Vilnius, Day the Firsecond

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Due to being completely wiped from the previous day, and since we had the relative luxury of being in one place for FOUR WHOLE NIGHTS, we slept in the next morning. After rolling out of bed and shaking most of the cranky out of our collective noggins, we descended onto the town of Vilnius. Like most Old Towns®, this one also has plenty of the twisty passages, all alike, that Americans seem to crave about Europe. The difference here was that not only are many of the streets open to cars, some roads through Old Town are full-fledged boulevards, with multiple lanes, reasonably fast traffic, etc. No stoplights, though. That would be sacrilege. 😉
In the middle of these boulevards were large gathering areas, paved with new stone and packed with beer gardens for the various restaurants lining the streets. Most of the area directly around where we were staying looked rather new. So new, in fact, that it really drove home for me the impact of the naming of Vilnius as one of 2009’s European cultural capitals (Linz, Austria is the other one). They were preparing for quite an influx of people, and hopefully banking that they’d bring in enough money to help pay for the investment in infrastructure. Don’t know if that worked or not: the place looked super-tidy (on the streets; back behind the storefronts was a different story) and the streets and restaurants looked well-trafficked. But the various amber and linen shops -- these made up about 48%!o(MISSING)f the total shops around Vilnius -- seemed to have quite a bit of inventory left on super-discount right after the tourist season had ended.

In any case, after getting our bearings in the city, a little wet from the rain (it rained nearly every day we were in the Vilnius area), we found an insanely cozy bistro to recharge and replenish. Erin’s creamy tomato soup was exactly what she was looking for, and I wanted to fill a large burlap sack with their crispy seedy rolls and live on them for the rest of the vacation, if not forever. Plus, a pot of tea each went a long way to making us feel human again.
After being cheered by this lovely place, we went a-wandering again and ran across a small doorway with a very-low-clearance stairway beyond leading down into the basement of some random building. Turns out this was a tiny music store called Thelonious, specializing in folk and jazz music. The proprietor was a great person to talk to; he was tickled that we’d come into his shop just on impulse, and were actually not interested in browsing through his collection of Lithuanian pop music, which he dubbed as “shit.” (Coincidentally, this was also the opinion, gathered later, of our erstwhile landlord.) Something about not having enough money to hire good songwriters. In any case, we splurged and purchased three CDs after listening to them. I’m pretty sure the traditional folk album we bought (against our new friend’s warning - he didn’t expect that we’d dig the non-Western harmonies and mostly-tuned birchbark horns) was what we heard while touring the Kaunas Folk Instrument Museum, so it was pretty exciting. After chatting with him for a while, he encouraged us to get our pictures taken with him, and then told us about a folk concert happening that night next door to his shop. We mentally penciled that into our schedule, thanked him, and headed on our way to go get some internet.

It turned out that even though there was no wi-fi in our apartment, there was a comfortable coffee shop about a block away. The place is called Double Coffee, and it looks like an upscale Lithuanian cross between Starbucks and Denny’s or IHOP, focusing on coffee-flavoured-sugar-milk drinks and a gargantuan menu of various simple dishes. We thought we were lucky to have found something so close, but it turns out that these joints exist on every other corner in Vilnius.

After ingesting our daily drugs of choice (internet and caffeine), we ventured out for a little linen shopping for Erin, and then we dropped by the local Ikukas and picked up some ingredients for dinner. After assembling those into something cooked and edible, Erin noticed that she was not feeling at all well enough to head out to our previously-scheduled folk concert. Turns out that traveling in areas (i.e. not the US or Canada) where you can’t get free, unlimited tap water at restaurants or water fountains can easily lead to dehydration if you’re not careful. So we decided to quickly pick up a 5L bottle of water at the store. Erin soaked it up like a sponge and immediately felt better. By this point, however, we’d missed the concert and decided to play some competitive (and then cooperative) Bananagrams to round out the night.

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Photos

Apartment Entry
The courtyard was lovely in the daytime, creepy at night.

Vilnius Decor
People who decorate short-term rentals are so... audacious.

Thelonious
A perfect little music hidey-hole.

Comments

[Mumsi]

I can't believe you took the Banagrams game with you [smile].