We arrived in Vilnius to discover that a huge annual festival called Capital Days was on the whole weekend we were there, perfect timing! Capital Days is a cultural and music festival with free concerts, but also closes off a whole main street with food stalls. With samples. Oh yeah! And yes, we did get a few dirty looks for perhaps going a little overboard on the samples, without actually buying anything.
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| Some guys getting real serious about their giant chess game at Capital Days |
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| In between Tom being approached by randoms to say hello (don't ask us why... maybe it's his dapper good looks?) we managed to have a drink and people watch in the street market |
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| Lithuanian X-Factor - words cannot describe how terrible this concert was. It was like Eurovision gone wrong. |
One of the most confronting experiences of our trip so far was our visit to the old KGB prison in Vilnius. There is a very detailed museum that covers the Nazi and Soviet invasions of Lithuania, but underneath was the actual prison used by the KGB and Gestapo during the occupations. We saw prison cells, padded cells with straight jackets, torture cells and the execution chamber, which was a pretty overwhelming experience.
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| KGB prison cell |
On a lighter note, rubbing things for good luck seems pretty popular in Lithuania. We made sure we did our bit to make sure our wishes came true!
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| Statute of Lithuanian author and humanitarian |
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| Republic of Uzupic |
We saw a couple of odd things in Vilnius, like a sand statue dedicated to John Lennon and a statue of Jesus carrying a backpack - because apparently Jesus was the world's first backpacker. Who could argue with that?
Also, to explain the title of the blog, 'thank you' in Lithuanian was pronounced 'a-choo' - pretty much the only one we have remembered so far! Currently we are in Warsaw, Poland enjoying dumplings and vodka - we will put a post up soon with more details :)
