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Today saw us up and out of Klaipeda and off on the bus to Vilinius (the capital of Lithuania). The first thing that we had to do before we could leave Klaipeda was to take a photograph us all of the card carrying members of the Olympic Casino. 😊
The weather deteoriated as we got closer to Vilnius until it was raining pretty constantly when we were getting off the bus. This gave me a bit of a dilemma. What was I going to do with Pugsy. He has a bag to ride in, but the bag is pretty full with books and the laptop etc and this meant that when he was at the top of the bag he was fully exposed to the rain. The only thing that I could come up with to keep him dry was to put him down my top under my rain coat. Unfortunately this made me look like I had had some serious breast augmentation, something akin to a GG cup, which certainly earned me a few strange looks walking through the streets of Vilnius on the way to our hotel.
Our hotel in Vilnius isn't quite as nice as the
one last night. 4 of us are having to share toilets and showers which isn't the greatest. Although the rooms are quite pleasant. After we had settled in the rooms a little bit we headed out for a visit to the KGB Musuem, or I think the official name is the Museum of the Genocide Victims. This was pretty interesting, although a lot of the information was exactly the same as the War Musuem that we had visited in Riga. However the most interesting part was the old KGB prison cells that we down in the basement of the building. These were fascinating and you could see how the prisoners were held, interogated and even where they were executed. The exection chamber still has the bullet holes on the wall. One of the torture chambers was the water chamber were the prisoner had to balance on a little circle and if they lost their balance they would fall into ice cold water, get all wet (obviously) and then have to get back up on the stand again. The prison rooms were freezing as well.
After the KGB musuem we had a wee coffee break in our favourite eastern european
coffee chain, The Coffee House, where I proceeded to have a bowl of oatmeal and some waffles and ice cream. All at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. We then met up with the rest of the group at 6 o'clock so we could do a brief walking tour and orientation around the old town. This tour mostly consisted of churches, churches and more churches. Vilnius has more churches than most other cities that I have ever seen. Most of them were rather unexeceptional except for the Gates of Dawn, which is located at the southern border of the Old Town. This is a 16th century church that is the only part of the old town wall that is still intact. Apparently the Soviets (and the Russians before them) were too scared to tear it down with the rest of the walls. The Gate houses the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary and is apparently one of the biggest pilgrimage sites for the catholic church. The golden icon of the virgin mary was a gift from the Crimea by the Grand Duke Algirdas in 1363.
For dinner we went to the Republic of Uzupio. Apparently in 1998 the resident artists,
dreamers, squatters and drunks of this suburb unofficially declared this a breakaway state to be known as the Republic of Uzupio. The state has its own tongue in cheek president, anthem, flags and a 41 point constitution that among other things gives people the right to cry, be misunderstood, and the right to be a dog.
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