We arrived in Vilnius, Lithuania (population 550,000, founded in the 1300s) in the late morning after a four-hour bus ride from Riga, Latvia and proceeded into the old city with our heavy backpacks.
Even with a map, the old city is a bit confusing to navigate given the tangled nature of its old roads.
After some map-viewing, second guessing and backtracking we approached a hostel called Hostelgate. The very, very hung over young French desk clerk buzzed us in and showed us a clean, simple private room – the last one he had available. Perfect. Too perfect. We booked the room, paid, and dropped our heavy packs in the room. It was time to start arranging our day of exploring Vilnius.
I did a bit of research on my computer in one of the spacious common rooms while Cecilia showered up. Another hostel guest chatted us up and offered to make us a coffee. Not bad. But no sooner than Cecilia was clean and dressed, the same French hostel staffer came to us with sad hungover eyes. He had botched our booking, and the room wasn’t really available after all – today they were in fact fully booked. He politely asked us to vacate the room, apologizing and apologizing again, but offering no real solutions. We forced him to call other hostels until he found us a room.
By this point we had wasted hours of our time between booking our first hostel, getting asked to leave, and marching to the next one with our packs on. Vilnius wasn’t working out so well for us so far. We briefly considering leaving down that night for Warsaw, Poland and giving up on Lithuania’s capital city – but reason (and exhaustion) ruled the day, and we stayed to give the city a fighting chance. We would leave for Warsaw the following night, August 6th.
We booked the first hostel our boozy Frenchman found that had availability – A-Hostel, near the bus station. I had seen it when marched into the old city, so it wouldn’t require too much navigation.
A-Hostel had no private rooms were available, so we took dorm beds – or rather, BED PODS. The hostel displayed glossy flyers proudly announcing their invention – dorm beds in the style of Japanese capsule hotels.
This is the image A-Hostel features on their website of the room of bed pods. Looks modern and design-oriented, but realistically, I think A-Hostel probably needed a way to cram eight beds into a room that only fit six bunks otherwise. Yes, those peg ladders were a bit tricky to climb.
Capsule hotels were first introduced in Osaka, Japan in 1979 and have become a popular and useful solution for Japanese businessmen that are too busy (or too drunk) to get home to their families. Modern capsule hotels in Japan have alarm clocks, televisions, reading lights and shared bathrooms and cost around $30-50 US per night. They’re by no means luxurious accommodations, but are totally workable for short stays for travelers and businessmen alike.
Here’s what the interior of a common capsule hotel looks like in Japan. I stayed in a similar capsule hotel in the Asakusa district of Tokyo in 2003. Bathrooms at the capsule hotel were communal, so in the morning I scrubbed myself clean in a room full of stark naked Japanese men, who were a bit surprised to see me there as I was surprised to be there myself. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons user “Chris 73”.
Our Vilnius bed pods were basically just a box with a mattress to sleep in at around $15 US per night per. The room itself was very stuffy and slightly smelly. One night was enough here.
Here’s the reality of the conditions in the bed pods. Not pictured: stagnant, humid air.
The morning bus ride into Vilnius, plus the inconvenience of relocating to new lodgings had chewed through a good deal of our day and energy. It was already around 3:00 PM at this point and we hadn’t yet eaten breakfast nor lunch yet. Cessi and I crammed our bags into the hostel lockers and marched through the old city for the remainder of the afternoon and evening.
Our very, very late lunch was ravioli and pork chops and big beers (well earned) at Cozy, a hip little place in the old city. Tasty. Entrees were about 20 Lita apiece, or $7.00 US.
Afterwards we lounged horizontally in an al fresco pub in a park in the center of the old town. Families were playing happily in the sunshine, and some dancers were (sans music) practicing their new swing moves a short distance away.
Soon they (and we) found the missing music – a US-based ethnic folk dance band called The Blasting Company started a set nearby, playing a set that bounced between Dixieland and the Balkans. At first, we thought they were locals banging out traditional music of Lithuania (not that we knew exactly what that might sound like), but they showed their roots between songs by speaking in very American English and forgetting the name of the local currency (the Lita) in their CD sales pitches.
