Oh Life!: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles!

A week ago, I embarked on a lovely 10 day vacation of the Baltic States and then the Scandinavian states. It was surely an adventure.

We started our trip with a 14 hour train ride to Riga Latvia. In the middle of the night, we crossed the border into Latvia, which they stopped the train for a good hour. They took our passports, and stamped our passports so we could get into Latvia, and it took forever! It was one long train ride. Once we got there, we walked around a little bit and then checked into our hostel.

The hostel was quite great. It was called Fun Friendly Franks. We had to climbed up these treacherous stairs to get o the main floor. It was fun. We met some of the staff there, and they were so nice, the only problem was they really, really wanted us to drink beer with them. They gave us a walking tour of Old Riga, and we got to meet some people staying there. The first night was an adventure. I slept through half of what happened, but apparently one of our roommates lost his weed in the room. He stumbled into the room at like 2 am, and continued to search through things and was being so loud. The other two guys that were with him were trying to get him to be quiet, but it didn’t happen. I woke up to it, but then I went back to sleep. I heard more about this in the morning from the other teachers. Apparently it kept them up. The next day we went to the open market there. You can buy anything from fruit to clothes to random objects like tape. One of the random objects that we found was a lock.

In European countries, they have this tradition where when you get married, you lock your love on a bridge, and then you throw the key into the water. This symbolizes that your love will last forever. So Courtney, Sydney, and Marci and I locked our love on a bridge in Riga. It was on our bucket list of things to do while we are here.

After the market, we went to this Ethnographic Open Air Museum. I felt like we were either in the movie How To Train Your Dragon, or a Viking Village, which basically is the same thing. Haha. When you go places with Courtney, Marci and Sydney, it is usually an adventure. This was no exception. According to Marci, she found the perfect tree to climb, and Courtney and her had a little fight about the tree. It was super entertaining, but apparently we weren't supposed to do this. We then had a Latvian worker yell at them. It was really funny. We continued to look at the building, and then we left and went back to the hostel for the night.

Then we left for Lithuania the next morning on a bus. It was one long ride. We took a bus to Panevezys, then another one took us to Siauliai. We went to this place called the Hill of Crosses. All I can say was that place was not what I expected. It is this creepy hill two miles away from a road. When we went, it was getting dark, and there was a hint of mist. We get there, and it is this hill with thousand and thousands crosses. They were all sorts of sizes, and shapes. It was interesting to see them all over this hill. We finished at the hill, and we caught a train to Vilnius. In this train we got our own little compartment, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. We didn't have to worry about being quiet, or anything. It was nice.

We arrived in Vilnius that night at like 10, and found our hostel, Jimmy Jumps. This hostel was an adventure. When we walked in, there was a group of like 10 guys playing the guitar, and singing. It was a great way to start our adventure there. The next day we went to a market, where I purchased some nice scarves. Then we went on a tour of Vilnius. It was a long tour, but it was fun. After that, we went to a castle with one of the guys from the hostel.

During the tour, we went to the Republic of Užupis. If you click here you can read about it. There are 4 rules that are posted when you first go into the Republic. The first one is you always have to smile, the speed limit is 20, respect the arts, and be careful of the river.

That adventure was quite fun. Here it gets dark at like 4 pm. Which is kind of annoying. So we go to this castle, and when we got there, it was dark. Jess decided that it would be fun to go explore this castle, and it was an adventure. After the castle, we wanted to go this place called the Television Tower. It is the tallest building in Vilnius. But of course, it was closed. So we just went back to the hostel and went to bed.

We woke up the next morning at 4 to go to the airport. That morning we took a taxi to fly to Stockholm Sweden. I will do another blog post about that!

Sorry if the pictures are slightly grainy. I took them with my iPod because my camera got stolen.