Vilnius Day Three

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On our second morning in Vilnius, we still had no hot water, so we called our apartment manager to see what she could do. For some reason I don’t totally understand, calling a plumber was not an option, so she drove us to an unrented apartment so we could shower. Again, it was a beautiful place with some weird flaws, like a shallow recess behind the tub with no drain, so after the shower, Graham wound up bailing a whole mess of water back into the tub with a juice glass. Well, whatever, at least we were clean.

Back to Double Coffee to grab breakfast and plan the day. Our first stop was a little pilgrimage to the only existing statue of Frank Zappa; it was sort of charming, off in a little side yard that probably doesn’t get much traffic, set against a wall featuring some pretty fantastic graffiti. Next up was the National Museum, a collection of treasures from the country’s history. In addition to the permanent exhibits of finery and documents from nobles of the 14th century onward and an indoor ethnographic exhibit on peasant life in the 19th century, the temporary exhibit currently on rotation told us a bit about one of the groups that inhabited Lithuania during the 6th century AD, the Curonians -- “the Vikings of the Baltic.” There was enough there to give us a full-on case of museum head, so we decided to break for a late lunch.

Graham wanted some traditional Lithuanian dumplings, so we went to one of the places our guide recommended for Lithuanian food. We recognized from the name and logo -- Cili Kaimas -- that it must be a chain owned by the now-familiar Cili Pica (“Chili Pizza”) company. However, I don’t think either of us was prepared for the atmosphere, which was sort of like an Outback Steakhouse with very disaffected wait staff. There were TVs everywhere with MTV blaring fairly bad pop music (I guess Mr. Thelonious was right). Our menus were thick and laminated, and featured overly macroscopic pictures of the food. America, the things I hadn’t missed about you... Anyway, the food was filling and exactly what we’d come to expect from Eastern Europe: meat and potatoes, in one way or another. Time to head back out for some more sightseeing.

One charming thing about our apartment in Vilnius was that the owners had put a flyer with some advice on the back of our front door. Their first suggestion: “Don’t be too lazy to climb Gediminas Hill.” Gediminas was the founder of Vilnius; legend has it that he dreamed of a howling wolf, which some mystic or other interpreted as a command to go and found a city that should become great and important in the world. A sort of primitive version of the shining city on a hill, I guess. Anyway, one of the conspicuous features of the land around Vilnius is this giant pimple of a hill, rising improbably out of a fairly serene landscape, right by a river. I’m not sure you could invent better terrain for a fort: the hill gives you a 360-degree view and the river connects you to everyone else. So, now there’s a fort there. We climbed the hill, which turns out to be much less tiring when you don’t have a cold, and looked around. I think we saw more tourists there than we’d seen in most of the other spots we’d hit on the entire trip -- mostly admiring the view (minus the one pair behind the maintenance office, admiring each other instead). We also ducked into the museum inside the fort, where we saw one very interesting exhibit about a pacifist protest that the Baltic countries staged at the end of the Cold War called “The Baltic Way.” We went back out and took some photos -- I could see the square where our apartment was! -- and hopped on the funicular to the bottom of the hill. (Even when I am well, steep descents are not my friend.)

We decided to walk the long way back to our apartment, along one of the tributaries of the larger river. On the way we passed through Uzupis -- or should I say, The Republic Of Uzupis. About ten years ago, this neighborhood just east of Old Town playfully seceded from Lithuania. Its constitution is painted on the wall of a central street. Here are some of the charming rights it proffers:

• People have the right to be happy.
  
• People have the right to be unhappy.
  
• People have the right to have no rights.
  
• A dog has a right to be a dog.
  

As you might expect in an unrecognized bohemian state, Uzupis is a little bit run down and not so full of commercial life; so we headed back across the river to Old Town, where we picked up some groceries and made dinner. One of the hard and great things about cooking while traveling is that you don’t have access to the stuff you know what to do with -- whether because you don’t know what it’s called, they don’t stock it where you are, or it comes in containers too big to use up -- and so you wind up improvising a lot. Dinner that night was pasta with a cream sauce that Graham jerry-rigged out of a packet of broccoli soup, with “Mexican vegetables” mixed in. I don’t know what is up with Eastern Europe but the Mexican stereotypes are seriously out of control -- every time you see the word “Mexican” somewhere, you will find two of the following three things pictured on the package: corn; a sombrero; a handlebar mustache. Anyway, apparently “Mexican vegetables” are green beans, red peppers, corn, and kidney beans (plus a sombrero). Well, uncomfortable imagery or no, we ate well that night.

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Photos

Frank Zappa and Pals
"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best..."

Vilnius View
A view from Gediminas Hill.

Funiculi, Funicular!
Heading down Gediminas hill in the middle of Vilnius.

Uzupis Constitution
The declared tenets of life in the Republic of Uzupis.