Trakai by train

I am a horrible tourist. I theoretically want to love every new experience but sadly I cannot seem to do this. Today we were actually on time for everything. We started out at the big flea market which is basically a larger version of the one down the street here except it's across town. Trying to get there by bus to save time was an embarrassing experience because the buses are completely automated as far as ticketing and you do everything on your phone by app. Many problems occurred because of this even though a really nice guy tried to help us. I had to download the app from the apple store and because i never buy anything from the apple store i didn't remember my password so that was totally humiliating... luckily i had taken a picture of all my passwords before we left davis so i had to sift through all those to find the stupid password to download the dumb app to be able to purchase a bus ticket to get across town to the flea market. a fiasco. so basically we were scofflaws for about fifteen minutes. anyhow the flea was a bust. here's a map of it:

we scoped out the "old stuff" that was mostly broken down junk and fake old nazi paraphernalia so we cut our losses and hopped on another bus but this time it had some kind of credit card machine and we will be checking our statement next month to make sure that ride wasnt the most expensive part of our trip. 

here's another view of the train station. this was the cleanest, most well organized, cheerfullest, best food and drinkiest train station i have ever been in. it was so simple to use it makes you wonder why they don't teach classes in train station creation, implementation and maintensnce, not to mention etiquette, aesthetics, time management and basically maybe existence 101. anyways it was a half hour ride for under $3, we were in second class which makes any train back home look like, well, you know, they come through the car with snacks and drinks and the prerecorded announcement advises you not to travel on an empty stomach.

here is A enjoying his cappuccino:

here's our tickets to prove how insanely affordable this short trip was:

and so we arrived at Trakai and took the scenic path around this main lake. 

but first some plants! these are all starting to come up along the path. here is ground elder:

and i think this is burdock:

potentilla:

a dandelion with a visiting snail:

yellow start of bethlehem:

Germander speedwell or Veronica:

wood anemone:

and here is a short video of the main street in the old Karaim section of Trakai, flanked on both sides by lakes:

It was time for a proper lunch so we stopped at a Karaim restaurant, which, if you know anything about Karaim, was unsurprisingly a blend of Lithuanian and Turkish food. It was warm today, the warmest we've been, so we sat outside. The small glass of honey-colored liquid is krupnik, which seems very trianke-like, as it contains vanilla, cardamom, nutmeg, and other healing spices.

The cuisine is a (faithful?) blend of Lithuanian and Turkish, presumably reflecting the Karaims' Crimean origins. The soup is a cold yoghurt and garlic soup--almost linw tzatziki soup, and the herring is accompanied by the tomato-and-eggplanty imam bayildi.

And this is a kybyna, the main Laraom contribution to Lithuanian cuisine. It's basically an empanada, in this case filled with cabbage.

Trakai has an interesting history--although it's mostly famous as the home if Karaims, a hundred years ago the inhabitants of the town, which was then in Poland. included Ashlenazi Jews, Lipka Tatars (across the lake must have been the Tatar settlement--it's still called Totoriškė), Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Poles. Here is the castle, under the protection of which the Karaim were invited to settle, more than six hundred years ago.

It might be livelier in the summer--in some ways it reminded us of South Lake Tahoe, with vacation homes on the lakes.

No pictures of our return trip or our evening stroll here in Vilnius, but we had fun and ate vegetarian food next to the most action-packed sidewalk bar (it was a beautiful warm evening and everyone was out enjoying it).  We got mistaken for locals whole scrutinizing a library (there are lots here) by someone hoping she could pixk up her after-hours ILL. Busman's holiday.