A taste of Vilnius

And what better place to start a post on Vilnius than beautiful Trakai castle from the ground?

Like Denmark, most of the tourists in Lithuania are locals. In fact in order to walk around Trakai castle, which was beautifully restored post Soviet era, we had to ease our way through the background of four wedding parties' photo sessions.  Below is another wedding, I can imagine that tulle and high heels must be a bit uncomfortable for sailing, but hey!

Since we were lucky enough to have the loan of a car we decided to do the 80km driving tour around Vilnius, with an audio guide we'd downloaded on the internet. We figured this should take us 3 hours.

Wrong.

In fact it took 3 days and we didn't even see everything, as each stop was something really interesting: walking paths around the stations of the cross; incredible sundials; botanic gardens; old mills with their own breweries; and of course the television tower, the tragic scene of the uprising against the Soviets in 1991.

Great Lithuanian brew, probably my favourite non-German beer brewing country

Julian in the gardens of the brewery / former mill

The most amazing sundial, I have to make one of these for my garden! The boulders on the ground mark the hours.

Close up of the carvings

Beautiful view out over town centre in the evening just before a storm hit

Julian at the opera, fabulous 

In Talinn we learn a lot about recent history from the Kumu art museum, in Vilnius we learnt it from the KGB/Genocide Museum: we think of the KGB activities as being from another era, Stalin and WWII, in fact it is all very recent. Lithuania only managed to expel the KGB in 1991, up until which point they were still very active in surveillance, wire tapping and the odd torture and execution.  When I think of the German Nazi past I think of it as being a terrible past that is disconnected from our current day, as everyone who was alive and old enough to have been involved in the atrocities is now either dead or celebrating some significant birthdays.  It is quite disconcerting to think that people who committed these crimes against the population are still part of the workforce (case in point, the esteemed Vladimir Putin).

Isn't this a fantastic piece of Soviet architecture???

Anyway I don't like to dwell on the unpleasantness, as Vilnius is a fantastic and very pretty city.

Wherever we go we try to cook local style, so I leave you with a picture of one of our dinners of chanterelle mushrooms, potato dumplings with cream cheese centre and some dill from Justinus' garden.