Lithuania, my homeland

Lithuania isn't my homeland, but my couchsurfing host in Warsaw told me that that's how the most famous Polish poem of all time begins. Go figure.

I'm writing to you from Riga, Latvia, having just completed my trip in lovely Vilnius, Lithuania. I arrived at the bus station at the ungodly hour of 5am, and waited around there for awhile while I waited for it to become late enough to call my couchsurfer, Eva. I hopped a tram to her apartment (a charming Soviet-style project that I will show you whenever I manage to get pictures up from this trip) where she fed me eggs and made up my bed. She had to go to class until 1, so I took a much-needed nap and then met up with her in the city center for an afternoon of guided touring-- much more efficient than my usual style, which is to say bumbling around with my map upside down and wondering how to say "which way to Old Town" in various languages. We saw several churches in varying architectural styles, the 14th-century Gedimino Castle, and the quite romantically named Gates of Dawn that mark the original entrance to the medieval walled city. After the tour she took me to a traditional Lithuanian restaurant for dinner, where we ordered nothing but various types of potatoes, which I was fully in support of because potatoes are pretty much the best food ever. Then we went back to the apartment, had some tea, and collapsed.

In the morning Eva had class again, so we said our goodbyes and I set out for a morning at the Genocide Museum! It was more fun than it sounds. Lithuania was occupied by the Nazis during WWII, and afterwards was a part of the Soviet Union until it disbanded, so there is a long and tragic history of its national history being suppressed and its citizens persecuted. The building that the Genocide Museum is housed in is the site of a former KGB prison, which held prisoners all the way up until the 90s, if you can believe it. In the basement of the museum you can see cell blocks and interrogation rooms, showers, solitary confinement rooms, and even the scary padded wall room, all of which were the unfortunate temporary residence of political dissidents and the otherwise unruly. Took lots of pictures there too, none of which you can see yet because I was a dumbass and left my USB cord in Paris. It'll be like a National Geographic slideshow when I get back.

Now I'm in Riga enjoying the hospitality of a Latvian couple named Lina and George, who are taking me on a tour of the city tomorrow. They've been great so far, very friendly as hosts and just plain interesting characters-- Lina has a law degree and is a press secretary in the Latvian judiciary court, and George is a former keyboardist in a heavy-metal rock band and still does something in the music production industry. He showed me his group's CDs as we listened to the music over a midnight snack of cheese and vermouth, and I was surprised to hear that all the lyrics were in English. I asked him why they weren't in Latvian, considering that that was the nationality of all the members in the band, but he looked at me with surprise. "Heavy metal is an English style of music," he said with a shrug. "It would sound stupid in any other language." Hm. Perhaps he's right.

Off now to take a shower, which is ironically located in the kitchen next to the washing machine and across from the basin that doubles as a kitchen and bathroom sink. Now that's efficient!