Christmas Days, Part 2

Hi Everyone! Laba diena!

Continuing with our Christmas days -

On December 15 we had our first cultural outing. (I mean, you have to be cultural in Europe, right?)

But first, we couldn't resist a relapse into good old German/Austrian/Sheboygan food - the Bunte Gans German restaurant. They were full, but found a table in the bar for us, and it was a perfect spot. Tall biers, sauerbraten, pork schnitzel, and a fantastic apple strudel with vanilla sauce and cherries. Ask Liz - she'll sing its praises!

And then the "culture" - a chamber music concert at the Vilnius Philharmonic. Contemporary - Paul Hindemith and later, including a bizarre and amazing piece by a composer who was there and took a bow afterward. Not easy listening, but very well done.

Our little International Church community has been even smaller during the holidays with folks going home for the Christmas break. So Sunday, the 23rd, was a very small service - just 12-15 of us in the chilly sanctuary. But we enjoyed some beautiful playing by a guest organist and guest cellist. (Whenever there is special music scheduled for the Lithuanian service at 11 am, we benefit by having their music at our 9:30 am service too.) The guest organist was the daughter of Vytautas Landsbergis, the man elected as parliamentary chairman on the day, March 11, 1990, when Lithuania declared itself once again free from the Soviet Union. (Astonishing to brush up against history like this.) And the cellist was (is) her son.

After the service we were taken to a restaurant where you can eat American pancakes and syrup. Since I get excellent American pancakes at home, I chose the blini (crepes) instead, and so did Liz.

And then we went to a Mozart mass at nearby St. Casimir's church. This is the church which the Soviet occupation turned into the Vilnius museum of atheism. Ironically, it was standing room only for the earlier mass which was just concluding when we arrived (I think it was in Polish) and then just as crowded for the Mozart mass - a beautiful, fairly short piece which featured a large boys choir.

In the old days (the 70s) I visited these atheism museums in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and so on. The museums really didn't say much about atheism, but mostly just ridiculed superstitions about black cats and walking under ladders, praying to do well on a test or to win the lottery, etc. Sometimes they made some very good points about religious extremism. But to me it was criminal to desecrate a beautiful church in order to do this. Build your own museum - don't take away our church. But that's not how it was.

Anyway, it's good to have a church back to being a church again, both St. Casimir's and even our Lutheran Church, which, you may recall, was a combination warehouse and basketball court from the 1940s till 1990.

Our friends here have taken very good care of us. On the day before Christmas we were invited to an apartment where about  ten of  us gathered for a nice dinner. And then on Christmas Day, after our small but really nice Christmas morning worship, we went back to Steve and Rebecca's - that beautiful house across the river (above).

Here are a few pictures from a lovely and lazy Christmas afternoon:

Part of the joy of these occasions is, of course, how international they are - we were from the US, Canada, Lithuania, and Russia (Kaliningrad). And the coincidences you discover - one of the students at the table is a graduate student at Ohio University in Athens, where our son-in-law also is finishing up his PhD work. (Our new friend is a biologist and Dan is in the humanities and theatre, so there probably isn't much chance their paths would cross.)

I've noticed that in Vilnius there are some Christmas activities that actually don't start till Christmas - what a nice concept!

This "bubble" appeared in the Town Hall square just the weekend before Christmas and is now humming with customers.

Gingerbread and hot wine are popular, as well as the bread bowls filled with mushroom soup.

These snowballs (?) popped up a couple days before Christmas -

And the children are enjoying playing in the fountain of lights.

Maybe the most popular thing is the Christmas train. Note the elf in green on the left.

It seems like families wait for an hour to take a very crowded little trip around the Old Town - but it's the thing to do.

These Christmas days and now on New Year's Eve the sidewalks are packed with strolling couples and families. Maybe it's a city thing - getting out of the apartment for some air. That's what gets us out at least. Liz looks across our one-room flat at me and says, "I can't stand it! Get me out of here!" So we've been joining the Christmas crowds. And with the recent thaw most of the sidewalks are not the death traps they were a week ago.

Peace and good will, everyone, on this New Year's Eve, the seventh day of Christmas - already one month and four days since we arrived.

Christmas Days, Part 1

Good Morning! Labas rytas!

We were locked out of our blog during Christmas preparations and celebrations, so I thought I'd share a few of those things in this blog and the next.

