All Saints Day
Trip Start
Aug 18, 2007
1
24
44
Trip End
Ongoing
Raseiniai, Lithuania
Saturday, November 3, 2007
On the 1st of November all people who observe this holiday in Lithuania go to the cemetary and light a candle for those loved ones who have been lost along the way. I had barely noticed it but for the month running up to the day supermarket impulse racks (the ones just near the cash registers) had been stocked with different types of candles in exquisite glass jars. These jars keep the candle from blowing out in the wind.
We started out in Vilnius on the bus to Raseiniai (said Ras-ay-nee), where my girlfriend Vik comes from. It was a little bit daunting for me because I was checking into Hotel Linikiene: Vik's mum's house. We had a reservation in the luxury suite for four days right next to the kitchen. During the long weekend there all we did was eat and sleep except for one instance. Vik and I went outside to rake the leaves off the front lawn for her mother. It took about an hour or so and then we were done. Maybe you could guess what was to come next for us? FOOD. Both Vik's mum and her sister are good in front of the stove and they didn't let me down. I am not usually a fan of eating pork, but they did something that made me not notice.
Vik made a cake of sorts called 'Tinginys' which was made of only four ingredients: buscuits, butter, sweetened condensed milk and cocoa. For people who have never seen it, it is hard to imagine, so I will simply describe the process and maybe you will get a better idea. You break the buscuits into small pieces in a big bowl. Then you melt the butter, a lot of butter at that and add the sweetened condensed milk. When all of this is nice and runny you add the cocoa slowly and mix it all together so its even. The penultimate step is to mix the now-brown liquid into the buscuits so it is a lumpy sludge. As it starts to cool it becomes less viscous and you put on to baking paper and fold it up like a present. Last step, put it into the fridge and wait a few hours. What you get when you unfold the paper is Tinginys, the solidified cold 'cake'. For your information, Tinginys translates literally as 'lazy'.
Now to the actually reason for going to the town...
I got a terrible cold when I was in Raseiniai and it lasted a while after, but all in all the eating glut was a nice weekend away.
