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Europe » Lithuania » Klaipeda
August 31st 2009
Published: September 3rd 2009
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We woke early today in prep for our trip to Klaipėda -- especially me, as my sore throat kept me from sleeping past 3:30. We grabbed a quick breakfast at home and made our way to the airport. Riga International is a pretty nice airport; they had a drugstore, which was important for acquiring some ibuprofen, and a post office, where we mailed a bunch of postcards, and a souvenir shop with some of the things we’d not been able to find elsewhere (a Latvia patch for me, a small bottle of Black Balzsams liqueur for Graham), and a cafe that had milkshakes, though Graham wouldn’t let me get one and made me eat mushy fries instead. Mean, mean Graham. Our AirBaltic flight to Palanga was smooth -- again, the plane was nicer and the service better than similar-distance flights in the US; it was a 25-minute flight but we still had drink service. Screw you, Northwest Connect.

We arrived in Palanga a few minutes early. Palanga is the airport that services Klaipėda, a resort town on the Baltic Sea. Since it had an airport I was assuming there’d be some “there” there, but then again, State College has an airport, technically, and that’s about what I found in Palanga. The buses to Klaipėda were supposed to be matched to the arrival times into Palanga, but we managed to get on the one flight with no Klaipėda bus. We had spent our Lats instead of changing them into Litas, so we had almost no cash, and there was no ATM. We found a tiny currency exchange, but the woman there wanted nothing to do with our travellers’ checks, and told us it’d be a 5K walk to the nearest ATM, downtown. Uhhhh. We scratched our heads for a bit and finally Graham remembered that he still had a little American cash in his wallet. Bless you, Graham: I could almost forgive you for the milkshake. He went back and exchanged his thirty-seven US dollars and we caught a cab downtown.

Downtown Palanga is a little bit sad: a lot of houses and apartments in disrepair. We found a bank and went in to see if we’d have more luck with our travellers’ checks there. We got to the desk and asked. She looked at the checks in obvious puzzlement. “American Express,” she pronounced slowly, no tone of recognition in her voice. She called to her friends in Lithuanian. “Hey guys, you gotta come take a look at this,” I translated in my mind. “What the hell are these things? You ever seen anything like this before?” “Ay yai yai,” one seemed to say, shaking her head. “I think I read about those somewhere,” another said. “They gotta sign while you watch.” She turned back to us and pointed to a spot on the checks and said, “Okay. You must sign here.” Of course it was not actually the *right* spot on the checks, so I politely corrected her, which is a tricky etiquette problem as the customer in a bank, but she was extremely nice about it. She asked to see our passports. “Ahhh, Jonaitis!” she exclaimed. “Perhaps you speak Lithuanian?” We were sorry to disappoint her. We’ll probably have to do that a lot out here.

We walked through some light rain to the bus terminal and found a minibus that was headed to Klaipėda in ten minutes. Score! We got our information from a passenger in the front seat who spoke English. Then he paused and asked, “How did you wind up HERE?” We find ourselves explaining that a lot, too. 😊

After Palanga I was expecting Klaipėda to be a resort town on the model of Pärnu: small and only seasonally populated. I was shocked when we got there to find a town of nearly 200,000 people, immaculate and modern while still preserving some of the interesting historical buildings. If any of you have studied Prussian history, you may know the city by its former name, Memel. Klaipėda is an old port town, with an excellent harbor created by the Curonian Spit just to its west -- a long, narrow strip of land that protects the coast from the Baltic Sea. There is also a university, where a friend of ours took a short language course one summer, and the town feels fairly young and vibrant. I could tell I was going to be sorry we only had one night here.

We checked into our guesthouse -- like the Riga apartment, it was a beautiful little suite with a marginally-comfortable bed. We grabbed some fast lunch and then took the ferry over to the Spit. The ferry, which took about five minutes, docked in Smiltyne, a very small town containing a museum, a restaurant, and not much else. Most of the Spit has been incorporated into a national park, I believe, which is great -- I compare it mentally to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, which are now mostly boardwalks and surf shops, and it wins handily. We spent some time walking in the woods, which change very quickly from deciduous to evergreen before petering out at the shore. We dawdled for a bit on the beach, which, like the other beaches we’d seen, was quite deserted by this time of year. The norm in Lithuania is single-sex nude or topless beachgoing, so we saw a lot of very detailed signs with pictures indicating where you should go depending on your sex and your level of attire. I can tell you that although the sun had now come out, you could not have paid me enough to wander naked into the ocean that afternoon. DC summers, these are not.

Once we tired of the beach we walked back into the woods. Our tourist guide had advertised a “castle moat” at the north end of the spit, so we set off in search of that. What we found was more like a smelly ditch around an old 19th-century fortress that hadn’t worked very well and had been abandoned. However, the birds liked it, and we saw some cool ones -- a huge flock of barn swallows, a few flirty wagtails, and two beautiful grey herons. I also caught a glimpse of something VERY BLUE but I have no idea what it was. On the far side of the fortress, we found the Lithuanian Sea Museum (“the most popular museum in Lithuania!”), now closed, but apparently the sea lions live outside in the icky castle moat, so we watched them stretch for a few minutes, giggling. We walked back to the ferry docks, where the long wait was made shorter by the presence of a litter of kittens. Awww.

We finally made it to dinner around 9 pm, at a rustic jazz club with live music. Dinner was tasty -- though my pedestrian turkey-with-fruit-and-potatoes could not compare to Graham’s order of stewed beaver -- but I had to struggle mightily to stay awake. Luckily, once we got the check, sweet sleep was just a block and a half away.

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6th September 2009

You guys should write a novel together! You both have such a beautiful way with words. These posts are captivating!
10th September 2009

First read - liked it a lot!
Hi Erin and Graham! This is my first time reading your blog. I don't think it's the first day of your trip. I plan to read more tomorrow. It's very interesting. The city names intrigue (sp?) me, as I know little of eastern European history. I'm curious if you booked your lodgings before you left and how detailed you planned it before you left. I even enjoyed reading of your airplane ride on this day. I never heard of the airline. Well, enjoy the rest of your trip! Love, A. Gail
12th September 2009

Hi Gail! Nice to have you reading! To answer your question, we did book the lodgings before we left -- in some cities you can get away without doing this, but we didn't want to have to spend any of our time here knocking on doors. When our inter-city travel required flying, we got those tickets in advance, but have been buying bus and train tickets the day of travel. There was a lot of pre-trip planning to make sure it would all work and I think it's safe to say Graham did most of that (though I helped some).

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