UNDER CONSTRUCTION;for some reason all pics got deleted. gonna upload soon After a really foggy night in Augustów we went on to Lithuania. Very good sunny weather, autumnal colours everywhere. First stop Kaunas, a beautiful city especially in autumn. Everything is red and yellow, an old city with charm. In Kaunas we went to the museum of devils. A rather humorous place worth visiting. Afterwards we went to the cafe in the cellar of the museum, which was VERY cheap and quite nice..The waiter was pretty funny aswell. Afterwards we drove towards Trakai when the fog came back! And even stro [View Full Entry]

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Our ride took us to the center of Vilnius, just next to an Internet cafe that we could use to contact our host. (Thanks for the ride!). We checked our host phone number and and went for a night walk trying to find a public phone. The city center at night was beautiful, the weather was great (wasn't raining and wasn't very cold), but the public phones were calling card only and we couldn't buy any cards. Technology can be a blessing and can be a curse at the same time. We saw the cursing side before, but soon we found [View Full Entry]

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In Kaunas, hanging out this evening until our 23:30 bus to Warsaw. Here are some of our photos from St. Petersburg, Riga, Vilnius, and Kaunas. They appear in reverse chronological order. Photos from Halong Bay, Hong Kong, Mongolia, and the rest of Russia are coming soon! [View Full Entry]

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Growing up in North Carolina, living just outside Durham in a house in the woods surrounded by lots of woods and plants and space to roam and explore, I felt like I was pretty in touch with nature. I spent hours upon end building forts, hiking and exploring, looking for spiders and other insects, doing all sorts of things in the forest. There weren’t many ‘rules’ given to me/us, but there was one very clear one that we all knew from a very early age: never pick mushrooms. Don’t pick them, and certainly don’t eat them, because they are almost all [View Full Entry]

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The Balkans Rule... the Baltics drool! I've officially decided that the whole "Seeing the World" thing is totally overrated. Screw it... from now on, I'm going no further than the Balkans where, above all its other amazing attributes, THE PEOPLE ARE FRIENDLY!! I'm on the bus getting the Hell out of Vilnius, and not a moment too soon! How I regret leaving sweet Estonia with its saunas and nice old towns and good dancers! I'm hoping that Lithuania will redeem itself over the next two days when I'm out of its truly shit capital! Last night, my dinner was pretty good. [View Full Entry]

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Hi from ho-hum Vilnius Hmmm.... I was expecting to be blown-away by Vilnius, but so far I haven't seen anything that compares to the beauty of Tallinn (but, to be fair, I've only been here for a couple of hours, so I'll reserve judgment for now). The bus ride from Riga to Vilnius was a painless 4 hours (I had my raspberries and my mobile phone games to occupy me). When I arrived, I got a little lost finding my way from the bus station to the AAA hostel. The hostel had a pretty creepy feel right away, made even creepier [View Full Entry]

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In all of my travels in Europe, I have been stopped by the police twice. The first time was in Moscow in the Red Square, when I was standing outside with some friends having a beer and we were ticketed for having an open container in public. The irony of the situation was that everyone in the Red Square (or so it seemed) was drinking beer, and everyone (or so it seemed) was speaking Russian except us. We stuck out like a sore thumb, the police tagged us, and we eventually and reluctantly forked up a small bribe so that they [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday, September 3, 2008: Today was the first day of the new season of baseball players. At 9 AM this morning Sigitas picked me up from Viktorija’s place and we headed to the schools to go class to class speaking about baseball and inviting them to come and try it out. We were going to two primary schools where we have been before, one of the schools being the school where our teams train in the wintertime. We decided that, since I now speak Lithuanian fairly well, I would be the one to do the talking about the baseball program in [View Full Entry]

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. The summer is over. In the last month loads of things changed in my life especially the people structure around me, people coming and people leaving, meeting new people and making new friends and in the same time missing some others. In the last month people returned from different countries in the world and people left. But the most interesting thing is that most of us were out of Lithuania and at one point we managed to see each other again. So, Deny, Elin and Ieva were out in Brazil for 3 weeks, Rytis was in Bulgaria, Laura in London, [View Full Entry]

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Lithuania almost didn't make the cut for this tour. We chose to go to Vilnius because it was reckoned to be the easiest city to obtain a visa for neighbouring Belarus. As it was, we ended up getting them before we left home but rather than realign our meticulously-planned itinerary, we decided to give it a go. We scheduled four nights here, and as the frustratingly pedestrian train gradually clunked through mile after mile of unremarkable countryside, we confided in each other that 96 hours may be excessive. For Vilnius is not a big city. And according to our Lonely Planet [View Full Entry]

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