Sunday, July 3, 2016

Meandering around Vilnius

I have a some backlog to process in terms of blog-posts. We travel faster than I write. :) But I guess it's not a bad thing. I owe Vilnius, Caen, Mont Saint Michel. I will not blog about Copenhagen, I keep it for the myself.

So Vilnius. It was mid-November 2015. We decided to make a weekend somewhere, where we could get easily and was not expensive. This is one of the great advantages of living in Berlin: you can fly in Europe really inexpensive, and uncomplicated. So we found a relatively cheap flight to Vilnius, where we both haven't yet been.

A small twin-turboprop aircraft took us to Vilnius airport. The airport itself was built by the Soviets. It's nicely decorated. Sculptures of workers, soldiers and aviators from the outside and of flowers, bay leaves and stars from the inside are irregular nowadays. It reminded me somewhat Moscow's underground stations. We took a bus to our hotel, most probably our cheapest ever travel between hotel and airport, costed 1 (one) Euro.

Airport hall:


The next two days we toured all around the city. We visited the university, the Gediminas Castle, St. Ann's Church and also the Grand Dukes’ Palace and even an amber museum. The city is very friendly for tourists, everybody in the service sector speak English. There is an excellent restaurant scene is international. We explored exquisite Korean, French and Lithuanian restaurants.

The university consists of thirteen courtyards, from which the buildings are accessible.




In one of them we found some really weird wall-paintings:



It's just sick.

Gediminas Castle:





Old city:





Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania:







Home, sweet home.

We also found an apple, well half of it:

Then I realized that if you cut an apple into two you get the shape of a heart. On it there are "80 Names of Generosity" inscribed. They were probably good people. We conscientiously skimmed the names. We happened to visit this monument 6 times, as it was located on our way between the hotel and the old town.

Amber museum. We learned there the fascinating story of this special stone, and found some intricate instances of insects in them. The poor animals got captured about 130 million years ago. But I guess they would probably be dead anyways by now.



They sell these stones for quite a bit of money. We skipped the purchase. After all they're just stones.

Some views of the city from the castle:




Not bad for two days. :)