Statues in the Snow

Good Morning! Labas rytas!

Another snowy morning! The streets and sidewalks are starting to look and feel like December once again.

Following our "a new thing every day" program we took the bus yesterday north across the river to the Kalvariju turgus, the old open market.

It was a very snowy day, so there weren't so many sellers, but still it was busy. I took a couple pictures inside the meat hall

which was basically the sausage and bacon market. A lot of pigs perished. I expected that someone would tell me to put my camera away and I wasn't disappointed. But at least I got a couple pictures.

 We bought some beautiful eggs, some craisins and apricots, and some dill for our supper last night - we had purchased some smoked trout at the duty-free shop in Helsinki and so last night we enjoyed smoked trout with dill and sugar snap peas on penne pasta. Excellent! And we watched a DVD of "The King and I", one of several we've borrowed from the US Embassy.

Yes, these cars are parked and the drivers are gone. Too busy to bother will parallel parking!

I've been strangely attracted to the "Green Bridge" and its statues. They are straight out of my Moscow days, done in the socialist realism style.

There are two sets of figures on each side of the river. This one is about education,

and this set is obviously military - it's the one set of figures that has had its identifying plaque removed or torn away. Since the statues date from the Soviet days, perhaps it's not a coincidence that the military statues have lost their sign. (And there is a slight provocation in the hammer and sickle emblem within the spear point atop the flag.)

The other two sets are "labor and construction" and "agriculture." Though they are Soviet era statues, because they are not blatantly anti-Lithuanian - in fact they were designed by artists with Lithuanian names - and because they make the bridge a real work of art, the statues have not been vandalized, except for that missing plaque.

One other snowy statue -

"Zemaite" - the Lithuanian novelist and story-teller, 1845-1921. In her Russian-occupied country it was not permitted to speak Lithuanian, but she came to know people in the countryside who spoke it anyway, and as an adult she spoke and wrote her stories in the forbidden language. The statue dates from 1970, interestingly, a time when the Soviets (Russians) were still in power.