Warsaw and Vilnius

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Trip Start Sep 17, 2009 Previous
Entry Trip End May 05, 2010 Next
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  Vilnius, Lithuania
Monday, September 21, 2009

Yo!
This time I'm going to actually just type out my  handwritten journal cos it'll be quicker..and probably better!

So on Friday, after we'd got off the night train, we had sausage rolls for breakfast (containing about 10g of fat each) and then roamed the streets of Warsaw to try and find our hostel. Our backs were very strained still from the previous days' bagathon (carrying our backpacks all day!), so we were getting fed up with being lost. At that moment, 2 New Zealanders called Tanya and Eric spotted us in the street and just so happened to be going to the same hostel, so they showed us the way.

After we had got to the hostel and rested, we ventured out into Warsaw again which seemed to be full of massssssssssive roads of a million cars, and ridiculously huge billboards..dwarfing everyone in the city. We also kept seeing lots of Dreadzone posters and reminsced about their XTV interview. After lots of walking around we stopped at a Polish restaurant for dinner, which was advertising itself as a bit of a touristy 'Polish' place, and the waitresses were wearing tarty 'traditional Polish' dresses. It was mainly dumplings on the menu which looked more like ravioli, and we both had the meat ones..which turned out to be tuna. They were a bit weird and made Tom feel a bit sick..however we had been warned the previous night by 'Toulouse' that Polish food was disgusting! We felt very rich because we hadn't spent any money that day so we could have ordered anything we wanted on the menu with our daily budget.

After dinner we went through a very swanky shopping district and into a massive posh chocolate shop. It was cold so we went back to the hostel and after being so tired from the night train before, ended up going to bed at 9:30!.  There were lots of Polish chavs in our dorm room who were laughing very loudly and one of them kept perching his leg on the ladder of Tom's bunk..! Lol.

Saturday 19th-
After a good 12 hours sleep we had a breakfast of cereal and cheese and ham toastie...we bought an all day travel ticket for under 2 pounds, and took the metro to Ratusz Arsenal (I couldn't give a Ratusz Arsenal about it....no....? lol) to see the Old Town. It was very pretty, despite the fact that its mostly reconstructed after being destroyed in WWII. There were lots of tourists around there, and some in horse-drawn carriages. In one part there were lots of soldiers and a man giving a speech next to someone who Tom thought looked like the pope but we knew it wasn't. There was also a building next to it that did have a big picture of the Pope spread across the front which Tom said it looked like he was winking in ..lol. We also went to see a building designed by Norman Foster of gherkin fame, and we were amazed by the fountain in the middle that made loads of different patterns. We walked for ages to the bridge over the river Wista, and went to see a live display of bears (which is used as an advert for the nearby zoo) and Tom loved them, especially the bear that looked particularly wise. We bumped into Tanya and Eric (who kept talking in a Kiwi accent about how everything was 'heaps of fun') and went to explore an area of the city which the map described as a 'beehive of activity'. There was nothing there apart from a lot of art and graffitti.

We decided to check out a traditional Polish communist eating place, the complete opposite to where we'd eaten the previous night. They are called 'Milk Bars' and are basically really cheap canteens. All the meals were about 50p and 1 pound, and everyone had massive plates of chicken and potatoes. The woman at the till didn't speak any English so we just had to order something random from the menu in Polish...Tom ended up with plain pasta in oil and I ordered kluski slaskie..which I later found out was dough made out of potatoes and flour. Both weren't very nice but we'd felt we'd had an authentic Polish experience. After, we went to a Polish hypermarket to check out all the Polish products, and for some reason there were loads of women fighting over these green coats! It was very funny..
We bought Polish chocolates from the pic n mix, drinks and baguettes for the night bus to Vilnius for later. We also bought Polish doughnuts called 'pachek'.

We went back to the hostel, said our goodbyes to our Kiwi friends and then left to go to the coach station...which was a very long dark walk. When our coach arrived, the driver who didn't speak any English, babbled loads of Polish at us and wrote '19:45' on our tickets..(the bus was at 20:30). We guess that our time had changed but he was letting us on anyway, 'bounding' aroudn the coach and putting our bags in. The coach seemed to be full of people younger than us, as if we'd hijacked some sort of school trip. The driver also kept staring at us, as we were sitting in the front seats. At about 11pm, we randomly stopped in this seemingly abandoned car park in the middle of nowhere to change driver. The new driver looked a lot dodgier than the friendly old one, causing Tom to name him 'The Wallet Inspector', perhaps there to conduct a very unofficial inspection of our wallets and passports. But we were yet to experience the drama of the night.............! dun dun dunnnnnnnnnnnnn...

Somewhere in the depths of Poland, we stopped at a BP garage for a toilet break, and we guessed we had about 10 mins (we couldn't understand the Polish announcement). Most people got off, apart from us and after 10 mins a lot of people were still not back on the coach. The driver honked the horn and started to edge forward to prompt them to get back on..they still didn't..so he just drove off without them!! About an hour later he seemed to get lots of angry phone calls and eventually turned back..despite being an hour away! When we'd got back there, the people that were left behind were standing with the police. The police drove off but then a big angry argument ensued, first between one  of the women left behind and the driver, and then between the same woman and a random man sitting behind us who was really angry! There was almost a fight! The only othe revent in the night was about 5am when the Lithuanian border control people got on to check our passports.

Sunday 20th-
We arrived in Vilnius at about 7am...although turned out it was an extra hour ahead in time zones, so it was actually 8am. The rubbish coach driver said nothing but 'VILNO' into the mic when we got there..and then just drove off without another word...obviously on his way to getting sacked lol. We found a cash point to withdraw some Lithuanian Litas, and I had a very Bulgarian toilet experience (Laura Balla knows what I mean! lol). We then walked through Vilnius to get to our apartment, which seemd to be on the main street. It was so early and cold, and everywhere was completely deserted, although Vilnius looks like a really nice place. Lots of 'baroque' buildings, and everything just looks really nice...I can't describe it..! You'l have to see the pictures. We phoned up the guy who was meant to take us into the apartment, and eventually he arrived in a car. He was very large and seemed to have a very strangely glamorous girlfriend. Tom found it absolutely hilarious (in retrospect) when the large man almost fell over whilst taking our bags to the car..and then he drove us to a different apartment in true rally driver style, which Tom described as being like in a game of V Rally in the Corsica stage. Our apartment is MASSIVEEEE and has about 5 rooms! We were also told by this man (dubbed Fatman Scoop), that we had arrived on Vilnius Day! A celebration of 1000 years of Vilnius apparently...so there were lots of events going on. We went to Uzupis, a really arty district which has loads of bits of art everywhere and graffitti, and apparently has its own fake republic with constitution and president. There were loads of locks on a bridge as well, which all had couples' names on.

We also saw a massive market that had loads of Lithuanian food and Lithuanian wool..that was really nice to walk through, and we bought some kepta duona, which is a Lithuanian food consisting of bread fried in garlic with garlic mayo. In the evening there was a massive Autumn Equinox celebration by the river so we went to watch. We didn't understand any of the speech..but we watched as hundreds of candles were lit on the riverbank and there was a big display of fire eaters and fire throwers with music...it was really lucky we arrived on that day!

:)

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Our apartment in Vilnius	Vilnius square	Locks on Bridge	Uzupis
Vilnius	Market in Vilnius	Fire throwers	Fire throwers
Autumn Equinox in Vilnius

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