On December 16 we hosted a Sunday afternoon Lessons and Carols Service, with about 90 people attending. Since our congregation usually numbers about 15 or 20, this is a big deal - a significant outreach to people who don't usually come to the church - but maybe they will in the future. We hope so.

Or maybe they've just heard about the food and drink afterward!

It's amazing to see this little group of folks offer such a beautiful service and such generous hospitality to the community.

Earlier that day we had had dinner with Steve, Rebecca, and Owen Garrett (we were free since we didn't have a morning service - just the afternoon carol service). The Garretts are one of the key families of the congregation, and Steve is the one who was my contact all through the planning to come here.

We took trolleybus no. 7 across the river and into their neighborhood, and then walked the last few snowy blocks. It's an area with many single-family homes, or houses that used to be single-family. It looks like a real neighborhood and not just a series of apartment blocks. We walked past several charming examples.

And this is the Garrett home:

The house is divided into five flats - two each on the first two floors and one on top. It has been a family home for generations, and descendants of the old family still live in the rest of the house. The Garretts are the only residents who aren't part of the family. They live in the flat on the ground floor on the right: living room, dining room, two bedrooms, office, kitchen, bath, large foyer. What a huge, gorgeous place. Coming from our tiny attic flat, we were just a bit jealous. (We also had Christmas Day dinner there, so you'll see a bit of the inside of the house in another post.)

That was December 16. On the 17th Liz reminded me that we needed a Christmas tree.
Fortunately, free and cheerful tree delivery is available:

And soon it was decorated - well, as soon as Liz unscrambled the lights that had been left from previous years.

It's a live tree, but needles are still falling off at an alarming rate. Oh well, we love it.

Of course, what is Christmas without a trip to the mall? We took the bus north across the river to Akropolis, the largest of the Vilnius shopping centers.

We had some pizza beside the ice rink.

We did not follow the signs to McD's.

We gave some serious consideration to upgrading our winter footgear (above).

And I guess all we bought was a printer cartridge and some dinner napkins. Well, it was easy to carry home - that's important.

A little bit more about our Christmas next time.

Till then - we are doing well. Liz is still doing her exercises for her sprained ankle, as well as her yoga and pilates:

Did you ever doubt that beer could be a fitness drink? Although half liter cans aren't much of a challenge.

That's a look at some of our preparations for our first Lithuanian Christmas!

Back On Line

Good Morning! Labas rytas!

Yes, Liz and Mike are back with news after 10 days of not being able to sign in to do our posts. We don't really know why our problems happened, but we are grateful to our son-in-law EJ for finally figuring it out for us. Thank you, EJ!!

We're in the process of letting everyone know that to find the blog now you have to use winterinvilnius2.blogspot.com - the old address won't work anymore. The title of the blog is the same, but we've had to change the web address. Very sorry for the inconvenience!

The first item of importance is the weather! While many parts of the USA have been clobbered with winter weather, a dramatic thaw came through here early Christmas morning. The temperature went up at least 20 degrees (F) within six hours, so we were greeted with rain on Christmas morning, along with very slippery sidewalks and streets.

So you see, above, that the snow on the roof of our attic flat is mostly gone, but enough is left to make an impact on any passersby below. (And yes, that is an old brick wall looming up above our skylights - we hope we're out on a walk somewhere when it comes crashing down. I guess they've left it up there because it's so picturesque.) In our courtyard the snow is piled in the corner while the walkway is pretty clear - just a few patches of ice.

One of the big events of last week was an excursion by mini-van to Trakai, the medieval capital of Lithuania, about 25 miles southwest of Vilnius.

The island castle probably dates from about 1400, when mostly pagan Lithuania was still resisting the assaults of the Teutonic Knights. The knights - mostly German - and their allies could substitute a "crusade" against northern peoples like the Lithuanians instead of the bother of going all the way to Palestine to fight Muslims.

Our tour guide, Julia, in the center, spoke very good English and was our personal guide, as the other three tourists were Russian and had their own guide, once we reached Trakai.

If we'd been there later in the winter I'm sure we could have walked across the ice, but it wasn't quite hard enough yet, so we had a very nice, cold walk across a bridge to one island and then another bridge to the castle.

There were lots of children coming and going. The big common room in the castle was decorated for a Christmas party for the kids.

