Morning in Klaipeda / Off to Šiauliai!

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Ah! Waking up after having fallen asleep in a new place always makes me feel both refreshed and a little off-kilter. But this time it was in Klaipėda, and the town was just so gosh-darn cute we were feeling pretty good (slightly firm mattress notwithstanding). We made our way downstairs for our early-as-they-served-it breakfast in the same room as the guesthouse’s hostess. It’s strange having smørrebrød in the same room as a check-in desk, but the food was extremely tasty and duly inhaled. (Erin ponders: “What would American smørrebrød look like? I fear it would be an Egg McMuffin, which is tasty enough, but SAD.”)

After Tallinn, we’d been starting our days on the early side, since staying only one night in a town really cuts into your exploration potential and we wanted to wring as much wide-eyed wonder as possible out of these places. Klaipėda was no exception, and we struck out before many things were open -- the restaurants, certainly, but also the souvenir shops and even the string of amber tchotchke stands that were assembling themselves on the town’s central square. (Estonia imprinted on me and it’s hard not to call one of these squares a “raekoja plats.”) Once the doors of the jewelry store creaked open, we poured in like people camped out waiting for UW hockey tickets and we purchased a lovely amber necklace for Erin to wear. Pictures coming, I promise.

We had a relatively early train to Šiauliai, so our next stops were quick ones back at the guesthouse to pack up and check out, past a very impressive old post office (we mustered enough Lithuanian for some stamp retrieval), through a beautiful sculpture garden, and then we were on our way to the station. Lithuanian trains are apparently a very mixed bag, but we lucked out on this trip. Both Erin and I commented that this was one of the nicest trains we’d been on in quite some time, and not only that, it was amazingly smooth and nearly perfectly on-time when pulling into tiny . . . Šiauliai? What we’d been led to believe was a half-horse town at maximum is actually the fourth-largest city in Lithuania (bigger than Tartu), and it had the sprawl and the cutesy downtown to prove it.
We walked down the pedestrian street that looked crowded with well-dressed college students, and finally found the hostel where we’d be spending the night. It was listed in our guide as a former college, but it looked like there was still a fair bit of college-related activity going on there, or at least above the first floor. After some linguistic circumlocution, we checked into our room (the only double in the place, with four separate rooms, including a lounge. Other than the place smelling a little bit musty and the area outside the shower smelling a little like backed-up sewer, with an uncomfortable bed, and oh yeah, no pillows, it was again better than many hostel rooms.

Settled in, we decided to head out, grab food, and explore the town a bit before heading to the Hill of Crosses, really the only reason we’d stopped in this city. After much indecision, we settled on a lunch of homemade sandwiches, bananas, and what the package notably called “salty wheats.” Duly fed, we walked off to find one of the area’s curious attractions, the Bicycle Museum. Unfortunately, the end of the tourist season yielded an end to the regular museum hours, and therefore we had a big steaming pot of museum fail waiting for us at the doors.
Our next stop, and bit further out of town, was the little-ballyhooed Museum of Cats, which we soon found existed in the part of Šiauliai out behind the supermarket. After triple-checking our guide, we confirmed that this was, in fact, the place, and entered to find a unbelievably cheery young woman who delighted in showing us the entirety of the Museum’s collection of cat-themed paraphernalia. And paintings. And poems. And surprising menagerie, which included a huge albino python, baby mongeese (!), a few caimans, and a handful of birds and small rodents. If anyone reading this has a cat object that you would like to unload, let me know and I can give you the Museum’s address to see if they could use the piece. 😉

On our way back to town, we grabbed a Very Important Object: a Lithuanian/English dictionary. Finally, we could identify the words for, say, “reservation,” “still water,” and “potatoes.” We still couldn’t pluralize or decline nouns properly, but at least we could speak Lithuanian like your average 30-month-old.

Armed with that, we were ready to try to get a cab to go to the Hill of Crosses. After some dictionary wrangling (I think I will always remember the joy of finally finding the word “grįt” in that book) with our hostel manager we set up a short trip for a nominal charge. Twenty minutes later, our cab showed up and we took off for the sight that my Lithuanian relatives told me we could not miss. I’ll spare you my incomplete memories of the story, and just link to the Wikipedia article here. The place was majestic, it was eerie, it was a monument to the uncomfortable bedfellows of individualistic resistance and conformity. It started out as a testament to a small community’s devotion to their faith and now ranks up in our minds as a collaborative Dickeyville Grotto. Fascinating, and certainly awe-inspiring.

After our cab ride back (with a minor embarrassment when the cab driver could not make change for our large bill), we decided to end the night with a trip to a Lithuanian country/western bar. This consisted of mostly Lithuanian staples (deep-fried rye garlic bread, šaltibarščiai, broiled skin-on pork shank, etc.), served in an outdoor garden while C&W music played quietly in the background. The guide says that they occasionally have live bands play in the summertime, but since it was cold enough that night for the restaurant to lend complimentary blankets to the patrons, we were glad we didn’t have a reason to stay there too late. Full of tasty food and wonderful beer (Švyturys is a great brewery, even if it is owned by Carlsberg), we waddled home.

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Photos

Klaipeda post office
The old postal building in Klaipeda is quite impressive.

Sculpture in Klaipeda
One of the many Soviet-era pieces in Klaipeda's sculpture garden.

Museum of Cats
Unfortunately, the photos of the stained-glass cat windows didn't turn out...

Hill of Crosses
From afar. If you expand the picture, you can start to see the detail.

Interfaith
One of the few testaments to interfaith dialogue on the hill. Unfortunately it had been defaced with some antisemitic graffiti (scratched out).