Bunny and Becca's Lithuania Adventure

My daughter and I will be in Vilnius, Lithuania from July 29, 2011, to August 13, 2011.

We would like to have our friends and family follow us on this journey, where we hope "Everything is Illuminated."

Politically incorrect...

Try this anywhere else in the world: Jew Street (!)

The Soviets (I think) put up a monument to a famous Jewish scholar of the far distant past:The Vilnius Genius, as he was called. Ths was one of many bizarre ways of honoring Jews (a mystical, albeit vanished species, like gnomes or fairies or leprechauns) in order to show how 'enlightened' they were.

The Gaon of Vilne

But here's the problem- Orthodox Jews are not allowed to create any graven images, as in a statue of a human being. In Jewish Law, a person is not allowed to be shown in any art form.  This most famous of mathematicians would have been insulted and horrified to know that he has been immortalized in the form of a stone and marble monument of his head.

The Girl in the Window

Please click on photo to enlarge it.

We seem to have veered in all directions without really talking about the original purpose of the trip: to look for our ancestral roots in Lithuania. Maybe the subject is too painful to talk about all the time; maybe we don't want to dwell on the horrors of the past; maybe mabye maybe...

In order to find ourselves in this country, we have to see the places our relatives may have lived.  Here is a big vacant building in what used to be the large Vilnius Ghetto. It was a jeweler's shop, with an apartment upstairs for the family. It was a prosperous business and the family was comfortably wealthy, and they were prominent citizens of the Jewish Community of Vilnius. Most of the family was rounded up and killed along with other members of the Ghetto. But a young girl survived and subsequently moved to Israel. She returned as an adult and found the building still vacant. There is no real explanation for this this, since either the Nazis or the Soviets would normally have claimed it. But they didn't. The young survivor went inside and wrote in Hebrew and Lithuanian (in thick dust) that the building belonged to her family and that she now lived in Israel. This message still exists after all these years. Others have written in the dust on the window panes, and these notes still are visible. No one has yet moved into this large, well situated building.

What is very odd is how the photo turned out. I was standing in a group of around 15 people, directly across the street when I shot this. No one is reflected in the windows, except for what seems to be a young girl who looks nothing like any of us. No matter how much we look at it and try to explain the face in the window in some logical way, we can't.

Here is an example of the Lithuanian government's mixed message regarding Jews. It's a sign for a museum called 'The Green House' which houses photos, documents, personal objects of Jews in Vilnius before, during, and after the Holocaust.

The sign is virtually invisible. Becca and I walked up and down the street (the sign is in a short alley off the main drag) and decided the musuem didn't exist. But later, with others in our party, we see that there is the tiniest of signage. The musuem is here, but we don't really want people to know about it, the Lithuanians seem to say.

Here are some popular things in Lithuania:

1. Jazz

I learned from Erika, one of our excellent guides/translators/generally awesome coordinator of activities, that Lithuanian people really love jazz music. When Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union, playing and listening to jazz was a quiet way to rebel. She mentioned that jazz is really important to Lithuanians. After our bus trip to Trakai, Erika mentioned a new jazz club opening in Vilnius. Ho-hum, I thought, conjuring up the sounds of Kenny G or sleepy elevator music. But then I went to the new jazz club, Soulbox, and found a completely different scene than what I thought I might be expecting. Young people (maybe Russian movie stars again!) packed the small bar. The music was a happy, danceable improvised blend of indie rock/jam band/jazz. At any time during the songs, people from the crowd would come up and sing along on choruses. At the end of each song, people merged from the crowd to take over various instruments.

borrowed from soulbox's page

2. Basketball

Okay. So neither one of us knew that Lithuanians love basketball. We had no clue, until we noticed all the basketball trinkets and t-shirts for sale. Apparently, the Lithuanian basketball team is one of the best in Europe, and has been quite successful during Olympic games as well. We were eating beetroot soup in our local cafe when the Lithuania/Moscow game was on. The crowd was rowdy but also polite, so I guess Lithuania was winning.

