Kaunas, Or: The City That Wins Over Our Hearts

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Well, that night was unlike all other nights. Rolled-up towels do not, it turns out, make great pillows. We slept horribly and woke early, and even with a breakfast stop and a coffee stop we still managed to get on a 10 AM bus to Kaunas.

We rolled into town midday and called the manager of our apartment, who came to pick us up at the bus station (!) and take us to the place. Wow! This place was one of the nicest of the journey so far -- beautiful decor, a fairly well-stocked kitchen, and no major structural problems. More importantly, its sleeping quarters passed muster. Awesome. The manager was also really friendly, and helpful too -- when we idly mentioned we were planning to take a train to Vilnius the next day, he told us that was a bad idea because the Kaunas terminal was under construction and in order to take the train we’d have to first get to the suburbs. Okay then! Coach it would be.

After a bit of lazing around we suddenly realized it was midafternoon already and rushed out to downtown Kaunas to find lunch and explore. As soon as we made it to the long pedestrian street downtown, we realized we were going to be sad we only had one day here. We saw a puppet theater which had an upcoming show but nothing that night. We saw a twelve-year-old busking his little heart out on the recorder, playing a bizarre medley of the Axel F theme and the Chicken Dance. We saw streets with a bigger variety of people than we’d seen in Siauliai or Klaipeda -- okay, I’m sure they were almost all Lithuanian, but there were people in a class other than “startlingly-thin college girls.” It seemed like our kind of town.

Our first stop was a restaurant Graham had read about, whose name translates to “Carrot Party.” The restaurant, which is run by a Canadian transplant and his Lithuanian wife, is 100%!v(MISSING)egan (that’s no animal products at all -- no meat, no dairy, no eggs). Its specialties are a meatless sunflower-seed-based meatloaf with mushroom gravy, which we tried -- utterly fantastic; I need to learn to make one of these -- and some crazy fruit and veggie juice blends, which Graham loved. We were starting to get pretty meated-out by the Baltics, and this restaurant was the perfect interlude.

Our next stop was the Folk Instruments Museum, a great little collection of reproduction musical instruments from several folk traditions. Best represented was Lithuania, of course, and there was an entire room full of these elaborately-carved string instruments called kanklės -- which are something like a zither, or maybe an autoharp without keys. We’d found a dictionary by this time, so I attempted some brief conversation with the curators, which went very badly at first. At some point I realized we actually had an important question to ask. I thumbed through the guide. “Camera?” I said in Lithuanian, pointing at the exhibits. The curator looked puzzled. “Camera who?” she replied. I thumbed through some more. “Uh. Camera.... hotel,” I said. The curator said, “Hotel?” The curator’s face said, “Are you an idiot?” I tried again. Thumb thumb thumb. “Today....camera....hotel. Tomorrow...camera...here?” She laughed, finally understanding. Yes, we forgetful souls who had left our camera at home could come back tomorrow and take pictures.

After the museum we spent an hour or so wandering through Kaunas’ old town, which is small but charming. We stopped in a nice little bookstore with a ton of English-language books and I got myself a bird guide and we picked up a phrase book too. We wandered by some other shops, and skirted a big red castle, and suddenly realized we were famished and should wind our way up the big hill back to our place. My lovely husband made us dinner, and we flipped on the TV and watched what appeared to be Lithuania’s answer to Monty Python or the Kids in the Hall. Sometimes sketch comedy works even if you don’t know the language; who knew?

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Photos

Kaunas apartment
Wow, this was lush.

Carrot Party
Tucked away in a back alley, this restaurant was well worth a little searching.

Kankles
Traditional Lithuanian folk instruments. These come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes.