, the benefit of ‘off season’ is less crowds, but most of museums close at 4pm. So, we decided to walk around old town.
We checked out the infamous “Paminklas Frankui Zapai” or the “Frank Zappa Monument.” Long story short, one of the more renown artists in Lithuania really liked Frank, so he sculpted his head and put it on a stick. However, Katie enjoyed the lovely spray-paint of Cartman from South Park more…
On our walk around old town, we saw many old, abandoned buildings, showing the previous Soviet Occupation. With the sun setting around 16:00 (4pm), it is rather difficult to make it out to many museums sights during daylight hours… so we went to get gelato, and Dermot realized that he had definitely overdone his daily limit for the day.
We walked over the “Arkikatedra Bazilika,” aka, the Cathedral, in search of the “Stebuklas” or the miracle stone. We caught the end of mass (in Russian…) and made our way to the tiles in front of the church. We weren’t sure if we had successfully found the infamous tile…until a man came up, very matter of fact, did a clockwise turn on top of the tile and walked off. We knew we had found the lucky tile…so we repeated the man’s actions and made our wishes. In Lithuanian culture, the stone is a symbol of freedom and peace. It marks the spot of where a couple million handholding Balts linked hands between Vilnius and Tallinn to end communism and bring peace and freedom to their countries.
We realized that ice skating would have been several buses and Katie wasn’t feeling the freezing cold idea of ice skating, so we went to “Zemaiciai” for dinner. It was a delicious option which was hobbit-like in that you had to duck your way through cave-like stairways to the dining area. We enjoyed the meat platter and the Lithuanian specialties “Zeppelins,” which were potato stuffed with pork.
After dinner, we walked around town attempting to enjoy the local nightlife. However, we were turned off by cover charges for ‘discos’ and decided to have dessert at a random restaurant discovered on our walk home. Long after finishing our dessert, we realized that our server was no where to be found…so we actually to request our bill from the bartender. He didn’t recognize us or speak English, and we found it rather amusing that we felt like we were bothering HIM to pay our bill…
Our last morning in Vilnius was pretty standard, as we attempted to catch the bus to the airport. We ended up catching the maxitaxi (which are little buses that run the same lines as the buses, only MUCH more frequent, more cozy (Dermot had 1/2 of Lithuania sitting on his lap) and twice the price) and arrived to the airport with 1.5 hours before our flight to Chisinau, Moldova.