Bunda jau, Baltija (Part 2, Lietuva)
Dec. 9th, 2010 05:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
urania_himeSo, turns out I wasn't exaggerating when I said it'd be months before I got around to posting some more pictures... Who'd have thought! xD
I proudly present you here: photos from my travel across the Baltic states way back this summer! Today: Lietuva aka Lithuania! :)
So, to jog your memory a bit, here is the last post I made, the one about Latvia. So check it to see what this post is about (in the likely case that you've forgotten it over the last two months xD), if you want to. :)
To match it to the last post, it'd be nifty to start with a song again, yes? ;) Aaaand I chose you, glittery Eurovision band! xD
I actually really love this song and still think it's a shame they didn't make it to the finals. The text also is very Baltic, so I guess it fits in here. :)
And there we are! In Lithuania! :D
The first city we visited in Lithuania was Palanga. It's kind of a resort town and a very famous among tourists, especially among the Lithuanians. It has a nice beach which, in conrast to the other beaches, was packed! When I look at the photos now, it actually doesn't seem that crowded. xD
The weather was warm and nice but I had forgotten my swimsuit in the car. :(
And they have cool ads in Lithuania! JUST LOOK AT THE TELEPHONE COMPANY DINOSAUR!! xD
Then we drove til Klaipėda (the former Memel) where we stayed for the night. :) There you can see...
… the "Ännchen von Tharau" fountain! :D
And the theater at the market (where the fountain also is).
We stayed in Klaipėda two night but actually didn't see all that much of the town because we spent the whole second day on the Kuršių nerija, the Curonian Spit! Or "Kurische Nehrung". :)
This might very well be one of the prettiest places I've ever been to. It's just such a dreamy, beautiful landscape you really don't want to go away once you're there.
But I guess pictures say it better, eh? ;)
Oh, but first off, you know what walked on the street right in front of me when I was driving! A HUGE ELK! Luckily it was away far enough so I could slow down! And OMG, I never saw a real elk just walking around freely before! I was so amazed! IT WAS AWESOME! :D
*coughs* Anyway, let's get on with the pictures, eh? ;)
View on the Curonian Spit from a pier in Nida.
And they have such prettily painted houses there! :D It's the traditional Curonian colours, blue for the sky, white for the sand and brown for the sea. At least that's what I read in the guide, don't hold me responsible for this information. :P
And those are the traditional flags which double as a family crest of sorts.
Not far from Nida, you can visit the Thomas Mann house which is now a little museum dedicated to him (and also a little to the rest of the family). When you climb up there from the side of the Courland Lagoon, you have a really nice view though the trees:
And this is Mr. Mann's house in question! Also painted traditionally.
After being all cultural we wanted to go swimming in the Baltic Sea and not in the lagoon, so we just thought, "Well, the land shouldn't be very broad here, so we'll just walk through the forest and we're there", but it actually took quite some time... But it was a nice walk through a stunning forest.
And that's the Baltic Sea with the whitest of sand! Isn't it awesome? :D
Have some impressions...
Huge waves! Those are the best! (Though you have to be really careful not to be dragged out too far by the current.)
A storm is coming! Thankfully, it passed right over us. :)
The we wanted to go to the large dune, so we had to walk though the forest again:
This time we found a path which was more official and eventually led us to a lighthouse!
The dune as seen form Nida.
The dune is huge and very, very impressive. I think it also is the highest (or largest) dune of its kind. I'm not an expert, but I think it is a wandering dune.
From the dune you can look to Russia. Hi Russia!
View on Nida.
You just feel like you're in a real desert.
Afterwards we were hungry so we just went where all the Lithuanians went and bought some delicious freshly cured fish. Yummy!
(Also cola, but that's just international. xD)
I think Lithuania has awesome "Caution! Deer!" signs. The deer just look so excited somehow. So I had to get a photo!
And like it was an omen, we encountered our second elk that day!! The picture is blurry and hard to make out (there wasn't any place to park the car D:), but it's still awesome! xD
The next day we continued and troed to get a view of the Curonian Spit from the land, but it was so stormy, so we didn't really take the view in a lot, but rather admired the wind. xD
This is Ventė, a cute little town separated by a channel and apparently everybody has a boat and uses it to visit his neighbours and so on.
Me, the bird photographer! *laughs*
Sadly, I forgot the town's name where this castle is, but it's still pretty. :) Nowadays it's an elementary school. That's really nice, I think.
