Artful Dodgers

Judi excavates a weighty Lonely Planet guidebook from her pack, and we make a plan.  And then, a revised plan.  And another until we are ready to hit the streets for our first days in Moscow.

It’s Sunday.  The first Fall rains drizzle in our faces and steadily soak our clothes.  Deep in the subways, families are the crowds.  Romantic couples turn to face each other, hugging while travelling the steep escalators.  At the Revolutionary station, two bronze dogs hold their noses high as passers-by reach to pet them for good luck.  The dogs’ noses are shined bright gold from the attention.

Our destination is Vernissage/Izmailova, Moscow’s outdoor market.  Vendors sell Russian handcrafts and antiques within a market situated in the shadow of a faux facade of the Kremlin. Along the sidewalk that approaches the market, honey sellers compete with each other for attracting buyers.  Misdirected hornets also are attracted.  They mire in the honey vats, skimming across the sticky surface with great difficulty on their paddling legs.

A handsome bbq chef in a white jacket calls for us to try the smoked salmon or lamb or chicken or beef kabobs.  There are tables with benches to share with other market-goers.  The tables are welcoming in their alcoves with shelter from intermittent rain.  Our benchmates are a friendly couple who gesture to us to take a picture with the chef.  We secure the offered souvenir after Judi joins the smiling chef on the business side of the red coals at his grill.  He hands her an “arrow” of meat, as the menu deftly describes in English, to use as a photo prop.  We hope he got a deal on his white coat -It reads, “Medical” in crisp, blue script )!).

The antique vendors assemble on the weekends.  The antiques are a varied lot which resemble the hodgepodge of a house sale.  One particularly nice find is an air-brushed print that is about 40 years old.  The seller introduces her friend who says that she was once an Engish teacher.  She observes that the artists who worked on poster propaganda also made domestic, decorative prints on their own such as the one in hand.  They used the same layering, screening technique.  We agree that the artistic urge cannot be confined by prevailing politics.

I was drawn to a cobalt blue porcelain cup with a Lomonosov mark.  This factory became famous in St Petersburg during Catherine the Great’s reign.  The seller said it came to Moscow from a Siberian household.  Good lord, it made it this far…I hope it will make it to south Florida.  That was the deciding moment when I became not only a traveller, but a luggage juggler of fragile things.

After mingling with home arts at the fair, we search out classical Russian art at the dignified Tretyakov / National Gallery of Art.  Russian masterworks are glorious throughout the collection which particularly features 19th C. painting.  This proud exhibition of Russian, cultural accomplishment seems like an effete chest pounding for touting Russian artistic prowess.  Praise is well earned,  but the narrative says most by omission.   Nowhere do the Gallery curators attribute any influence of European Impressionism, Cubism, or other international and visibly influential art schools on the Russian masters.  It is as if the Russian painting tradition had a virgin birth, and appeared by miraculous inspiration here at the Tretyakov.

Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire, 1880–91 (State Russian Museum).

I can forgive such a revisionist view of art history.  Especially after visiting the work of Ilya Repin, a jovial sort of painter whose wit, manliness, psychological studies, and philosphy rival the same attributes found in the literary works of Ernest Hemingway.

Getting to Know the ‘Hood

Four consecutive nights in the same hotel is so welcome.  The Arbat House is in Moscow’s Embassy Quarter and but a short walk to the Metro.  We eventually figure out how to ride the AeroExpress train from the airport into Moscow’s city center.  We drag our bags and our tired selves to the Arbat, arriving late afternoon.

We also locate a bank enroute so that we can make a money exchange and receive our first Russian roubles.  Russia guards its colorful currency by allowing only in-country sales and purchases of roubles.  There are way too many zeroes in the conversion of US dollars to roubles to assure us about the resident economy.  And guardedness continues inside the banks; we must enter the privacy of a tiny room behind a closed door, to complete any documented money exchange under the watchful eye of a single, currency exchange worker.  Invariably, the bank employee doles out large denomination bills.

