Vilnius 2

Vilnius is a city I wandered around more than took photos of. It is eminently suitable for wandering; its Old Town is large, and the street layout is as bewildering as Rīga's is. Here are some of the few photos that I took. This first is, to my mind, the ubiquitous Vilnius shot. Wherever you look, there is always a church tower or steeple peering out over all the other buildings. I like the contrast of colors here, how the setting sun captures different shades of stone.

Vilnius is lucky to have a little river running through town (as well as a big one). This is the river Vilnia, which is really more of a stream. It loops around Old Town, and in one of its loops sits the groovy neighborhood Užupis. You have to cross little bridges to get to Užupis, which adds to its sense of being set apart from the rest of Old Town. Here's one of the bridges with one of the Orthodox churches in the background. You can see that spring is getting seriously started in Lithuania. By the way, an interior design feature that I saw consistently in the Orthodox churches in Vilnius was the use of marquee lights. Seriously. The Greek letters for "Christ" were spelled out in one church over the icon screen in marquee lights, as if Ethel Merman were going to show up to belt out some Russian chant. 

Here's a panorama from the top of tower in the Museum of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which is one of the former palaces. There's a castle on a hill nearby where I'm sure the view is even better, but that would required climbing the hill. Kathy Knapp, my fellow Fulbrighter, has run up there on one of her morning sprints, and we agreed that sitting down and having lunch in an outdoor café was a far better plan. Unfortunately, the photo doesn't do justice to the view. One of the pleasures of the Vilnius skyline is seeing it punctuated in all directions by Catholic, Lutheran, and Orthodox church spires. 

And this is just a typical street scene, here snapped from the portal of St. Anne's Catholic Church, a little gem of a church and dripping in Gothic-style brickwork. This seems to me to be another ubiquitous snapshot of Vilnius -- churches in the foreground, churches in the background, and cobblestones galore. 

Having said all that, it's also worth noting that Vilnius may look like a museum set but it isn't one. There are loads of tourists, yes, but once you get into the regular neighborhoods, like the one where my hotel was located, you can see that this is very much a working town, filled with ordinary people doing their laundry, walking their kids in strollers, going to their yoga classes, and chatting with their friends in outdoor cafés. You can tell that winter is long in the Baltics because once the outdoor cafés open, they are simply flooded with people who have been cooped up too long in overheated apartments. Daugavpils, three hours to the north, has opened up its outdoor cafés with a vengeance. Every restaurant that can have one does have one. Spring has come, the voice of the turtle is in the land, and the beer is flowing.