Vilnius to Riga

We will never take an overnight bus again!

I have never been on a bus that smelled so strongly of stinky feet and sweaty people before; it was awful. It was smelly, and uncomfortable (with an intermittent snorer directly behind us and a whining little German girl in the back) so neither of us slept more than 2 hours. And the sandwiches Dan bought us for dinner were so dry that, in asking for water, a dust storm of crumbs blew out of my mouth. So, we ate candy bars instead, and for the rest of the night we twisted and turned and wished we had tried for the train.

Upon arrival, we couldn't have been more disappointed. We hadn't booked any lodging because we thought that, like in Poland, there might be people offering cheap hostels in the station. Well, we were wrong. So the search began for acceptable accommodation. We knew the prices were high there, so we did our best to get the most for our money. I'm not sure we did too well, but we did try. Going from one overpriced hostel to another, we met a French priest who helped me carry my bag (a blessing, ironically, not in disguise).

The priest was there with a group of girl scouts (in the U.S. I believe they're non-denominational, but French girl scouts are apparently linked to the Catholic church). They had spent three days in the countryside, where running water and electricity are scarce by his accounts, and several days in Vilnius. He warned us that the town had very little to offer apart from a few pretty churches and lots of fancy cars.

He couldn't have come closer to the truth. We checked in to a guest house and slept for a few hours before heading out to discover the old town of Vilnius. In our quest for something akin to lunch, we found a blyni restaurant. In retrospect, that may have been the highlight of our stay there.

We spent a good part of the afternoon walking around, noticing the fancy cars (there was actually a hummer there!) and pretty churches. It was not at all what we expected. Nothing looked all that old, and the town seemed overrun by foreigners (tourists, businessmen and diplomats). We stopped at a cafe for a little while, but it turned into a long while when an old Norwegian man started talking to Dan about American politics and social programs.

He did a lot of criticizing for a man who moved is business from Norway, which is highly taxed, to Lithuania, where labor and costs were much cheaper. He did, however, emphasize how much he LOVED the United States, regardless of that fact that there is no universal health care.

He also told us about his trip around the world when he was just 15, and explained why he didn't like Arabs. He had a really bad experience in Yemen, but he didn't go into a lot of detail, so neither will I. The man liked to talk, so we didn't manage to slip away until his mistress arrived.

Aside from the Norwegian and a couple of pretty churches, Vilnius proved uninteresting. So, we were more than happy to part for Riga the next morning, and the five hour train ride turned out to be about as interesting as our day in Vilnius.

We boarded the train and found our seats (right next to a grumpy Belarusian woman and her granddaughter). We couldn't help but marvel over the use of space on the train; where there were two seats with a table, the table flipped over to make the two seats into a bed, and another bed flipped down from the ceiling!

So, for five hours, while Dan went around making friends with people, and I slept and read.