Our next stop was Kaunas, where we had a hell of a hard time finding our hotel, and when we found it, they told us, it was overbooked and we had to find the new hotel. Agh.
Aside from the confusing one-way streets, they do have a pretty church.
And when we walked around on the search for an ATM, I saw the best rainbow! I love rainbows! :D
After climbing like 1000 stairs you get a pretty nice view of Kaunas. :)
Also in Kaunas punk is not dead which always is a great joy to my mother. xD When we walked around in the rain, I kind of lost sight of my mother, and where did I find her? A little down the road talking with some punks. It was a hilarious sight. xD
Next we went to see Trakai with Trakai Castle, one of Lithuania's (if not the) most famous sights:
I love this picture! xD It's like the slow sinking of a boat in all its stages.
And where did we go next?
The amazingly awesome Vilnius! :D It's a really nice city with lots of stuff to see.
It means something along the lines of "I do too" (literally "And I you.” but you can't say that in English, can you?). The words on the riverbank on the other side say "I love you!" in Lithuanian, so I think it's reaaaally cute. ♥
This bridge is so weirdly Soviet in a city (and a country) that tries very hard to rid itself from any Soviet reminders in the form of building and bridges etc. I kind of wondered why they still had those statues on the bridge around, but then I read the sign that is attached below each statue. They are very sorry, but sadly Europe doesn't allow them to demolish the bridge/the statues because very sadly, this bridge, and more important the statues, are listed. So they can't. And they don't like it. I felt kind of terrible for finding it this funny... :P
Vilnius at night. This is the St. Stanislaus Cathedral (Vilniaus Šv. vyskupo Stanislovo ir Šv. Vladislovo arkikatedra bazilika. Yes, it actually is that long in Lithuanian. XD But it's just the full name which somehow also features a certain St. Ladislaus), doesn't it look really cool? xD (I admit I was kind of drunk when I took the photo, so blurry...)
The next day was also spent in Vilnius. We went to see quite a lot! The guy we met who also traveled the same route we were, had a Russian teacher who is from Vilnius and lives there when she doesn't have to teach Russian in Munich. She's Lithuanian though and had a lot of interesting stuff to tell!
Inside of the St. Peter and St. Paul's church (Šv. apaštalų Petro ir Povilo bažnyčia ).
The Gediminas tower:
... from where you have an awesome view of the city!
When you marry in Lithuania, you attach a lock on a bridge, symbolising that a gap between humans can always be bridged and that they can be brought together forever. ♥
There's a lot of weddings in Lithuania.
Užupio, the "Republic on the other side of the river" is a quarter for artists and "free spirits" in Vilnius. They have a bit of a freestate thing going on... xD
This is what it looks like:
Dene (our guide) said Lithuanians sympathise with Tibetians a lot because they were also oppressed by a mighty country that wanted them to get rid of their culture. That's whay in Užupio you see a lot of prayer flags.
The very famous Gate of Dawn (Aušros Vartai):
Inside is the icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of Mercy which is said to have miraculous powers like healing. I tried to walk under it against my sore feet, but it didn't work. :(
In the evening Dene took us to an alternative music festival. Where they had a cow on the wall. xD
And that's goodbye to Vilnius!
Next day we travelled on and we went to see the Hill of Crosses (Kryžių kalnas) in Šiauliai.
It's... a lot of crosses. Like. A lot. See for yourself:
It has a really cool history which I'm too tired to tell now, but as always Wikipedia provides a good summary.
And that means bye-bye to the beautiful Lithuania as it was our last stop there.
...
So, yeah, this is my photo travel report of Lithuania, but since we had to cross Latvia again, in order to get to Estonia, I'll post those pictures, too. :)
First off, Rundāle Palace (Rundāles pils), a barock palace in Latvia which is very nicely renovated and has amazing gardens.
The front.
View from the garden.
... and something to laugh at:
They had a rose exhibition. xD Some roses have the silliest names.
For the night we stayed in Sigulda from where it isn't far to the Gutmanis Cave.
It has a rather sad legend attached to it, which I present you here, stolen from Wikipedia... *coughs*
After a battle at the foot of Turaida Castle in 1601, the castle clerk, while searching for survivors, found a baby in the arms of its dead mother. He called the child Maija and brought her up as his own. She grew up to be very beautiful and so was known as the "Rose of Turaida". She fell in love with Viktor, the gardener at the castle of Sigulda (opposite Turaida over the Gauja River) and in the autumn of 1620 they prepared to be married. Shortly before the wedding Maija received a letter from Viktor asking her to meet him at the Gutmanis Cave, their usual meeting place. She went to the cave with Lenta, the young daughter of her adoptive father. When she reached it, however, it was not Viktor she encountered but a Polish nobleman or soldier called Adam Jakubowski who was lying in wait for her with the intention of forcing her to be his wife. Maija promised to give him her magic scarf, that had the power to make the wearer immune from injury (in some versions the scarf is impossible to cut through), if he would let her go, and persuaded him to test its power on her. He struck her with an axe and she died, having thus saved her honour.
