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Campanile
This is the campanile at Vilnius' Cathedral Hello friends. We have been to Vilnius
A couple of months ago dad took us to Tallinn in Estonia. We only stayed there for one day but we liked it very much. But now that we have seen a little bit of Tallinn we wanted to see more. But mum and dad refused to take us there again. They said that they have been there before and that there really isn't much more to see than the old town and we saw that when we were there with dad. We still tried our best to convince mum and dad to take us to Tallinn again but we soon realised that it was pointless.
But we are not only cute little cuddly toys, we can be tricky too. We had a look at a map and did some research on the Internet. What we learnt then is that Tallinn is the capitol of Estonia, one of the three Baltic countries. The other two Baltic countries are Latvia and Lithuania and they are in many ways very similar to Estonia. So we launched a campaign to make mum and dad take us to either Latvia or Lithuania instead. Since neither
Mum reads
Mum is reading about Vilnius and we try to see what it says. But mum reads so fast that we can't keep up with her... mum nor dad have ever been to any of those countries it was much easier to persuade that issue. Our campaign worked splendidly. So in May we were off to visit Vilnius in Lithuania.
Vilnius is going to be pretty nice we thought... until we saw the place where we were going to sleep. Our parents have no style whatsoever. They put us in a simple youth hostel. How did our parents manage to get a room in a youth hostel by the way? They are certainly not youth any more. They are both older than the dinosaurs... But mum and dad just loved the place. They said it was "nice old Soviet style" and "very Eastern European". No wonder Soviet Union had to turn in their chips in 1991 we say.
A lot of Vilnius actually went in the same style as the youth hostel. "Very Eastern European" mum and dad would say, "very much falling apart" we say. But it wasn't all bad we had to admit. There were nice houses in Vilnius too. Several in fact. But what we can't understand is why not all of the houses were in the nice style. Do the
Defence Tower
This defence tower on the top of Gediminas Hill is from the 13th century. That is very old. We don't even understand how old it is. And it is nice too. Lithuanians like when houses have a leaking roof and when the paint is peeling off?
So we spent one day in Vilnius. In the evening mum and dad told us that the next day we were going for an adventure. We are always up for an adventure so we were more than happy for this. We hoped that the plan was to go big game hunting. The idea of walking in the Lithuanian forest and try to shoot lions, tigers, wolves and
banthas sounded great to us. When we mentioned hunting banthas mum and dad just looked towards the ceiling and sighed. We think we now understand why. We later checked on the Internet and it seems like banthas aren't very common in Lithuania. They can only be found on the planet
Tatooine. But it isn't so easy for us to know that. Remember, we are only cuddly toys!
But it wasn't big game hunting we were going to do. But mum and dad said it was something just as fun and exciting namely crosses hunting. We have never heard of that before but mum and dad have had strange ideas before that have turned out to be
St Casimir's Church
This church is ugly. Most churches we see look nice but the Lithuanians totally failed when they built this one. The front wall looks awful! fun. So we gave it thumbs up. Emma: "Well, strictly I gave the idea a 'right hand up' because I don't have any thumbs". Jean-Claude:"And I don't even have hands so I had to give it a 'tail up'".
We took a bus from Vilnius and headed out in the countryside. During the first hour or so we had little luck. We think we found only one or two crosses. We then started to wonder what the point really was with all this. But then we hit a jackpot. In between a couple of farms we found a hill that was absolutely
covered with crosses. All of a sudden this day turned from being pretty boring to become a total success. We walked around this place for hours and everywhere we found more and more crosses. It was so fun that we now are planning to go crosses hunting in every country we visit!
We are not sure why there are a lot of crosses at this place. First we thought that the crosses actually grows there. But then we found stone crosses and crosses covered with licence plates from cars. There are a lot of things in this World
Easy travelling
It is good to be a toy. When mum and dad go for a walk we just sit and enjoy the views. that we don't understand. But we know that licence plates are made in prisons and that stones are not living material.
Rolling Stones is living material but stones are not! So the stone cross and the licence plate cross are definitely man-made. So we guess that probably all the crosses are man-made. Not a single one grows naturally there.
Next thing we don't quite understand is what the purpose with putting the crosses there in the first place is. And also we have a problem with understanding why the crosses have that particular shape. But what we do understand is that since the crosses look like they do they make excellent chairs. We tried sitting on many of them and they were really good. But then mum and dad saw what we were doing and told us we had to stop immediately. They said it was sacrilege to sit on a cross. We don't understand what the word "sacrilege" means but we could see from mum's and dad's expressions that it was a bad thing we did... But why it is so bad they did not explain to us. So when mum and dad didn't look we sat on a
Jesus statue
In Hill of Crosses there is this statue. Mum and dad say it is of Jesus. We don't know him but he looks like an important fellow. few more crosses anyway.
After seeing all those crosses we were happy but very tired. We simply had enough of crosses for one day.
The next day we went on another adventure. This time we went to see a castle in a town called
Trakai. We had to walk really far from the bus station to the castle and for a while there we thought we would never find any castle at all. But then we remembered the crosses hunt yesterday. Then we looked for more than an hour without finding anything. But after that we found thousands. So we might have to wait a while but if mum and dad say there is a castle waiting for us there probably is. And the wait we had to endure was worth it.
The Castle was really nice.
The last day in Lithuania we spent in Vilnius. Mum and dad found some odd things in a shop. First they found vodka in plastic bottles. We have never seen that before so we guess it isn't very common. Mum and dad said that you can only find that in former Soviet Union. The next thing they found was smoked pig
Sitting on crosses
We soon found out that crosses are excellent to sit on. That is probably why they look so funny. They are designed as seats for tired cuddly toys noses. They even bought a set of four noses and dad ate them all. When we came home we told one of our friends, his name in Mr Piggy and he is a pig with a very nice pig nose of his own, what dad had done. He was absolutely devastated by that and we had to comfort him afterwards. Mr Piggy didn't talk to dad for several days after that.
That was our trip to Vilnius and Lithuania. Now we are going to campaign for mum and dad to take us to Latvia.
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