Although already a few days away from home, I felt that my trip had not really started until I touched down in Vilnius, Lithuania. Before that, I had known the people I had stayed with and spent a wonderful time with. And they had taken care of everything.
That had changed upon entering the Baltics… So I had to make some arrangements before leaving the airport. A couchsurfer had agreed to host me for a night, and I was to meet him and a few other people just an hour later. I had a great time exploring the city with them and they showed me cool places I would not have found on my own. For instance, they have an artists’ republic “Uzupis”, in the middle of the city. They might not be internationally recognized as a country, but their constitution has been translated into twenty or so languages and stuck to a wall. And it said that they had an embassy in Germany! ;-)
Otherwise the city has an old town center with a venerable university right in the center. And there are churches everywhere! The further you get away from the center though, the higher the shabbier everything gets. I like to believe that there are nice appartment homes hiding behind the ugly facades of the many plattenbau blocks; but from the outside these building seem not to have received any maintenance whatsoever since the fall of the Soviet Union.
But when hitchhiking to Riga the next day, I passed this line of industrialized homes and beyond there was nice, although rather boring, hardly populated countryside that stretched all the way to the Latvian border and on…
