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Today sure started with a bang. Literally. At 4 A.M. Some lad trying to wake any friend who'd let him in. Didn't sound like our Italian rugby players - loud and English. From then, I sort of dozed until the birds and the sun announced it was time to run. Nice and warm, so I could go back to shorts and T-shirt. I have been really enjoying the dry air - so unlike North Carolina humidity. As Chuck and I have noticed in England, even when it rains, the air itself feels dry. Honest.
Another breakfast of blynai vaisiai (crepes with fruit). Can I hide the cook in my suitcase? I could live on these breakfasts of blynai or omelets or fried eggs, with the incredible rye bread, butter, cheese, and ham - especially when we get that clotted-type cream. But then I love all the food here.
The phone rings as we get into the room. My English and Jonas's Lithuanian get us nowhere, but at least I know who it is and that our ride is here. Mom takes the phone and gets everything settled. Down to the lobby to meet Jonas's daughter Rasa and her husband Raimis Maskauskas. Jonas is such a gracious gentleman, I wish he were coming with us. But he came to introduce us (how typical of these kind relatives) and is taking the bus back home. Rasa and Raimis both understand English (he even worked in Chicago for about 3 months), and Rasa also speaks it. As usual, I feel less than bright, armed to the teeth with English and a bit of French (which I read far better than I speak or understand aloud).
| We drive north across Kaunas and stop at their home and meet the kids, Mindaugas and Rasa. They have been building it themselves for 10 years. It's cinderblock with brick ourside and plaster inside. No prefab walls, plastic siding, and sheetrock here! They have made beautiful wood trim inside, and sort of Scandinavian-style built in furniture. The rooms are large and airy, with clean plaster and natural wood. |  |
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They both work full-time - and do screen-printed flags for gas stations and such in their basement workshop. And build the house and raise the children. In her "spare" time, Rasa has developed this amazing garden, complete with green house (and there's more around the back of the house). Lithuanians are certainly not a sedentary people. |
On the road heading north, we go through Josvainai, in Kedainiai, the cucumber capital of Lithuania, past lots of roadside vendors selling tomatoes, by Pelidnagiai, with the largest factory (for fertilizers) in Lithuania, and generally through an area of large farms and small farmsteads. Lots of hawks (in Europe: buzzards, which to us means vultures). I see a tower that is like a really short version of the one on Neringa. I ask if it is to watch for fires. Nope. It's to watch for boars! When they attack (and it does seem that they really attack) a farm, the farmer can stop them and call local hunters to save his crops (and have some good dinners).
| Along the right of the road, I see crosses and ask what they are. It is a recent roadside shrine to those Lithuanians who resisted the Soviets. This is a large, flat, fertile area, with fields of grain, potatoes, beets, cabbages.... Although it is much more mechanized than any area we have yet seen, there are still the tethered horses and cows along the roadside. Odd: a truck pulls out to the left to let us pass. Potatoes (or is it feed beets) are piled like rocks. I gather that this is the major commercial farming region. |
We enter the small city of Siauliai. But, like all the places we've visited, lovely. We come in past an attractive lake, surrounded by thick trees, and stop at a park on the edge of both the lake and downtown. The amount of green space, and not just small patches of grass with token decorative trees, within the cities still amazes me. How sterile Lithuanians would find the cities we consider "green". Thanks again to Mom's little hot rod walker, we wander around the park and admire the sundial. It's another tall spike, this one topped by a shining brass naked archer the shadow of whose arrow Points to the hour on the large plaza.
| While Raimis and Mom drive up to the church, Rasa and I walk up the hill from the park, up a stairway made by the Soviets from the gravestones of the Jewish cemetery. In the churchyard, I find this large carving of Vaidila. (OK, there's one of Vytautas on the left, and a big cross. But I like this guy.) He was the last great pagan priest and keeper of the sacred fire. Vytautas defeated his power and put out the flame, thereby making Christianity official in Lithuania. I have a sneaky suspicion there was a bit of blaze left. |  |
Next we drive to the pedestrian mall and again walk a bit. Mom loves these malls; they make a city seem so alive and friendly. We seem to be in the entertainment block, with theaters and performance halls all along the way. But this is just the start of our busy day.
| Just north of the city, the Hill of Crosses (Kryziu Kalnas) appears in a large flat area. It's really two adjacent mounds. This was a fortress against the Crusaders in the 14th Century. Ironically, it became a Christian memorial during the 1831-1863 uprisings. Under the Soviets, it honored those killed or exiled to Siberia. Now, it is also for petitions (as when Rasa and Raimis placed a hand-made cross to aid Mindaugas when he was seriously ill at age 7). Raimis bought us crosses at the adjacent market. Mom hung hers in memory of family members sent to Siberia, some of whom died there. |  Mom adding her cross. |
I tried to make a cross out of big blades of grass on the edge of the hill - like the ones we make for Palm Sunday. And I could not remember how to do the folding. I knew I should have written it down. (Once I write something, I don't need the writing; I then can remember.) So I just sort of tie it together. Of course, I use the cross from Raimis, but this is so moving, I need something really personal.
 Impressive, isn't it? |
 The variety of types and sizes. |
We spend quite a while here. I could just sit amidst these memorials and pleas for hours. There is a real feeling of some kind of power. Is that why they are here, or does their being here create it? There is something about this land, and I do mean the land itself. I have read about the Lithuanians' connectedness to the soil, expressed also in their treasuring their language despite repressive outside regimes. But to actually feel that connection....
After browsing the market area (the Man of Sorrows carvings here remind me of someone doing a sound check), we get back on the road, heading west. We stop for lunch at a combination restaurant and motel, in the middle of nowhere. But it is one of the main roads between the western beaches and the eastern lakes and forests. As at Nida, I cannot understand the menus. But this isn't a fish area, so I go along with the rest and have pork and mushrooms. Yum. Mom is again trying a red wine; I test another beer. Then we continue west.
To the Orvydas Farmstead. This is a weird and moving monument to and experience of the physical, cultural, and emotional chaos of the Soviet era. In the 1960s, Kruschev decided to remove and destroy all "anti-Communist memorabilia", which included cemeteries. Gee, why honor your ancestors who were too stupid to be Russian Communists? Kazys Orvydas, who was a mason and carver, and had made many of the local tombstones, rescued as much as he could of the carvings. Then he also rescued the remnants of villages that were also destroyed. He brought them here, and, with his family, turned flat fields into hills and ponds and grottos, built with and filled with all these parts of Lithuania that the Soviets thought they could obliterate. It is beautiful, but it is also chaos. Probably the most moving piece of art I've ever seen.
Raimis drove up to the gates, by old tanks the Soviets tried to use to blockade this monument - unsuccessfully, of course - and spoke to the owners at the ticket booth. And they let him drive Mom along the dirt road, while Rasa and I walked across hills, along ridges, past ponds to meet them at the "farmhouse". Mom and her walker can handle the larger open areas, but the paths are far to rough - we scramble over huge stones and ease along ledges around strange buildings. I don't know how this would feel with a crowd, but it certainly was eerie when we are alone in the overcast late afternoon.
| One of the carved stones in a tangled frame of wood on a small ridge. |  |
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Mom & Rasa with a building made of parts of a destroyed village. That's a vine growing over a piece of stained glass from the village church at the upper left. | Wood carvings in a mine-shaft of a grotto under a hill. |  |
Leaving Orvydas, we drive south through rolling green hills with lots of trees, rather like Vermont. We see lots of tethered cows and even some goats along the road. Farmers carry stools and pails out to milk the cows. But they also bring food, so the cows watch eagerly down the road. Some men (and women - both do this work) bring groups of cows back to barns. I feel as though I'm riding in a modern car through Herriot's Yorkshire.
By the time we reach the A1, it's dark. I watch the stars while Mom, Raimis, and Rasa talk. Again, I kind of enjoy listening without really understanding, being alone in a group. It's quite relaxing.
This has surely been a full day. So we just snack on apples, cheese, and beer. And watch a bit more of the Olympics. Then we fall into bed. Everyone is showing us so much of Lithuania - and of our family. It is wonderful, but we definitely are sleeping well! Let's hope the rugby gang is tired too.
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