I’ve had a look back at some of my old posts and I think some of them deserve a re-write and I’m going to start with my trip to Lithuania, back in 2011. Wow, that was a long time ago. No wonder I’ve never blogged them as they deserve. So I’m going to start with Vilnius because that’s where I went for most of the trip.
At the time, I’d just finished writing my masterpiece, the Big Book Project of 2009-2010, a spy story that is never going to see the light of day. I enjoyed writing it and I swore that one day I’d get a decent version of it written and turn it into a whole series and that’s never happened. I’m fine with it. But one thing that came out of it was that I needed some locations and I picked them by a metaphorical dart in a map. One of my darts landed in Lithuania, so I wrote a scene in Vilnius (there was a formal ball and an assassination attempt, of course) and I did just enough research to decide that I wanted to actually go there and see it for myself, walk down the street and go “Oh, that’s where this happened and that’s where that happened”. So that’s the reason I went to Lithuania at all.
I’m highly disinclined to spend a lot of money on accommodation. I want to be able to find it easily and I want my own room. I’m actually a bit more flexible about whether or not I share a bathroom but I’m not sharing a dorm room, not even thirteen years ago, when I didn’t have the excuse that “I’m too old”. So I found possibly the cheapest and worst-rated hotel in all of Vilnius, a couple of hundred yards from the main station. These days I know that the area around the station is generally the area you want to avoid but I had no idea then. And, to be honest, I’m still very likely to book a hotel near the station if that’s the easy way to get into the city. I admit, when work heard about my plans and looked at the pictures of the hotel, my boss sat down on the edge of my desk and gave me a very earnest talk about how their job is to move things around inhospitable places and if I got sex trafficked, their skills would enable them to rescue me – as if sending containers of cereal to a certain large continent has any relation to rescuing employees from sex slavery on an entirely different continent. Did it put me off? Just a little but at the same time, I had to laugh because it was just so ridiculous. It really spelled out “Anything that’s not a package holiday in France or Spain is scary” from people who never leave the beaten track.
I had a bit of a problem getting to the hotel. I’d gone hand luggage only because I had to change planes in Brussels, the first time I’d ever done such a thing, and getting out of the airport was easy-peasy but then I messed up big-time with the bus into the city. I needed to get the 1 but there was only a 2 waiting and for some reason, I figured they’d go to much the same places – at the very least, it would probably take me to the middle of the city and I could walk from there. Nope! I kept half an eye on Google Maps, because I had my first smartphone, even if I didn’t have mobile data abroad back then, and I eventually realised we’d driven out the other side of the city and were heading for I don’t even know where. So I jumped off the bus, crossed the busy road and got the bus from the opposite stop back to the airport to start again. Turned out there was a station just across the road from the airport and it went directly to the station that was a couple of hundred yards from my hotel. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned from years of travel, it’s that taking the train from the airport is always easier than taking the bus.
As the trip to Vilnius went… I kind of wasted it. I ambled around the Old Town, struck by the number of churches but also by the way the whole place felt deserted. I popped into the cathedral, where I mainly noted that lots of people were cleaning – as this was March 2011, it’s entirely likely they were preparing for Easter – and that it was all quite white and minimalist. Today I’d probably be lurching from one church to the next, criticising them all for not being Gothic enough.
But I did do a few things. I took the funicular up to Gediminas’ Tower, which is a stumpy three-storey brick tower built in the last century on the site of various castles that have been on the hill since the eleventh century. It’s got good views over Vilnius, including the modern city that I never saw any closer up. I’m going to have to go back to Lithuania just so I can learn enough about these places to manage more than a short paragraph about them. But I would definitely go back to Gediminas’ Tower just because I like to take a funi and have a view of the place I’m visiting.
I went to Vingis Park, which sounds like it was a bit of a marathon via the random Frank Zappa statue. Apparently I disapproved of the park, which was more like a small inner-city pine forest than the open park I expected. It was icy and snowy and there was nowhere to sit on the green grass in the sun to eat my picnic and I grumped back to the hotel. The version of me writing this in 2024 thinks a city forest sounds amazing. Definitely adding this to my to-re-do list for my return trip at some point. Having read my diary from that day, I can’t work out what I did apart from walk around looking for somewhere to eat my lunch while disliking Vilnius. It’s funny that my abiding memory all these years later is of being fond of the place.
And that’s about all I did in Vilnius. I strolled the Old Town, I went in a shopping centre and bought an obscene number of rubber ducks and I spent my emergency money on amber. I kept a certain amount of cash in the hotel just in case – mostly just in case I spent all my cash and couldn’t afford the train back to the airport – but in the end, I spent it on amber pendants for myself, my mum and my sister. I didn’t know about the Baltic amber thing back then – now I know and I still buy something every time I’m in the region but it was a surprise to me back then, hence going a bit over the top. For my mum, I bought something that I suppose looks a bit like a bee with three different colours of amber in it. For my sister, a more modern thing with a big oval orange amber in the middle and swooping silver forming a kind of vertical eye-shape around it. And for myself, I went for a silver bar with three different coloured circles of amber set into it. Just going to go and fetch it and put it on because I don’t wear it often these days and I do like it. Wow, it needs a polish!
I think that’s all I’ve got to say about Vilnius but I think it’s a little more coherent than my previous attempts to write about it. Two errors there – I didn’t appreciate it enough while I was there, and I never managed to get a proper blog out of it. I still haven’t but I’m working with limited resources here. And I will say for the me of thirteen years ago, while I was aimless rambling around Old Town Vilnius, I did take plenty of pictures of medieval streets – or possibly reconstructed medieval streets, if other Baltic Old Towns are anything to go by – with the remains of the winter snow starting to melt away and it does all look very pretty under a blue sky. Maybe you don’t have to do anything in particular to appreciate a city. Maybe sometimes it’s enough to just exist there for a few days. But if/when I go back, I’m definitely going to get some better blogs out of it.
