Today was a travel day. We walked to the bus station in early morning fog. Our hotel was kind enough to prepare breakfast “to-go” boxes for us, as our bus would be leaving a couple hours before the breakfast room would open. What they selected for us was heavy on meats and cheeses — not your typical All-American breakfast, but once on the bus, we consumed most of it.
Lithuania has some modern motorways (like Interstates in the U.S.) but a lot of very pot-holed 2-lane blacktops, as well. The route back-tracked to Kraunas, where we had been just yesterday on the tour bus, but we only stopped briefly at the coach station before moving on. We could have saved at least an hour by going direct, rather than hitting Kraunas, but the bus company has to fill the seats, and the stop added another 6-8 folks.
As we neared the border, the table-top flat farm fields of the Baltics began to change into a rolling terrain that looks a lot like southeastern Iowa.
Crossing from one EU country to another is usually about as dramatic as crossing from Iowa to Minnesota, and the border station was boarded up. But a Lithuanian border patrol car was parked in the median, and a fellow in camou fatigues indicated to the driver that our coach should pull over to the shoulder. He barely glanced at our passports, but looked intently at those of the young women on the bus, and questioned some of them. I think this stop was about trafficking.
Polack jokes were popular when I was a kid, but once in Poland the road improved, the farmsteads looked neat and well-maintained with lots of John Deere equipment parked near the buildings. The villages we passed looked clean and modern. When we finally arrived in Warsaw (which the rest of the world calls, “VOR-shaw”) we encountered a very prosperous, modern city in every respect. They should tell Lithuanian jokes, instead.
Google Maps took us the long way around to our hotel, for some reason. But check-in was quick, and after almost 8 hours on a bus we were ready to walk. After one false start down the wrong street, we got re-oriented and headed for the “Royal Way” which is closed to traffic and open to pedestrians and hordes of those damned electric scooters one can rent by the minute with a cell phone app. We avoided being run down and made our way to the Fryderyk Chopin Museum.
Chopin is very big here — they even named the airport after him. How many places name their airport after a composer and piano player? It only cost us about $3.50 each (in Polish Zlotys — they don’t use the Euro here) and it was supposed to be very modern and high-tech. But many of the computerized displays didn’t work correctly, and most of the artifacts were simply displayed without any context. If you were already an expert on the life of Chopin when you walked in, it was probably pretty fascinating, but if you weren’t up on his many girlfriends, a letter he wrote to some gal back in 1832 probably didn’t mean a lot. They had everything but context.
We walked back to the Royal Way and decided to sit down at one of the sidewalk cafes for a beer. But just as we sat, the cold front blew through and the rain began. We fled to the interior of the restaurant and were fortunate to get one of the fist inside tables. Others waited until full downpour and had to stand and wait as waiters and waitresses scrambled to regroup. We enjoyed our beer, then ordered pirogies — traditional Polish dumplings — until the rain abated and we could walk back to our hotel.
Lithuania has some modern motorways (like Interstates in the U.S.) but a lot of very pot-holed 2-lane blacktops, as well. The route back-tracked to Kraunas, where we had been just yesterday on the tour bus, but we only stopped briefly at the coach station before moving on. We could have saved at least an hour by going direct, rather than hitting Kraunas, but the bus company has to fill the seats, and the stop added another 6-8 folks.
As we neared the border, the table-top flat farm fields of the Baltics began to change into a rolling terrain that looks a lot like southeastern Iowa.
Crossing from one EU country to another is usually about as dramatic as crossing from Iowa to Minnesota, and the border station was boarded up. But a Lithuanian border patrol car was parked in the median, and a fellow in camou fatigues indicated to the driver that our coach should pull over to the shoulder. He barely glanced at our passports, but looked intently at those of the young women on the bus, and questioned some of them. I think this stop was about trafficking.
Polack jokes were popular when I was a kid, but once in Poland the road improved, the farmsteads looked neat and well-maintained with lots of John Deere equipment parked near the buildings. The villages we passed looked clean and modern. When we finally arrived in Warsaw (which the rest of the world calls, “VOR-shaw”) we encountered a very prosperous, modern city in every respect. They should tell Lithuanian jokes, instead.
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| Street parade |
We walked back to the Royal Way and decided to sit down at one of the sidewalk cafes for a beer. But just as we sat, the cold front blew through and the rain began. We fled to the interior of the restaurant and were fortunate to get one of the fist inside tables. Others waited until full downpour and had to stand and wait as waiters and waitresses scrambled to regroup. We enjoyed our beer, then ordered pirogies — traditional Polish dumplings — until the rain abated and we could walk back to our hotel.
1 comment:
I’m most jealous of your visit to the Chopin museum and consuming pirogies!
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