In the evening Viktor came to the cave and found the body of his betrothed and was accused of the murder. But in court there appeared a witness called Peteris Skudritis, who testified that he had been commissioned by Jakubowski to deliver the fatal letter. The girl Lenta confirmed the course of events. Viktor buried his betrothed near the castle, planted a linden tree on the grave and left the country for ever. According to documents in Sigulda's archives the soldier was later caught, tried and hanged for his crime. From then on it has been customary for newlyweds to leave flowers on the grave of the Rose of Turaida in hopes of knowing the same eternal love and devotion.
;_;
When we visited it rather early in the morning, a guy way sweeping it. xD I don't know why...
And once again we have to say goodbye to another country.
And when you approach the boarder, they still have those signs even though nobody actually is at the border to guard it.
So, yeah, those were a lot of photos... :)
Hope you enjoyed it and see you again in the last part about Estonia? ♥
ETA: So... I just noticed I haven't resized the pictures beforehand... I won't go through them now because if I do I might go insane! So yeah. Hope you have good bandwidth.
I proudly present you here: photos from my travel across the Baltic states way back this summer! Today: Lietuva aka Lithuania! :)
So, to jog your memory a bit, here is the last post I made, the one about Latvia. So check it to see what this post is about (in the likely case that you've forgotten it over the last two months xD), if you want to. :)
To match it to the last post, it'd be nifty to start with a song again, yes? ;) Aaaand I chose you, glittery Eurovision band! xD
I actually really love this song and still think it's a shame they didn't make it to the finals. The text also is very Baltic, so I guess it fits in here. :)
And there we are! In Lithuania! :D
The first city we visited in Lithuania was Palanga. It's kind of a resort town and a very famous among tourists, especially among the Lithuanians. It has a nice beach which, in conrast to the other beaches, was packed! When I look at the photos now, it actually doesn't seem that crowded. xD
The weather was warm and nice but I had forgotten my swimsuit in the car. :(
And they have cool ads in Lithuania! JUST LOOK AT THE TELEPHONE COMPANY DINOSAUR!! xD
Then we drove til Klaipėda (the former Memel) where we stayed for the night. :) There you can see...
… the "Ännchen von Tharau" fountain! :D
And the theater at the market (where the fountain also is).
We stayed in Klaipėda two night but actually didn't see all that much of the town because we spent the whole second day on the Kuršių nerija, the Curonian Spit! Or "Kurische Nehrung". :)
This might very well be one of the prettiest places I've ever been to. It's just such a dreamy, beautiful landscape you really don't want to go away once you're there.
But I guess pictures say it better, eh? ;)
Oh, but first off, you know what walked on the street right in front of me when I was driving! A HUGE ELK! Luckily it was away far enough so I could slow down! And OMG, I never saw a real elk just walking around freely before! I was so amazed! IT WAS AWESOME! :D
*coughs* Anyway, let's get on with the pictures, eh? ;)
View on the Curonian Spit from a pier in Nida.
And they have such prettily painted houses there! :D It's the traditional Curonian colours, blue for the sky, white for the sand and brown for the sea. At least that's what I read in the guide, don't hold me responsible for this information. :P
And those are the traditional flags which double as a family crest of sorts.
Not far from Nida, you can visit the Thomas Mann house which is now a little museum dedicated to him (and also a little to the rest of the family). When you climb up there from the side of the Courland Lagoon, you have a really nice view though the trees:
And this is Mr. Mann's house in question! Also painted traditionally.
After being all cultural we wanted to go swimming in the Baltic Sea and not in the lagoon, so we just thought, "Well, the land shouldn't be very broad here, so we'll just walk through the forest and we're there", but it actually took quite some time... But it was a nice walk through a stunning forest.
And that's the Baltic Sea with the whitest of sand! Isn't it awesome? :D
Have some impressions...
Huge waves! Those are the best! (Though you have to be really careful not to be dragged out too far by the current.)
