Vilnius (and Uzupis) – 11th August 2017

Sviety from Lithuania,

We left Riga after an amazing buffet breakfast and hit the road for the last of the three Baltic States.

Lithuania is a lot different to Estonia and Latvia due to the fact that they are predominantly Catholic. When Russia ruled them, they basically outlawed Catholicism and the Litho’s were fairly pissed about the whole thing. Covertly, they would sneak onto a certain hill and put crosses there as a means of giving the Russkies the finger. Our first stop today was the “Hill of Crosses,” where they have more than 200,000 crosses now. It was a fairly impressive place as there were crosses placed on top of crosses placed on top of crosses! Pope John Paul II even blessed this joint once and it is a very sacred place for the Lithos.

Next stop was the old town of Vilnius where we did a walking tour with Grace. It was OK – but the day was extremely hot and most people were over it. The highlight was when we walked over a bridge into a place called Uzupis. A few years ago a bunch of critters created their own nation. This was not as serious as Freetown in Copenhagen, but was more of a joke. They have a PM and their national day in April 1. They do have a weird constitution that is up on the wall on mirrors in several languages. This was quirky and cool and we bought a copy of their constitution.

That was about it – we were hot and tired and got back to the hotel around 7, had a trad dinner, a few drinks and crashed.

The Baltics were sick – getting pretty tired of coach travel though – oh well off to Poland tomoz.

Bye xx

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Vilnius and Uzupis