In Kaunas we had no laundry to do, no FTP'ing, no pressing errands to run. Instead, we had a whole day to be tourists, which felt like a real luxury. We wandered up and down the two-kilometer pedestrian mall that puts Copenhagen's Stroget to shame, checked out the cathedral (Lithuania's largest church, and full at 10 am for mass) and castle, crossed the river and rode a funicular to see a panorama of the unremarkable, industrial town, and visited two museums. The first of these was the predictably dull Postal Museum, which we stumbled into by accident, and the second was the [Devil Museum](../../mnt/user-data/uploads/glhell.htm), surely the only of its kind in the world, and consisting of an exhaustive collection of devil figurines.
Frankly, I had expected more --perhaps screenings of \"Rosemary's Baby\", hourly demonstrations of black masses, hexing opportunities. When dinner time rolled around, we headed back to the Astra Restaurant where we had dined the night before, figuring it served the best food in town. We sat on the terrace to find ourselves surrounded by the same patrons as the previous evening, most of whom were wearing the same clothes. Perhaps they hadn't moved in twenty-four hours. We were clearly in THE place in Kaunas, but I knew that one more night at Astra and we'd really feel like Bill Murray trapped in \"Groundhogs Day.\"
While Fred continued his aggressive flirtation with the Syrian boy from the night before (once again with girlfriend in tow) *\[Andrew again taking more artistic license\]*, I struck up a conversation with a Frenchman from Lille, in town to help set up a textile factory. He said that Lithuanian labor costs are one-tenth those in France, and that he comes to Kaunas so often that his firm has supplied him with an apartment. When queried whether Astra served the best food in town, he looked at me blankly and told me that he wasn't sure because he didn't go anywhere else.
We planned on having a cold drink back in our hotel room, but obtaining ice was a serious undertaking. The front desk sent us to the dingy upstairs bar, which was surprisingly crowded for a Thursday night, but the Soviet-style barmaid barked that only the restaurant could supply us with ice. Of course, once we got the attention of a waiter, he told us we had to return to the bar. I dragged him along with us to settle the matter, which had all the makings of an international incident. The barmaid and waiter argued at length before a glass full of hard water (no, we didn't want ice cream, I explained for the fifth time) was slammed on the bar in front of me, with the understanding that we'd bring the glass back the next morning at breakfast.
To make it totally official, the waiter insisted on seeing our key and duly noted our room number. But even after all that work, we never did take the glass of ice back up to the room. The other patrons at the bar urged us to stay, since it was \"English Club,\" the social event of the week for the anglophonic expatriate community of Kaunus. There was the drunken Chinese American who complained nonstop about the state of Lithuanian telecommunications, the freakishly tall Croatian we had seen earlier at Astra who played on the Kaunus basketball team, an obnoxious young Lithuanian-American from Libertyville, Illinois, and the two Danish girls we talked to whose names woefully escape us for the time being.
Like the Frenchman we had met, they worked for a textile manufacturer constructing a plant in Kaunus. They admitted with a certain amount of shame that they went to Astra \"about five times a week.\" As interesting as this insular little scene was, we opted to retire to our room after quaffing one beer on the rocks. After all (as we kept explaining to our new friends) we had to get up and ride today. And a nasty, long, hot and traffic-plagued ride it was. We spent the entire day on the \"Via Baltica,\" the highway connecting the Baltics with the non-Russian world.
Originally we had planned a little foray into either the Belorussian city of Grdno or the Kaliningrad Oblost, a chunk of Russia on the Baltic Sea (sort of a Russian Hawaii), but obtaining visas for these places would be costly and time-consuming. So we set our course in the direction of Poland and Lithuania's short border with that country, following the only possible route. It was hot and we had a nasty headwind, but it was the traffic that got to us. The road was an endless stream of stinky trucks and Ladas driven by graduates of the Butthead School of Driving.
More than once we were run off the road into the gravel shoulder by oncoming cars trying to pass. After sixty kilometers we celebrated arriving at the halfway point in one piece, in Marijampole. Fred called it \"MaryHambone\" and deemed it the ideal place to spend all of our remaining agoutis. I sent him to the supermarket on his own while I decompressed on a sidewalk with a growing number of mute spectators. He returned with several bottles of non-carbonated water (a rare commodity indeed) and stories of Lithuanian consumer frenzy. Our next stop was at the Polish border, where trucks were lined up on the Lithuanian side for more than four kilometers.
We blithely rode by them, assuming we'd be waved through as always. We passed through the several Lithuanian checkpoints without incident and marveled at the intensity of the No Man's Land on the way to Poland. There were more waiting trucks and an intimidating high fence on either side of the road. It looked very much like the old highway connecting West Berlin with the capitalist world, only with fewer guard towers and killer dogs. Then, at the first Polish checkpoint, we were stopped by a young immigrations agent with a Hitler complex. He obviously relished making us wait. I found it especially aggravating that a petty functionary was putting us in a potentially dangerous situation, since the sun would be down in less than two hours and we had thirty kilometers to ride before the first Polish town.
Amazingly, during the forty-five minutes that he tortured us, he let only a handful of trucks through. How did they deal with all the backlog, I wondered? Do all the truck and bus drivers simply take this idiotic manifestation of bureaucratic terror in stride? When Hitler finally did deign to let us pass, we still had two more posts to get through, with lots more barking, phone calls and senseless waiting. All in all, it wasn't a very favorable first impression of Poland. The plus side of this ridiculous border operation was that the road was deserted --not counting another four-kilometer line of trucks waiting to leave Poland---on the other side.
It was beautiful, too. Over the course of the day we had climbed considerably, and the rugged, lumpy terrain looked like a landscape painting by Van Gogh. The golden light of the fading sun made all the wheat fields and haystacks positively glow, and the wind had died down to a benign breeze. Before long we were screaming down a serious hill into the concrete ugliness of our evening's destination: Suwalki. It reminded me of a provincial town in China, only with far fewer people. Hideous concrete housing blocks everywhere, and the high-speed Via Baltica for a main street. We found a nasty communist place to in which to spend the night before hitting the town.
It was Friday night, after all. But all we could find in the way of action --aside from a string of scuzzy bars---was a pizza parlor with an outdoor terrace. We sat down at a table with a bunch of downtrodden looking German lads on their way home from St. Petersburg. They said they felt lucky that they only had to wait for an hour at the Lithuanian border, since it had taken seven hours to enter Russia. All five of them were clutching backpacks that contained what was left of their belongings after falling prey to theft in both Estonia and Latvia.
Fred and I looked at each other and thought about all the times we had left our bikes unguarded or had exposed ourselves to danger. Unconsciously I fingered my safe travel medallion given to me by friends Susan and Bert, thanking my lucky stars that our trip through the Baltic States had gone without a single major hitch. Maybe we should have hedged our bets and made an offering at the Devil Museum...