I suppose it was a little bizarre to have blow-up Santas and Frostys in a medieval fort, but it seemed like a good use of a room that always was used for feasts and entertainments. So batches of screaming first-graders seemed perfect! (We didn't stay long!)

It really is one of the most beautiful castles I've seen. It could have been left as a ruin (it was mostly destroyed a couple centuries ago), but it's been carefully restored - for example, I think you can see the horizontal line between old and new on the tower in the photo below.

And here you can the patchwork of old and new.

Eventually the history of the region turned in Lithuania's favor. A combined duchy ruled by Jogaila and Vytautas, with their allies, decisively defeated the Knights and their allies at Grunwald, in modern Poland, in 1410. Vytautas (the Great) was able to extend Lithuania's rule almost to the Black Sea, creating one of Eurasia's greatest empires, and resulting in the wealth which enabled Vilnius, with a population of about 25,000, to become one of Europe's largest and finest late medieval cities.

 
The Lithuanians brought back from the Black Sea area a group of people to serve as bodyguards in Trakai - the Karaites. They were a Turkic people whose religion was based on the ten commandments but who were not exactly Jewish. (I think it's a complicated story.)

After our visit to the castle we walked back to the little village, walked past some of the traditional Karaite houses and their house of worship, and stopped at Kybynlar for a Karaite lunch of beer and kibinai, pastries filled with meat and vegatables, similar to Cornish pasties. (You can find the pasties in Mineral Pt., Wisconsin, too.)

Too heavy on the history - sorry about that! There's so much to tell!

Winter Walks

Good Morning! Labas Rytas!

It's good we've been out walking these past days, because it's becoming colder and windier, and may even be a blizzard by tonight or tomorrow. "Winter in Vilnius" is living up to its title.

On Tuesday I walked Liz down to Cathedral Square.

Lots of activity - it seems to be the spot where Russian tour buses drop their passengers.

Liz had a meeting on the Square at Hotel Kempinski. The wife of the minister-counselor at the Embassy of Finland had invited Liz to come to a festive occasion on which the profits of a Christmas bazaar were distributed to lots of beneficiaries - the total was about 350,000 litas - about $140,000.

I left her to enjoy the party and took a walk, first up Gedimino street past the National Drama Theatre, above, with its three ladies above the doorway - maybe Macbeth?

Walked along the Neris River to where the Vilnia River (above) joins it, and then up a snowy hill.

The hill is the Hill of the Three Crosses. A story or legend is told of seven Franciscan monks who were killed on a conversion mission many centuries ago (the Lithuanians were a tough bunch of pagans!). As a tribute this monument was erected in the 1600s, only to be destroyed by Stalin during the Soviet occupation, and then restored in 1989 as one of the early in-your-face acts of rebellion.

And great views of the old city - not that these fairly depressing, snowy photos give the best impression.

And this is looking back up the couple hundred snow-covered steps I took back down on the other side, down to the Vilnia River, across a little bridge, and up a very interesting street (below):

Literature Street! Hundreds of tiles or metal plates set into the wall along the street, with some kind of reference to books or authors - Gunter Grass is one I remember - and a puzzling something which is sort of like an Illinois license plate. I'll have to check it out again!

A couple days ago while Liz was at the women's Bible study I took another walk along the Neris River, going west this time, on a very snowy, unshoveled path.

Finally the river intersected Gedimino street, where I found the Lithuanian Parliament Building. The Seimas, or gathering, was built in 1982, under the Soviets, but retains, on the western side of the building, some of the barricades built on January 13, 1991, to defend the self-proclaimed Lithuanian Supreme Council from Soviet forces. The thousands who gathered did, in fact, keep the special forces out, although the troops killed a number of people that same day at the TV tower.

Down the street from Parliament, this attractive building turns out to be the old KGB headquarters, now the Genocide Victims' Museum. We'll say more when we've actually visited it.

One more walk: yesterday Liz left me with my sermon cogitations and went up through some nearby winding streets to the Hales Turgus, a big old-fashioned pavilion-covered market where you can buy anything.

Would you buy a chicken from this woman? Liz did, cooked it all afternoon in our slow cooker, and it was delicious!

The market and surrounding area remind me of the rynoks in Moscow, 35 years ago, where you could buy all sorts of things you couldn't find anywhere else, including Easter eggs under the counter.

If you made it all the way this far you are a very patient customer. Thanks for taking some walks with us in Vilnius!