A storm is coming! Thankfully, it passed right over us. :)
The we wanted to go to the large dune, so we had to walk though the forest again:
This time we found a path which was more official and eventually led us to a lighthouse!
The dune as seen form Nida.
The dune is huge and very, very impressive. I think it also is the highest (or largest) dune of its kind. I'm not an expert, but I think it is a wandering dune.
From the dune you can look to Russia. Hi Russia!
View on Nida.
You just feel like you're in a real desert.
Afterwards we were hungry so we just went where all the Lithuanians went and bought some delicious freshly cured fish. Yummy!
(Also cola, but that's just international. xD)
I think Lithuania has awesome "Caution! Deer!" signs. The deer just look so excited somehow. So I had to get a photo!
And like it was an omen, we encountered our second elk that day!! The picture is blurry and hard to make out (there wasn't any place to park the car D:), but it's still awesome! xD
The next day we continued and troed to get a view of the Curonian Spit from the land, but it was so stormy, so we didn't really take the view in a lot, but rather admired the wind. xD
This is Ventė, a cute little town separated by a channel and apparently everybody has a boat and uses it to visit his neighbours and so on.
Me, the bird photographer! *laughs*
Sadly, I forgot the town's name where this castle is, but it's still pretty. :) Nowadays it's an elementary school. That's really nice, I think.
Our next stop was Kaunas, where we had a hell of a hard time finding our hotel, and when we found it, they told us, it was overbooked and we had to find the new hotel. Agh.
Aside from the confusing one-way streets, they do have a pretty church.
And when we walked around on the search for an ATM, I saw the best rainbow! I love rainbows! :D
After climbing like 1000 stairs you get a pretty nice view of Kaunas. :)
Also in Kaunas punk is not dead which always is a great joy to my mother. xD When we walked around in the rain, I kind of lost sight of my mother, and where did I find her? A little down the road talking with some punks. It was a hilarious sight. xD
Next we went to see Trakai with Trakai Castle, one of Lithuania's (if not the) most famous sights:
I love this picture! xD It's like the slow sinking of a boat in all its stages.
And where did we go next?
The amazingly awesome Vilnius! :D It's a really nice city with lots of stuff to see.
It means something along the lines of "I do too" (literally "And I you.” but you can't say that in English, can you?). The words on the riverbank on the other side say "I love you!" in Lithuanian, so I think it's reaaaally cute. ♥
This bridge is so weirdly Soviet in a city (and a country) that tries very hard to rid itself from any Soviet reminders in the form of building and bridges etc. I kind of wondered why they still had those statues on the bridge around, but then I read the sign that is attached below each statue. They are very sorry, but sadly Europe doesn't allow them to demolish the bridge/the statues because very sadly, this bridge, and more important the statues, are listed. So they can't. And they don't like it. I felt kind of terrible for finding it this funny... :P
Vilnius at night. This is the St. Stanislaus Cathedral (Vilniaus Šv. vyskupo Stanislovo ir Šv. Vladislovo arkikatedra bazilika. Yes, it actually is that long in Lithuanian. XD But it's just the full name which somehow also features a certain St. Ladislaus), doesn't it look really cool? xD (I admit I was kind of drunk when I took the photo, so blurry...)
The next day was also spent in Vilnius. We went to see quite a lot! The guy we met who also traveled the same route we were, had a Russian teacher who is from Vilnius and lives there when she doesn't have to teach Russian in Munich. She's Lithuanian though and had a lot of interesting stuff to tell!
Inside of the St. Peter and St. Paul's church (Šv. apaštalų Petro ir Povilo bažnyčia ).
The Gediminas tower:
... from where you have an awesome view of the city!
When you marry in Lithuania, you attach a lock on a bridge, symbolising that a gap between humans can always be bridged and that they can be brought together forever. ♥
There's a lot of weddings in Lithuania.
Užupio, the "Republic on the other side of the river" is a quarter for artists and "free spirits" in Vilnius. They have a bit of a freestate thing going on... xD
This is what it looks like:
Dene (our guide) said Lithuanians sympathise with Tibetians a lot because they were also oppressed by a mighty country that wanted them to get rid of their culture. That's whay in Užupio you see a lot of prayer flags.
The very famous Gate of Dawn (Aušros Vartai):
Inside is the icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of Mercy which is said to have miraculous powers like healing. I tried to walk under it against my sore feet, but it didn't work. :(
In the evening Dene took us to an alternative music festival. Where they had a cow on the wall. xD
And that's goodbye to Vilnius!
Next day we travelled on and we went to see the Hill of Crosses (Kryžių kalnas) in Šiauliai.
It's... a lot of crosses. Like. A lot. See for yourself:
It has a really cool history which I'm too tired to tell now, but as always Wikipedia provides a good summary.
And that means bye-bye to the beautiful Lithuania as it was our last stop there.
...
So, yeah, this is my photo travel report of Lithuania, but since we had to cross Latvia again, in order to get to Estonia, I'll post those pictures, too. :)
First off, Rundāle Palace (Rundāles pils), a barock palace in Latvia which is very nicely renovated and has amazing gardens.
The front.
View from the garden.
... and something to laugh at:
They had a rose exhibition. xD Some roses have the silliest names.
For the night we stayed in Sigulda from where it isn't far to the Gutmanis Cave.
It has a rather sad legend attached to it, which I present you here, stolen from Wikipedia... *coughs*
After a battle at the foot of Turaida Castle in 1601, the castle clerk, while searching for survivors, found a baby in the arms of its dead mother. He called the child Maija and brought her up as his own. She grew up to be very beautiful and so was known as the "Rose of Turaida". She fell in love with Viktor, the gardener at the castle of Sigulda (opposite Turaida over the Gauja River) and in the autumn of 1620 they prepared to be married. Shortly before the wedding Maija received a letter from Viktor asking her to meet him at the Gutmanis Cave, their usual meeting place. She went to the cave with Lenta, the young daughter of her adoptive father. When she reached it, however, it was not Viktor she encountered but a Polish nobleman or soldier called Adam Jakubowski who was lying in wait for her with the intention of forcing her to be his wife. Maija promised to give him her magic scarf, that had the power to make the wearer immune from injury (in some versions the scarf is impossible to cut through), if he would let her go, and persuaded him to test its power on her. He struck her with an axe and she died, having thus saved her honour.
In the evening Viktor came to the cave and found the body of his betrothed and was accused of the murder. But in court there appeared a witness called Peteris Skudritis, who testified that he had been commissioned by Jakubowski to deliver the fatal letter. The girl Lenta confirmed the course of events. Viktor buried his betrothed near the castle, planted a linden tree on the grave and left the country for ever. According to documents in Sigulda's archives the soldier was later caught, tried and hanged for his crime. From then on it has been customary for newlyweds to leave flowers on the grave of the Rose of Turaida in hopes of knowing the same eternal love and devotion.
;_;
When we visited it rather early in the morning, a guy way sweeping it. xD I don't know why...
And once again we have to say goodbye to another country.
And when you approach the boarder, they still have those signs even though nobody actually is at the border to guard it.
So, yeah, those were a lot of photos... :)
Hope you enjoyed it and see you again in the last part about Estonia? ♥
ETA: So... I just noticed I haven't resized the pictures beforehand... I won't go through them now because if I do I might go insane! So yeah. Hope you have good bandwidth.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 09:32 pm (UTC)Recent or not, it's still a cool tradition! I wish we had it here, too. :) Somebody told me it's originally from the Netherlands, but I really don't know if it's true. Which book btw? :)
no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 10:16 pm (UTC)I've neither read the book nor watched the film because it was a bit of a teenybopper thing, but according to IMDB the plot is: "A bad boy and a socialite girl hook-up". In a scene the two main characters put a lock on one of the bridges of Rome and Italian teens started doing the same, at first in Rome on the same bridge described in the book, then in other cities too.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 11:01 pm (UTC)So, they don't just do it when they marry? Aww. D:
no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 09:05 pm (UTC)Das "Ich dich auch" hat mein Herz geklaut, ganz ehrlich. Und der Regenbogen! Und der Elch!!! :D
Und diese kleinen, wunderschön angemalten Häuser, hachja! Und das Meer... *dickes.fettes.seufz*
Danke mal wieder! :D ♥♥♥
no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 09:35 pm (UTC)Das "Ich dich auch" ist sooo lieb, oder? :D Ich habe leider kein Foto vom "Ich liebe dich", was mich im Nachhinein ziemlich ärgert.
Elche! Elche sind cool. Auf der Kurischen Nehrung kann man laut Reideführer "mit viel Glück einen sehen" und wir gleich zwei! Manchmal hat man einfach Schwein!
Die Kurische Nehrung ist eben einfach wunder, wunderschön. :)Ich will unbedingt noch einmal hin. Und dann vielleicht in so einem Haus wohnen, das wär was. :)
Immer wieder gerne!
Und DANKE für die virtuellen Plätzchen! *hugs*