Lithuanian Stork Nests

Storks are a very popular animal here in Lithuania. They are supposed to bring good luck to any farm where they choose to build a nest and the government subsidizes nest platforms. Luckily, this is the part of the world where storks like to nest. The result: thousands of stork nests.
White storks come up from Africa in February, usually returning to the same nest that they occupied the year before. The structures are large, twiggy things that are easily visible in the leafless months - they sit on top of telephone poles, in the crooks of trees and on top of chimneys (which seems like a fire hazard). People apparently feel blessed if a stork chooses to nest on their property, and many people build platforms for them. In olden times (maybe not so long ago, really) wooden wagon wheels were used, stuck up on posts above the farmyard.

Lithuania has a springtime population of over 13,000 stork pairs, which makes it the most stork-dense of all the european nations. Poland has more storks (estimates are 16,000 to 20,000 pairs), but the country is much larger, so stork density remains fairly low in comparison, which is nice for those storks who prefer a more rural nesting experience. We see nests everywhere, here, sprouting out of trees and on top of poles. They really catch the eye. It's too bad that we're not here for the Lithuanian stork day, which is celebrated on the 25th of March, but you can't catch ALL the holidays...

Klaipeda Neptunas vs Vilnius Perlas

Merlin: They say that, in Lithuania, basketball is second only to god. Thirty litas ($11.90) got us into a house of worship this past friday night, where we witnessed the hometown boys take on the capital city team. Klaipeda almost pulled out the upset, but the visitors were a little too much bigger, better and they weren't coached by a raving lunatic.
Rebecca: I bought the tickets at a mall in Kaunas a few days earlier and we arrived in Klaipeda, hours prior to the game, a little unsure of where exactly it was to take place. After crossing and re-crossing a highway (and having a helpful woman at a jewelry counter call her teenage daughter for some insight) we figured out the game 'stadium' - which was really just a gym as big as any high school's - was adjacent to the megamall, Akropolis. We knew we were in the right place when we spotted the Vilnius Perlas team bus and a very tall Lithuanian in the parking lot.

Merlin: Basketball really is huge here. The NBA channel is on TV everywhere we've stayed and the national team has won three olympic bronze medals. I guess I expected more people to be at the game. The "stadium" was full, but there were only about three hundred people there. This league, the LKL, isn't exactly ready for television coverage or anything, but that wasn't the point. It was fun to be able to sit almost on the court, watch people compete at a fairly high level and get caught up in the excitement of a close game. We were close enough that Rebecca was hit by a ball - one of the things she had been hoping to get out of the experience.

Rebecca: It's true. Though, Merlin helped me to achieve my goal by deflecting the ball off of himself, right into my hands.
Rebecca: Every time the opposition had the ball, we would hear these awful horns sound over and over until they shot or turned it over somehow. Then, chanting began and we realized that there was a rowdy, enthusiastic bunch of fans in the corner of the gym, above our heads. I'm not quite sure why they took their shirts off. Maybe it was to impress the cheerleaders.

Merlin: Notice the police presence, at top right in the picture.

Merlin: Rebecca took this picture. I wasn't going to take any because it seemed strange to point my camera at them when we were sitting so close and they were dressed like cheerleaders. They had a number of costume changes and a more impressive routine than I would have imagined, given the small venue and crowd.

Rebecca: They had more than one routine actually. One involved hula hoops, another ribbons and costumes straight out of Aladdin. Of course, there were pom poms. I think the fatal error for our Klaipedians was that the cheerleaders were too busy changing their costumes to root them on during the play.

Merlin: We got a grease-smeared bag of these fried, garlic covered slices of rye bread. They were delicious, mostly because of all the oil that they were able to hold onto. We also drank quite a few beers and made friends with the concessions man.

Rebecca: Kepta Duona (fried bread) is a big thing here, but we've mostly seen it served as sticks not chips. When we bought these, we were sort of hoping (though also really not hoping) they were smoked pigs ears, which are also a big Lithuanian thing.

Merlin: The final score was 78 - 85, Vilnius. Our team played really hard, led by one guy we called "Steve Nash," because he was small and a point guard, and another guy we called "BGB," which is an acronym for "Big Guy Beard." BGB, it turns out, is from West Virginia, but we didn't know that until we checked the box score for the game.

Rebecca: Like Merlin said earlier, the Neptunas really did have a lot to overcome, like their height difference and their crazy coach. He reminded me of one of those wooden dolls with a pull string that makes their arms and legs move up and down simultaneously - or, like a big, pouty toddler throwing a fit while making a snow angel. Let's just say his emotions got the best of him and his limbs. Anyway, it was great.

Palanga

When the weather turns bleaker, when the first snow of the season is in the air, when the Lithuanian dirt roads are frozen and the days are getting too, too short... where do you go? Why, Palanga, of course! Might as well head to the seaside for some sun and sand, for rollicking parties and young, bronzed bodies.
Well, Palanga had pretty much closed up shop. The boardwalk was mostly deserted. The few places that did open up were empty. It had that lonely feeling that permeates all resort towns in the offseason.
The Baltic was calm and cold, the sand was wet from a constant drizzle. There weren't many people sunning themselves.
The pier was being used by fishermen, who were pulling a lot of fish out of the water. They seemed surprised to see us.

Our inn, Vila Ramybe, is perfect for this kind of town - it's the one place that has had any people in it. People from the town gather here with the family that runs it for drinks and food. People know each other, they play cards, it's cozy, loud, friendly and a perfect antidote for the miserable weather and empty streets outside.

It's Too Early for Christmas (So, how about those fruit vendors...?)

When we arrived in Kaunas, we saw the very first signs of Christmas market set-up. On November 15th. See, Europe doesn't have Thanksgiving, so there's really nothing to stop people from jumping headlong into Christmas as soon as November begins. The white, cobweb-looking light structure at the left of the building will soon sell wooden toys, hot wine and angels made of every material imaginable.
There's no doubt that these two little girls are very excited about ole Santa coming to town, but I just can't let myself get in the spirit just yet. It's too early. So, let's switch subjects.
These standalone produce kiosks reminded me of home. While candy, soda, magazine, cigarette stands have been around in almost every European city we've been to so far, these were the first fruit-and-vegetable stands where you could - say- grab an apple on the way to work.
Here's another one of the stands. You know this kid is staring off into the distance towards the Christmas lights....
Once you're done with your piece of fruit (or candy bar, if you've opted for the crap kiosk) you get to discard your core, peel, wrapper into one of these awesomely camoflouged trash receptacles. They are about as tall as a curb and have these removable metal containers that extend down into the ground. At least, I figure that's how it works, there being a little handle and all. They're perfect for the person who wants to feel the evil thrill of polluting. Go ahead, throw that balled up receipt on the ground. Just aim for the hole.

Gypsy Kitchens: Šaltibarščiai (Lithuanian Cold Beet Soup)

Rebecca and I have been eating a lot of soup in Lithuania - in the past month, really. One of my favorites has been the Šaltibarščiai, or cold beet soup. It is, of course, a borscht variant - like basically every recipe in this part of the world. The Lithuanian version is actually a summer soup, and it's characterized by the addition of kefir ("kefyra," in Lithuanian) and raw cucumber. It is one of the easiest soups I've ever made, even in someone else's tiny kitchen. Rebecca made a delicious mix of sauteed vegetables. She interpreted Brooklyn bacon-mania with an interesting, pescetarian twist, and it was great.
One starts with beets, which is pretty obvious. I started with three medium sized beets, but found that I really only needed two of them. It didn't disappoint me that I had an extra beet, though, because I love beets. Cook the beets well, boiling or roasting them whole. I would have preferred to roast the beets, but our oven didn't function well enough. Boiling had one great advantage: leftover cooking liquid.
Here are the beets - cooked, peeled and accompanied by a cup of beautiful beet-water. At this point, the cooking is done, which is awesome. It's good to do this a while before you want to eat. It could be three or four hours before, or up to a few days. Boiling beets is extremely easy to do, especially when it's the most difficult thing about a recipe.
Okay, so there are a few other steps. The most time-consuming is hardboiling eggs, though, which is about as difficult as pouring a glass of wine. The rest is grating and chopping, which goes quickly. Basically, the beets are grated into a pot (like I said, two medium beets were enough). Add a quarter cup of diced scallions, the yolks from two hardboiled eggs (smushed), one julienned cucumber and about a half gallon (less, really, because we're working with liters here - say one liter) of kefir. You can also use buttermilk, which is probably easier to find outside of Lithuania. Around here, kefir is big.

The final dish was pretty delicious: cold, rich, tasty and beautiful. The color is one of those shades that one expects never to find in nature. When garnished with the dill and egg whites, the dish has a nice mix of taste and texture accents, but the Lithuanians take it a step further. They serve the soup with hot boiled potatoes, which give the soup a nice hot-cold feature, but add about fifty percent more effort to the dish.

Here's the full recipe, which I adapted from a few sources:

Lithuanian Šaltibarščiai (Cold Beet Soup with Cucumber and Kefir)

Ingredients:

Two medium beets, cooked, peeled and chilled

One large cucumber, julienned

Two hard-boiled and chilled eggs

One quarter cup (about six roots) minced scallion

One third of a gallon kefir, or one liter

One cup cooking liquid from the beets

A lot of dill

Cook the beets in salted water for about forty-five minutes, peel them, put them in the fridge. Save about one cup of the cooking liquid. Hardboil your eggs to get that step out of the way - then go do whatever for a couple hours. It's very satisfying to know that you have a soup almost made, sitting in the fridge.

About twenty minutes before you want to eat: smush up the egg yolks with the scallion in a pot or bowl that's big enough for all of the ingredients. Grate the beets into the pot, then add the cucumber and the cooking liquid (which also should have been chilled). Mix it all up, then pour in the kefir until you think it's liquid-y enough. Give it a good dose of salt. At this point, just let it sit for about five minutes to let everything soak into itself - then ladle it into bowls. Garnish with the cut-up egg whites and a large dose of dill. Leave the dill and egg floating at the top because it looks great.

(This recipe is adapted from a version by Birutė Imbrasienė, found in "Lithuanian Traditional Foods," a cookbook that was lying around our rented apartment in Kaunas, Lithuania.)

I'll let Rebecca describe how she made her accompanying dish.

Rebecca: "I bought the salmon above at the fish counter of a tiny gourmet store in Kaunas' New Town. Merlin had his beet soup all figured out and I was looking for some inspiration for my accompanying dish. I really wanted to make a Stuffed Cabbage Head from the cookbook, but the recipe called for bacon. When I saw this fish, I thought it would make the perfect substitution.

Rebecca: "Unfortunately (or fortuitously), our oven was too finicky to try to bake the cabbage head, so I had to come up with something else. As a riff on the common Lithuanian "cabbage and bacon" model, I shredded some brussels sprouts and sauteed them with shallots in butter. Then, I added some baby spinach leaves, let them wilt and sprinkled in the diced up salmon jerky. It was very strong, so a little went a long way. Lastly, I added another ingredient we've seen a lot of, plums, half of one, thinly sliced. It was a really under-ripe plum, but the cooking fixed that."

Castle Hunting: Trakai Castle

Lithuania doesn't have a large number of castles, and a lot of the fortifications that they used to have are completely ruined at this point. Trakai is definitely the crown jewel of the Lithuanian castle scene. It's only forty-five minutes (maybe half an hour, if you speed - which, if you read on, you'll learn is a bad idea) outside of Vilnius and it's heavily publicized by tour groups, guidebooks and the Lithuanian government. It is, like so many castles, a majorly reconstructed building. During the postwar period it was essentially rebuilt from the ground up.
It is situated here in the middle of Lake Galvė. We got there early enough to avoid the swarms of tourists that were arriving as we left, but not before a number of vendors and beggars had congregated around the entrance to the bridge. There were kids playing recorders, people selling amber and carved wood - and one old man selling smoked eel. I wondered if he was selling the eel to the tourists or to the other profiteers.
This castle was almost completely rebuilt. It was initially built to help protect the Vilnius region from the Teutonic Knights (Malbork Castle was their headquarters) during the fourteenth century. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Polish and Lithuanian owners of the castle largely ignored its upkeep because it had ceased to be strategically located and was expensive to take care of. It fell into disrepair and was largely a ruin by the beginning of the twentieth century. After WWII, Lithuania began to rebuild the keep and the upper walls - it was seen as an important landmark in the new republic. During the soviet period, the reconstruction project was halted for twenty years after Nikita Khrushchev declared the castle a symbol of Lithuania's feudal past, saying that it glorified inequality. The final touches were put on in 1992, after independence.

One thing about our trip so far: we've been mostly in very low-lying, flat lands. This means that we've seen a lot of brick castles. Lowlands tend to have limited supplies of rock, especially in wetter land. It's not what one thinks of when thinking about castles, but I think they're actually very pretty. In addition, brick allowed the architects and masons to build smoother lines and more complicated angles. It's interesting to contrast the clean cylinder of the above tower to the rougher walls of many stone examples from the same era.
We left Trakai on our way to Kaunas, feeling lucky that we had an hour of good weather in an otherwise ugly day. About five minutes out of town we got pulled over by a pair of policemen. They weren't TOO surly, but they weren't overly friendly either. A warning to travelers: Lithuania is very strict about speed limits, especially around tourist attractions. Not that it does much good: they have the highest vehicle fatality rate in the European Union. I was luckily able to pay the fine on the spot and make one of the policemen laugh, so we were free to go (very slowly) on our way.

Made in Lithuania

These signs were all over Vilnius' old town, outside linen shops. Like most of the shops and galleries in the city, the goods were made right there in the store, by the artisan. Tourists go into the workshop, maybe look around at the process and then purchase something to remember it by - or just if they happen to be in the market for a traditional wedding sash.
The only thing more popular than linen was amber. Along with the requisite jewelry, there were figurines, sculptures even massages with "amber oil." I have a feeling that the "number 1" may have been an approximate translation of something that means official, authentic, endorsed or "top," because almost every store was "Number 1."What do you do if you can't decide between the Number 1 Linen Shop and the Number 1 Shop of Amber? You go to the Number 1 Linen & Amber in Lithuania of course. I'm curious to see if these are Vilnius-specific or not. I'm kind of hoping to find a Number 1 Beef sign outside a farm in the countryside.

Lock Bridge

We came across this bridge when crossing over the Vilnia River into Užupis, the bohemian neighborhood of Vilnius. The neighborhood declared itself "an independent state" in 1998, appointing a president and drafting a Constitution that guaranteed running water and the right of a dog to be a dog.
Anyway, when we spotted all the locks hanging from the bridge, we assumed it was some sort of quirky and/or radical installation piece and started snapping away.
When we got home, we looked it up and discovered that it was "Lovers Lock Bridge" which was much quainter and sweeter than we had imagined. Newlyweds affix a lock to bind their union and then return to saw it off if they get divorced. Though, I'm not sure every divorcee would love to stand on a bridge with their saw-wielding ex.

Something Old, Something New

Every European big city we've been to has had an Old Town and a New Town, one of which has any pre-war architecture that has been preserved and the other has H&M. Vilnius' Old Town is one of the largest Medieval centers in all of Europe and its New Town has the corporations responsible for about 25% of Lithuanian's entire GDP. Looking out over the River Neris from atop the Vilnius Castle ruin, I could see the vast difference between the two places, but what I'll always remember about the capital city of Lithuania was how old and new smashed up against each other, sometimes beautifully, sometimes jarringly in the outskirts.
As soon as we started wandering outside of the city center, we noticed this old, wooden house and the Soviet-era neighbor sitting in its backyard. Both remnants of past eras in Vilnius, in Lithuania, in this entire part of Europe. It sort of reminded me of layers of wallpaper, pasted one on top of the other, a hint at what the previous owners were like.
These two houses seemed like they were right out of a Scandinavian design catalog, reminding us that we are actually very close to Scandinavia right now. We snapped this picture and then turned around to see what was directly across the street.
The fact that each house has a view of the other is so intriguing to me. This was just one of the many homes that were in serious disrepair, but were still lived in. While we didn't see anyone go in or out, we knew there were residents because of belongings left on their porch and the two cars parked in their driveway.
Between the two vehicles was a working well and disconcertingly close to the old-fashioned water source was their outhouse.
There was an outhouse outside of this building as well, though it looked like they had still found some of the creature comforts of modern living. More satellite dishes were strung up on the side as well. Sometimes a picture really just says it all better than words.

Vilnius Markets

We're in Vilnius, which seems very much like an affluent, Western European city - until you stray out of the old-town center. We drove out to a laundromat yesterday (they are surprisingly hard to find in the center of town) and discovered the concrete, soviet-era outskirts. One of the nicer things about the district was the little market that was going on behind a large Eki supermarket.
One thing about European markets: they tend to be outdoors. It's strange, to me, that they haven't been covered in more cases. The stalls are semi-permanent, and they house the same purveyors regularly. This market had fruit and vegetable sellers on one side (at right in the photo above), and meat vendors on the other (at left). The vegetables were out in the open, the sausages and steaks were sold out of little windows.
Vans crowded around the market square - really a gap between buildings. It's difficult to tell if these potatoes have just been bought or are waiting to be sold.
Today we went into a cavernous, covered market near the train station. There were a large selection of smoked and otherwise-cured meats. Also fish, cheap clothing, cigarettes, alcohol, chinese paper parasols and even a few vegetables - though not many.
The Lithuanians definitely like their sides of pork. As you can see, there's a nice range of fattiness.
It was quite crowded, it smelled like salt and it was a little too warm. We left without buying anything - dinner plans - but wished that we had.
Outside, other booths were set up in a much more makeshift way. Here were the fruits and vegetables.
And mushrooms. They seem to like their mushrooms dried instead of fresh, but that may be a function of supply and not demand. We think that the basket on the ground was full of cranberries, but that's just a guess. We've seen similar berries all over. Does anyone know what they might be (if not cranberries, which are a popular addition to foods here)?