Aaron and I, having failed in our half-assed hitching attempt, boarded a bus to Vilnius and after some lively conversations, I soon drifted off to sleep, waking up a while later not knowing what country I was in. The answer: Lithuania. We watched the sunset behind a guy riding above the countryside with a parachute and a propeller strapped to his back, then waited a bit longer to arrive into Vilnius, the capital of this country. Leaving the bus station, fireworks in the Western sky celebrated our arrival, or perhaps marked the horror that is Eurovision.
Arriving at our preordained hostel, we again ran into our good American buddies Amber and Joe, as well as Josh who had come from Riga that day. The four of us Anglo guys went out to celebrate Saturday night until the early morning hours.
The next morning, Aaron left in a rush to continue his journey, while the Texans and I marched off to the Soviet Occupation/KGB Museum to see where politcal prisoners were imprisoned, tortured and executed, as well as some history on the occupation of 1945-1989 or so. After that we felt hungry and got some food, whereupon we wandered to old town for a while before Amber and Joe and I parted ways as they headed off to a nearby town.
Once again I was on my own and while farewells are sad, it is nice to be on one's own again. After over a week of staying up until the break of dawn, I happily did next to nothing for the rest of the day before going to bed at midnight.
I awoke in the morning to a steady rain and it seemed like a fitting day to get out of Dodge. I was more than ready to leave this group of three Baltic states and get to Poland, so I caught the one daily train to Seskotai near the border, whereupon I could catch the other daily train on to Warsaw. Again, the landscape was downright pleasant as I finished the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, a generous gift from a good patrotic American named Greg that I met in Russia. Arriving in the non-entity of Seskotai, I walked across the train platform to a slightly plusher Polish train which about four hours later dropped me in the middle of Warsaw at nightfall.
With my hand-drawn map in hand, I found my way on foot to my hostel and passed the night uneventfully. The next morning, still feeling the itch to keep moving, and having heard from multiple reputable sources that Krakow was much nicer than Warsaw, I bought an onward train ticket on to the former and used the seven hours until my departure to make a cursory exploration of the capital of Poland. Here are some notes:
~ Stalin's Towers: In most major cities of the former USSR, Stalin ordered that large towers be built. All of them mirror Stalin's Seven Sisters in style. Here is a picture of the one in Warsaw:
You think he was perhaps trying to compensate for some personal defect?
~ WWII History: The war museum was closed this day, but the Jewish museum was open. The history of the Jewish ghetto was presented through images, video and text that demonstrated the horrors that happened in this place.
~ The "Old Town": 90% of the city was destroyed during the war, but they have done a lovely job of rebuilding it. Even if it's only 50 years old, it looks 500. Really though, I'm getting sick of these "Old Towns".
And then I left Warsaw by way of a Krakow-bound train. And thus began a great three days in that southern Polish city.
~ 5/18: I wake up earlyish and explore another "old town". I see Wawel Castle, a bugler in a church tower, a few hundred tourists, and those sorts of things. Really the best thing to do is to sit down and enjoy the show. In the night I share some beers in the hostel with a Kiwi, an Aussie, and a Guatemalan.
~ 5/19: In the morning as I'm about to leave the hostel for the day, I again run into Joe and Amber from Texas. I however have decided to take a bus 1.5 hours to Ocwiecim, aka the place housing the former Nazi Murder Machine of Auschwitz. There's no way to really explain my experiences there. I'll just say that I spent the day on my own trying to feel the gravity of this place, which didn't really hit me until I saw the shoes. After that I was ready to leave, and I brooded in a slow train back to Krakow.
I went out on the town that night.
~ 5/20: There was some sort of youth festival in the town square, which consisted of young people dressed in Bay-to-Breakers-style costumes consuming copious amounts of liquor. I watched from the sidelines for a while before settling down in the park to read and watch the people. A thunderstorm came and I ducked into a lonely pub, before returning back to the hostel to grab my bags and make my way to the train station to begin my overnight journey to Prague.
And that covers the week leading up to my arrival in Prague, where I now reside. Of course missing from this post, as from most, are all the intricacies of my encounters with people and my impressions of places; all those things that I can't adequately describe and will probably soon be filed away into the depths of my memory.
And I'm beginning to draw near to the end of this journey. I'm getting excited to see all of you back "home" whom I have not seen for a while, and of course nostalgic for all the relationships I've made along the way. Malaysia seems like a long ways away now, though geographically speaking it is no further away than is the Golden Gate where I began and will end. Well, see you later!
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