approaching poznan

I'm too tired to blog after a very long bus ride but i will catch up tomorrow when i'm not so crabified. here's a picture of the outskirts of town taken from seat 3B's the window on the flixbus with the derelict "bathroom" and the chorus of coughing passengers.

last day in Vilnius/Vilne

Baleboste is literally just down the street. We've been there three times, the first when we first met our friends there for the first time in person, the second and third for breakfast and not one disappointment was had...ok I was a little sad there was no compot the last two times but the coffee made up for it because it somehow reminded me of Mom mom's.

we next stopped at the market to buy a little acacia honey from the herb lady we talked to in an earlier post.  also we were looking for some kybynis (empanada-like pastries) to take on the million hour bus ride to Poznan tomorrow. we will have to buy fresh ones tomorrow morning, which is probably a better idea anyway. After that, we headed to a store our friends told us about because i have been in search of sea buckthorn berries to make tea. but it's just as i feared, they are sold either fresh or frozen so we continued on our way... but here are some of the handmade things sold at this store:

we had planned to go to the botanical garden in the woods near the university but reality conspired against us or rather should i say traffic. as a plan B, i really wanted to take another walk in the woods that surround this city so we hopped on a bus and got off at the first park entrance called Balmount I believe. The street was so busy that people walking on the sidewalk literally were going faster than the bus was crawling. Also it was insanely hot today, maybe 80 and we really didn't bring clothes for warm weather and so far haven't needed them. As soon as we jumped off the bus and started up the park trail, the city and road noises faded further away and the temperature cooled the deeper we went into the little woods.

the top video shows a path that must be part of an old road connecting villages through the forest and eventually the city must have sprawled around it. you can see the old stone road has fallen into disrepair and is missing big chunks. we walked down here in search of a "wc" and came upon some sort of equestrian center you see in the second video.

along the path were so many plants, some i recognized and some i didn't. this is a Hepatica or liverwort:

and here's mothetwort growing all around the horse corrals and training areas:

there were so many just sprouting plants, too many to include but here's A near a little meadow of Hepaticas:

I probably should have taken a pic of the soil. it's really sandy and when you walk on it you sink down a little and it has such a fantastic smell like fresh, clean earth, very hard to describe but somehow i think you know what i mean.

we're back at the apartment and i have to pack because we have to get up early to buy a few food and drink items and then catch the bus by 8:30ish for the long haul to Poznan. I'll try to take some pics along the way.

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.

Random Jumbled Monday

here's a view from the top of the hill where we rented an apartment. If you click on the picture, it's the pink building on the right, and just two doors down (next to that egg shaped wine-colored sign) we are on the second floor. what's amazing is how close this place is to the train station but it's absolutely silent, even with the windows open. Anyway, A wanted to go to a bookstore and we found one right up the street from this picture. It's a Russian bookstore and A was looking for an herb book. You will never guess what  we found...

A wondered if the Russian translation of our book woud be there. I picked up that green one in the back of the shelf up and said, I think our book looks like this one. A took one glance at it and said: that IS our book! They had three hardback copies marked at 26.95 euros, two dollars more than the american original!

after that weird discovery we took a walk into the "new town" but took a wrong turn and ended up in a very residential and rural neighborhood that had no commercial district. I probably should have taken some pictures because it was very different from this more cosmopolitan area of the city but i was too busy gawking at the unfamiliarness of it all. on one corner was a strange structure that looked like a wire bench but the part where you might sit was too narrow and there were several levels making it impossible for actual sitting. on top was a kind of scaffolding for an umbrella or an awning in case of too much sun...A surmised it might have been a place for selling produce to people coming and going from the train station across the pedestrian bridge. this makes sense because many of the houses we walked by before turning back had big gardens and little orchards in their yards. below is a view from the pedestrain bridge over the train tracks that separate the old town (which has all the businesses and the tourist area) from the more rural neighborhood. note the large statue.

an interesting apartment building in a part of town we hadn't been to yet.

A found this local restaurant and we had some of their hearty and delicious fare. A cold beet soup, potatoes, I was going to get the kugelis (a Lithuanian variation on the kugel theme) but they were out so I had a cepelin (not pictured) and A had another kind of herring that looked like it had gone from the net to his plate (also not pictured). The pink juice is kompot which is so good and with an inexplicable flavor. 

another walk this time up a hill with views of the city. not sure what that sign says on the below right. it's backwards because i was standing behind it. there are so many secret alleys and cut throughs and pedestrian bridges and parks with their little cafes. i don't think you could ever get bored walking here, it's just a tapestry, layer upon layer of visual and walkable delights. from here we headed back down the hill for dinner at a ukrainian restaurant called Kyiv.

on the way we passed a few planter boxes with little sprouts just coming up. Today was the first warm day probably in the 60s. I think you can see Lady's Mantle is unfolding on the left side of this planter.

Schav, more herring and cherry blinis.

an after dinner concert rehearsal was noted on the walk back:

there is so much music here. lots of people carrying instruments, sounds of songs wafting from windows high and low. there's just so much creativity here.

we stopped again to take a picture of the ghost of a Yiddish cafe our friend Eva showed us yesterday. Today it is still a cafe but called Gaspar's.

Continuing on to our apartment i saw this figure standing on a corner and said to A "I've seen that guy before". As we got closer Leonard Cohen made an appearance.

I just liked the way this store looked so i took its picture :)

 

A mol Vilne [More Vilnius] (ershter tog) (Vilnius/Vilne part 2)

There was more to the afternoon and evening, but these are the pictures we've selected.

A note on the plaque photographed for Murray: Fedor Mixailovič Dostoevskij lived upstairs. "Beauty will save the world," the apposite quotation.

We walked through Użupis, the New Hope of Vilne, if it declared independence from the rest of Pennsylvania.  Uphill we walked, until the courtyards, cafes, and art galleries melted away, and the fancy gated houses began. And above them the Kalnu Parkas, the Park of Hills.  Down below the Vilnia River, and beyond it, the Bernardinu sodas, the Bernardine Garden.

The gardens are obviously well-loved: today was sunny, and even though the morning was still chilly, by mid-afternoon it was pleasant to sit on a bench near the carousel and the river and watch the passing promenade.

Some helpful international guidance for the ladies of Litve (neither of us took or chose this picture--the ghost in the machine did it).

And then a fun discovery: the university botanical garden, which has lots of our favorite regional healing plants (artemisias, filipendulas, savories, yarrow) and some very intriguing plants that are native to Siberia.

Then it was time for Kaffee-und-Kuchen, and more perambulating, including a quick peek into a Lithuanian  mall. Some semiotic impressions in re politics that we are still mulling over.

Dinner (no pics!) consisted of an utterly amazing and fragrant barley risotto, latkes with lox and blended tvorog, and more herring (ah!).  The drinks: mulled wine, sea buckthorn tea, Lithuanian Ribes nigrum (blackcurrant) wine, and, as a postprandial, a thyme-, honey-, and saffron-infused liqueur. Holy moley.

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...

Ruh roh Shaggy

ugh this has been a harrowing day not worth detailing in photos or words. suffice it to say we are in vilna a day earlier than we thought we'd be. i'll write more tomorrow.