A brief visit to Vilnius

From Riga, we boarded the Lux Express bus and embarked upon our almost four-hour journey to Vilnius; but, not before we trekked for 25 minutes through Riga, going slightly off course for a moment. For a second, I thought we might not make our bus in time. Alas, we arrived with a couple of minutes to spare, despite including some buffer time: that was eaten up by going off course. Oh well, we probably needed the extra steps.

We walked from the bus terminal to our hotel in the Old Town, which was about ten minutes away. But it was still too far for Jason, who kept asking if we were there yet. This is starting to become a bit of a theme. Suck it up Princess, you need to work off all those bakery goodies.

We arrived at the hotel and the woman behind the counter stared at us with her multiple pairs of fake eye lashes that looked like she was ready to enter a dressage competition. No, sveiki (hi) for us. She handed us the key and gave us instructions to our hotel apartment, which was equipped with a small kitchen.

We had little time to spare so we took off to explore the Old Town. Vilnius is the second largest city in the Baltic States, only marginally smaller than Riga, with a population of almost 600,000. However, it's Old Town is much larger and better preserved, with amazing Vilnian Baroque architecture, which was declared as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. The city is sprawled across a 401 km² area. There was no way that we would be able to cover it all in a day. Almost immediately, we regretted not spending more time in Vilnius. The beauty of the city cannot be described in words.

Prior to World War II, Vilnius had a large Jewish population, leading to the nickname "the Jerusalem of Lithuania", or as Napoleon called it "the Jerusalem of the North". Unfortunately the German Nazi genocide murdered about 95% of the 265,000-strong Jewish population. But, the Jewish influence still lives on.

Our dear beloved Rimi existed in Vilnius, but it's competitor Iki had overtaken it as the main supermarket chain. So, we cheated on Rimi once again. The bakery section has a similar range of goodies to those at the Rimi in Latvia and Estonia. The shop assistants were just as friendly and helpful ... insert sarcasm. Unlike the Rimi self-service registers, there was no obvious button to press to change the language to English: it was written in Lithuanian. That’s helpful. Well, Janina was put out that she needed to get off her arse and help us. With a dirty look and a bit of huffing and puffing, she reluctantly changed the language to English. Ačiū (thanks), Janina.

The next time I went into the Iki I didn't bother changing the language and just scanned the items. I had cut down on the bakery goods by this stage, so there was no need to look up items. I'd already stocked up earlier! We had also increased our step count by this stage. The belt notch had already needed to be loosened, and we were determined that it wouldn't go to the next notch.

Next destination: Warsaw.

Lithuanian: Sveiki (Hi), Padėka (Thank you).Read more