Our neighborhood market. Vodka’s for sale behind the curtain toward the back.

We learn early in our visit that we must ask for “small money,” or small denomination bills so that we can do business in the shops where large bills are sometimes turned away.     The bank employee uses her discretion, or perhaps even a governmental guideline that we are not privey to, to give any amount of the requested “small money.”  She doesn’t look up as she dispenses only part of the total requested small bills.

We carry on.  As does the fledgling, capital economy.  The economic mood is similar to the translated instruction printed on our hotel fire extinguishers:  “Never give up.  Do not panic.”

Our guide at Estonia’s KGB Museum noted that many KGB agents became suddenly unemployed when the Soviet era ended.  Many former security personnel continued work at hotels.  We recall her comments at the Arbat, as a burly man in a suit maintains his vigilant presence throughout the hotel.  Throughout the City, including at the Arbat, we see doors with one-way glass and no marked purpose.  We see serious men in suits in Moscow’s Red Square and in the shopping galleries, keeping their visible presence without any obvious purpose.

On arrival, our tiredness combines with cultural awe as we slog past a row of shops selling $15 sweaters next to vendors selling $20 half-dozen roses.  We check in to the hotel and enter the elevator.  Silver buttons pop out loudly from the control panel with a sharp bang at each floor.  No safety bumpers line the elevator doors.  No Otis leaves us a repairman’s love note with his promise of a perfectly inspected lift.

Our fatique tempts us to surrender.  But we join the most hopeful of Moscow’s new consumers and buy bright Gerber daisies to counter any rain against the hotel room’s window.  We also coddle vodka, the clear and inexpensive Moscow Water, while deciding to Never Give Up, and Not Panic.  Nyet.

Dinner at the hotel is delicious.  Our young waiter, Demitry, is always smiling, but our waitress, Irina, is easily irritated.  It seems a passing thing on her part, especially after I ask about the live canary in its pretty cage next to our table.

“What is the bird’s name?”

Irina answered, “Froella,” while trying in vain to hide her amusement at my interest in befriending a bird.

Later during our visit, we are on the sidewalk behind a young woman who  is chatting on her cell phone as she walks.  She kicks at two pigeons in her path as she makes an audibly strident point to whomever is on the other end of her call.  The birds fly up in a quick wind of wings.  Her small kick causes her to make a partial turn in our direction.  She notices immediately that we are laughing at her unintended choreography.  She also laughs, while motioning cheerfully to us and acknowledging in English,  “Not so good mood!”

Nice for the world that Russian moods can so readily change.  Da.

Across from our hotel window is the window of a neighboring apartment.  A child’s Pooh Bear sits propped in the apartment window, looking at nothing and everything.  We collect square boxes of matches from an empty ashtray in the hotel’s lobby as we return in the elevator to the hotel room.

Matches, you might wonder, when no one smokes anymore?

Yes.  You might be in the mood to change sometime soon.  Be ready.

And never give up.  Or panic.

Moscow!

omg, we don’t read Cyrillic.  Can’t speak a word.

We’re dog tired, and catalogueing the reasons why:

Several bottles of wine last night, with several departing friends;

Four total hours of fitful sleep;

A Berlin cab ride.  Or was it two?

A Lufthansa flight that crossed two time zones;

A broken escalator and countless lifts both with and against gravity in the new Moscow International airport;

An exotic Metro that is new to us.  We need to double back on our subway choices only once;

Many precipitous rides on the escalators of the Moscow Circle Line.  Are we also leaning at a 30 degree angle into the moving stairs?  No, sleepy shape shifter, it’s an optical illusion;

A deliberate walk of only one extra block.  Well, not deliberate.  That, too, was a tired, wrong choice;

A skillful dodge of a gazillion Muscovites in two underground passageways beneath street traffic.  Who are we kidding?  We feel like the salmon from the States swimming against tides of Russian people.

We stop counting like autistics.  Take a breath.  We made it!