3. 999

So, I heard about 999 from some of the people on our bus rides. They were discussing the bars they went to and how much they had been drinking each night. I heard them mention something called "Three Nines," and how delicious it was. So, at the next outdoor cafe, I scanned the menu for nines. We asked the waitress, and she said that there are two kinds of three nines: red and green. Which is better, we asked. Green. Definitely. So we ordered the green. What arrived was not actually green at all, but a kind of murky maroon. It was delicious--like Nyquil and honey and plums. Okay, so that's an exaggeration. I couldn't taste plums. Just Nyquil. Regardless, it was delicious. For our last week in Vilnius, we probably had a couple shots of 999 a day. I think we'd had quite a lot of it on our last full day in town, too. I finally realized that a bottle of 999 would be a perfect souvenerai, so at 8 am, an hour away from our taxi ride to the airport, I dashed over to the Rimi, our local supermarket. I grabbed three pint bottles (green label, not green liquid), and rushed to the register.
"Labas," the cashier said, which means 'hi."
"Labas!" I chirped back, happy for a practical use of Lithuanian during my last few hours there. I handed her some crumpled litas. Back at the apartment, I tucked them carefully into my rolled clothes in my suitcase and hoped they wouldn't break in transit.
Now that we're back home, no one is getting the 999 for a souvenerai. We've decided to keep it for ourselves.

disclaimer: this is actually not our own 999. i had to borrow it online. we'll put up some pictures of our own personal collection of 999 soon.

The head of Frank Zappa

One of the oddest things about our meanderings around Vilnius was the discovery of a monument to Frank Zappa. He was not Lithuanian and he never visited there. Somehow, he is some sort of cultural hero. And there is a monument to the late great musician in a courtyard of what looks like a grim state hospital.

Living Outdoors

One huge difference between us in the States and them in Europe is how life is lived outside of the home. It's a tremendous adjustment to make after only two weeks in Lithuania. Americans stay inside, a lot. Yes, I know those of you lucky enough to live in a lively city like San Francisco or New York walk a lot and take public transportation everywhere. But in Vilnius, and other European cities, people are out walking and eating and socializing until late at night, every night. That's what we did while we were in Vilnius. Now, here I am at my computer at 7:30PM, wondering what will be on the tube later on that's watchable. This is not the right way to live.

The photo above this one is a common sight: a bachelorette party. The women in the wedding party go out in their chic clothes and have a lively night out. This photo is a plaza at the intersection of two main streets where Becca and I would stop sometimes and have a coffee or a Baltus- a delicious wheat beer- or a bottled water. For water, you are asked "gaz or still?" And they serve it to you in a stemmed wine glass. I miss this neighborhood. Nothing even remotely like it in Medford, Oregon.

Looking for a restaurant, we stumble on the most amazing architecture. Always a surprise, just turn a corner and there it is.

An interesting lunchtime parade in Old Town Vilnius. We were sitting at an outside table having blinyis or potato pancakes and heard music and chanting.

Trakai!

Last week, we had a nice break from discussing dead Jews. Most of the participants loaded up on a bus (with air conditioning!) and headed to Trakai, which was advertised in our welcome packet as being the only castle in Eastern Europe to be surrounded entirely by water.

Our group had become pros at bus travel, but the short ride to Trakai wasn't quite long enough for some. As the bus crawled through slow, touristy traffic, someone near us called out, "Do we have to get off the bus yet?"

People piled out of the bus, and gathered in a circle around Laimos. Even though our day was entirely free of tours or dead Jews until six PM, and he was off duty as a tour guide, people were lost without his direction. He explained how Trakai was home to the Karaims, (and I'm a little fuzzy on this) some sort of Babylonian sect of people who are Jews, but not quite. As in not quite Jewish enough to be disturbed during the Holocaust. At this point, with the mention of more Jews, we decided to check out the castle.

According to Laimos, the castle tour was very touristy and fake, but we decided to investigate anyway.

There were a ton of people at Trakai--mostly Russian tourists, it seemed, as Trakai is a bit of a resort destination in Lithuania. It was also interesting to note how the lake had none of the tourist destination troubles that a lake in the United States might. People seemed content to just loop around the paths.

We crossed over the far bridge in the picture above to get to the castle. Once there, avoided the snaking line inside the castle and opted for a boat tour around the lake instead. We tried to piece together some puzzling signs and then found the correct dock for the cruise. Our tour boat showed up a few minutes later, and let out  its previous passengers, including at least forty children and nuns--orphans, we decided.

The cruise took us around the back of the castle. At one point, we nearly hit some people on paddleboats.

Back on the shore, we decided to get a bite to eat--the local and famous cuisine, little pockets of pastry and pork called kibinyis. The outdoor restaurants were crowded everywhere, and the only table we found was in the direct sun. So, we ordered kibinyis, beer, and Greek salad.
We shared our table with this nice guy:

We noticed that there were an absurd number of wedding parties--and, being our second Saturday in Lithuania, we'd noticed a pattern. Saturdays were wedding days, when brides and grooms and bridesmaids in shiny dresses were out in droves.

There were some seriously shiny bridesmaids dresses that didn't quite come out in these few pictures--amazingly tacky purple and gold dresses. From our outdoor cafe vantage point, we watched one shiny wedding party get into a rickety boat and sail away: