Vilnius/Vilne part 1

 

daily caveat: please excuse any design discrepancies this app is very difficult and clunky. 

the picture above is from a wonderful market hall down the street called Halės Turgus. the herbs here are all grown or foraged by the woman you see back there in beige and her husband tends the bees and collects the honey and other bee related stuff like propolis and wax. i would have bought everything she had because she was so friendly and kept giving us tastes of all the different honeys but i have a fear of stuff exploding in my suitcase (shampoo and conditioner are the usual offenders) that i limited myself to a small piece of aromatic wax and two packets of herbs. i might just go back and buy a small container of the acacia honey because it's so distinctive.

these packages of onion skins were all over the produce section of the market and a mystery until i realized it's almost easter and these are for dyeing eggs. i only know this because there was a similar custom among ashkenazim, but for a different spring holiday (of course) but not passover, i just can't remember which at this moment.

we stopped for a late breakfast in the old part of the city. i had these amazingly delicious blueberry virtiniai,  blintz-type boiled dumplings with a creamish sauce. the best part is this is not a sweet dish. there was no sugar added which made it so good. A had another variation on the herring theme :)

this one (above) is for you, Dad! A spotted it on our walk after lunch. Ironically this building is now a very sheeshee realtor's office.

another interesting view on our quest to find the big city park. many buildings here, like zagreb, have these archways that take you to the back of a grouping of buildings. the difference is in zagreb they open into more of a an enclosed courtyard with shops and apartments inside (see relevant from 2015, below: https://ferdinandeffect.blogspot.com/2015/06/zagreb-courtyard-entries.html?m=1 ); here it's more of a little road to other buildings, not enclosed but more of a deadend alleyway. in this case it deadended at the creek (that the city of Vilnius is named after) which is really pretty and threads through this part of town with a little stone bridge connecting both sides of the water. (A keeps telling me random local factoids so this might be somewhat disjointed)

and we finally found an entrance to the park up a flight of stairs in the middle of an unassuming block of houses and apartments and discovered we were on an ancient path that connects Vilnius to Riga and takes ten days on foot with your horse drawn carriage! stay tuned for part 2...