After a few songs, the swing dancers meandered over to the band and inquired if they could dance along to the fun mix of gypsy tunes and Americana. A fun mix of the two arts followed.
It was one of those fun moments of travel when we realized (once again) that we didn’t have to rush around town chasing events or historical places to have a good time or see something new and unique. Slow down and the world often comes to you.
The band moved on to a venue for an evening gig and we moved on as well. The evening’s events included a visit to Cathedral Square (Vilnius’ large central plaza) and a large ice cream cone each. Due to our late lunch, we weren’t hungry for dinner until late, at which point all the good restaurants were closed. We punted and had a kabob, borsch and can of Coca-Cola at a 24-hour Lithuanian diner where a rather drunk woman was passing out on the table next to us. Good company.
Borsch. pink as Pepto-Bismol.
The next morning, August 6th, I woke up in a full sweat in the bed pod thanks to what felt like a complete lack of air in the room. Good start.
The included breakfast at A-Hostel wasn’t what I would call breakfast – more like white bread, cheap jam and a toaster for the bread. It didn’t do the trick. Thus, lunch followed “breakfast” almost immediately. We wanted to try typical Lithuanian food, for which we had to stray a bit from the old town, which seemed dominated by bistros and places with English menus. We found a dingy little lunch place and ordered up: cabbage rolls, borsch and cepelinai, one of the worst things Cecilia and I have put in our mouths to date. Sorry Lithuania. It just wasn’t good.
I failed to take a picture of my awful cepelinai, so here’s one from Wikipedia that looks a lot more appealing. Don’t be fooled. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons user “Jpatokal”.
Cepelinai (“zeppelin” when translated to English) are large dumplings of potato flour cooked around minced meat, and then covered in gravy or other toppings. The potato surrounds of our cepelinai were a tasteless, gelatinous sludge that felt altogether wrong to sink your teeth into. Also, they were huge – probably about 20 cm long. That’s a lot of rubbery potato and mystery meat! One order included two of them. I made my best effort to finish just one of them so as to not send back a full plate of one of Lithuania’s national foods (as if the distracted bartender would actually be emotionally wounded if not), but I just couldn’t hack it. Other locals around the eatery were ordering up and tearing into their cepelinai with vigor. We finished the cabbage rolls and borsch (both of which were served with potatoes, as if we needed more potatoes) and moved on.
To walk off the sticky, heavy meal, we did the short climb up the hill to Gediminas Tower, which overlooks the old city. The road to the top was paved in cobblestones, but this being eastern Europe, a woman in five-inch stilettos was climbing the hill alongside us – and keeping up, somehow!
presenting: Vilnius, Lithuania!
We took our time and headed back into the city, stopping for a beer, a coffee, whatever. Vilnius’ UNESCO-recognized old city wasn’t as heavily touristed as Tallinn’s or Riga’s, and let us fall into more of a relaxed mood. Locals were walking about enjoying the sunny Sunday.
Pilies Gatve, the main tourist street in Vilnius. Also: the guy on the left may or may not be wearing a shirt that says “addicted to bitches”. I suppose we’ll never know.
Vilnius probably deserved a little more attention, but we just didn’t have time on this trip – our night bus to Warsaw would depart at 10:30 PM for a seven-hour ride into Poland’s capital.
We must have gotten the last seats on the bus, because they were in the rear – those unenviable seats that don’t recline at all. No amount of body contortion or repositioning of jackets-as-pillows could make it a great place to sleep, so we stayed up for a bit and watched a movie on the in-seat entertainment system. The movie was Final Destination 5, in which the entire cast is brutally killed while riding on a bus within the first ten minutes of the film’s run time. How very appropriate for our long bus ride. Sweet dreams!
Did we get a complete feel for Vilnius? I can’t say that, no. Due to the short time we had to explore the city, all I can really do is tell the story of our day in this post. But what I can say is this: the vibe was good in the city and the people we met were quite friendly. I wouldn’t mind another visit at some point!
NEXT POST: WARSAW, POLAND
