[ESN EVENT] Trip to Lithuania

In Riga the trolleybus starts driving very early, but not even that early on weekends that you can already be at your faculty at the required time of  6:30 AM on a Saturday (October 13th). Calling a cab solved the issue, since the first bus 15 to school from Rēznas iela ''only'' leaves at 6:29 AM on saturdaymornings (see www.marsruti.lv for more info on public transport in Riga).
Having arrived safe and sound at the faculty, we were ready for our 2-day trip to Lithuania.

[DAY 1] 
From the faculty we hopped in the bus to go to our first destination, Traikai, having both our lunch and tour to the Trakai Island Castle there. Sadly no picture(s) of this, as I accidentally deleted these photo's from my camera (thinking I already had imported them on my PC)!
Perhaps you can use Google (http://bit.ly/PFBylj) to get an impression of what it's like.

We will move on to our 2nd destination and capital of Lithuania, Vilnius. Here we had a guided tour through Old Town. And since here I forgot my blocknote to make notes, this blogpost will sadly be shorter than planned. I will mostly just show some pictures for this part.

In my opinion, Vilnius looks somewhat as a mixture between Assen in Drenthe (The Netherlands) and Riga, Latvia. Because Vilnius is not such an old city as Riga is, some of the roads in the Old Town are more broad. Also, there is a large square in the middle of the city in front of the Town Hall, you don't have this in Riga (apart from Dome Square perhaps). When walking back from the bar or club, in Riga there will always be some noise still there. In Vilnius this is not the case, being able to enjoy some silence when returning back home from a night out.

When you move your way to the Upper Castle (Aukštutine (Gedimino) pilis'' in Lithuanian) you will be able to look far and wide over the city Vilnius. 














You can also find this tile (see picture) in Vilnius, it says stebuklas (Lithuanian word for miracle).
Go stand on the tile and spin three times around and a miracle will happen! When I hopped on in front of another group being guided around (I correctly noticed that their guide did not tell them the story yet), they thought I was crazy and laughed.

Then their guide told them this was exactly what they had to do as well, made my day. :-)

On your left you can see a mermaid. The story with the mermaid is that you can not keep your eyes of her. In my opinion it looks pretty indeed.

















All the famous people that have visited this location, either shooting a movie there or doing something else.
Frankly, I don't recognise any (but I also hardly watch any TV). Do you?

And two more pictures to illustrate that Vilnius really has beautiful buildings, and that it is not just Riga and St. Petersburg who are like that.

After the Old Town tour it was time to go to our hostel, Filaretai Youth Hostel (Filaretų street 17, Vilnius, Lithuania). Good place to stay if you don't want to spend much money, but don't mind sharing only a few showers and toilets with a ton of people. Also, the breakfast was good here.

After having dropped our bags and having had dinner (went to Vapiano (www.vapianointernational.com) for the first time) it was time for our night social activities with ESN Vilnius. We went to Salento DiscoPub. I can't say I would recommend the place as being overly great (and locals even say it is not great at all), but it is definitely a lot better than the equivalent version of Moon Safari in Riga. I enjoyed my time in Salento DiscoPub a lot more than I did in Moon Safari. Both are said to be ERASMUS clubs.

By locals I was advised to go to Piano Man Bar and Soul Box, also not being far away from the very heart (Town Hall) of the city. The locals that in fact said that Piano Man Bar was ''shit'' still answered to my question ''but is it better than Salento DiscoPub?'' with ''yes''.

I checked both places and others briefly, as I did not want to experience just 1 bar/club when being in Vilnius. Somehow I seemed the only one interested in this, but that did not stop me from going. After about an hour (and having seen a lot of beutiful Lithuanians - they might be even more pretty than Latvians, or coincidence beacause it was a saturdaynight?) I returned to Salento DiscoPub but only roughly 10 out of 50 people of our group were still there. And starting to hear the Gangnam song (really crazy that I hear this everywhere, Riga, Vilnius and even St.Petersburg) for the 2nd time, it seemed like a good time to leave with others who were also fed up by this type of music or that simply had become tired.

[DAY 2] 
On the second day we went to Kaunas, where we also had a guided tour. Our guide was great and got us in the right mood, also being to tell us a lot. Kaunas is the 2nd biggest city after Vilnius, Lithuanian people are crazy about basketball (for Latvians it is ice-hockey) and that just like Vilnius it is multi-cultural and that you will see many young people on the street.

Brick castle, 1st building of Kaunas.

It is said that the best Lithuanian basketball teams come from this city, Kaunas. Their signature is written on the wall by fans. Vilnius fans made a hangman, after which Kaunas fans made a new signature right next to it. Next year a third signature? 

Up next, a statue of Pope John Paul II. He is popular in Lithuania because he preached for its independence. The speech he held at the time was highly appreciated by the Lithuanian people (still being under Sovjet regime). The inital idea was to build the monument on real size. Eventually it was decided that Pope John Paul II should be displayed bigger.












Walking onwards, we see the following at the other side of the water.

Kartu means together, so it says something like 'we love Kauna'. Next year there will be a new text, but nobody knows what it will be yet. For that you would have to come back and see.












Now moving alongside the water, we will see a bridge. Napoleon used this bridge in his journey from France to Russia. It has for some time been called the longest bridge of the world, as Poland was on one side and Russia on the other. As these two countries used different calenders, there is a difference of 13 days in time needed to cross the bridge.

Going into the heart of Old Town, we went to Kauno rotušė (Town Hall of Kaunas). It had different functions of use in the past, including jail and threatre. Nowadays it is used for festivities and to welcome international guests. It is on this Town Hall Square where you can find both a lot of churches and clubs. A joke goes that if you did something bad in the club that you can go out and walk straight to the church to confess.












Another sight in the streets, the flag of Kaunas.

Next to the flags you can see the twin cities of Kaunas city.

To my great surprise and pleasure, they still have telephone boots in Kaunas. I like them, but think that they have largely disappeared in The Netherlands. I forgot to ask our guide if they are still functional, or that they are just there for historical purposes. Either way, they look good in the streets if you ask me.

Walking on in the same street you will bump into this building at a certain point. It was here where we ended our tour and headed for dinner. The idea was that we would have seen more, but the party people from the night before suffered too much that they could not uphold the Lithuanian walking style (fast) for too long. They could take their rest in the bus back to Riga.