And it only took ten hours door to door, Berlin to Moscow.  We arrive with…uh-oh, we’re counting again:

23 collective kilos of rolling luggage; two insanely packed backpacks; one Publix supermarket ‘s “Share the Food” picnic bag with innumerable snacks that are now crushed beyond recognition; one feeble-threaded, stinky sweat jacket; one camera in “on” position; one camera buried beyond reach under a packed layer of yesterday’s laundry; a pocket full of Russian roubles; a scattering of Lithuanian paper money that is negotiable in only one country on the planet and that is not this one;  and many pieces of loose change that we’ve begun to refer to as shrapnel after listening to the slang of our newly adopted, Australian friends.

Judy falls asleep after counting the lines from her socks.  They may be permanentaly imbedded in her swollen feet, but I doubt it will slow her next day’s travel.

I’ve earned a bit of insomnia, but don’t feel bad for me.  Nyet!  That’s why you get to read this.

Running to Russia

We defer to the conservative traveller in us.  About dawn, we order a cab from the hotel’s front desk in Berlin to take us to the Tegev airport.  We really don’t need to waste any remaining brain cells on decyperhing an unfamiliar s-car plus a-train alternative route.  A cab ride is our perfect alternative.  PS:  There is a cab company that operates in Berlin under the name, Plan B.  My kind of town.

The hotel’s night clerk says that the taxi will arrive in “four minutes.”  Throughout this trip, we are told tht the wait for whatever will be “four minutes.”  Four is a very arbitrary number, and this is a wonderfully strange idiom.  But so is as our own general advice projecting something  “in about five minutes.”  Does the extra minute of the English idiom indicate more prevalent leisure?  Or does the lower number tell a lot about Eastern European anxiety?  After all, just how much time is available to anyone in this life?  It’s doubtful that either theory holds, but it’s fun to guess.

Our cab and driver that carries us from Berlin’s posh Adlon /Kempinsky Hotel where we have tea is a delight.  He wears a tropical, flowered shirt and jaunty sailor’s cap.  He says gaily that he owns his perfectly maintained 1959 Peugeot in which we ride, and lives on a boat on the River nearby.  From the upholstered, vintage backseat where we overlook the cab’s tailfins, we watch in comfort as the evening’s rush hour traffic sails by.

Our taxi driver who arrives early the next morning is conscientious and kind.  He whisks us directly to the international airport.  Berlin’s Tegev airport has a pullout for arriving cabs with a monitor showing all flights.  We are understandably glad – after only four hours of sleep – for another dose of German efficiency as our cabbie checks the monitor and takes us promptly to the proper curb in front of our departing airline.

The night before, we attend an Intrepid departure dinner, then reconvene for a nightcap in the Australian sisters’ room at our hotel.  Coming full circle, we realize that this is the same small group who now toasts its good-byes, that quite accidentally met at the start of the Intrepid tour in Helsinki only two weeks before.  Judi and I had walked a distance from the ferry dock before selecting a random tram stop.  Similarly, Annie and also the sisters selected the same tram stop after watching the marathon and visting the market, respectively.  “Gorgeous!” to borrow an expression from our Australian friends.

The German manner of airport check-in is to wait until all preceding flights are checked in.  So, having extra time, we find a coffee counter and pass the time conversing with a young Israeli.  She’s curious about US politics, as are many whom we encounter.  She shares insights about her own Region.  It’s an interesting counterpart to the conversation on the train that Judi struck up with Jamil, a young Turkish Moslem travelling from Lithuania.  He declined a handshake on religious grounds, but was generous in sharing glimpses of his personal life.

When we land at the Moscow airport, there are signs of an ever-enlarging world.  Visible from our seats in the coffee shop, there is a well marked door to the airport’s mosque.  There is no shared place for religion.  Simply, a mosque.

The two hour flight on Lufthansa from Berlin to Moscow goes quickly.  It includes soft pillows and a breakfast of whipped egg served over chicken and spaetzle – all brought by well-groomed stewardesses.  The Lufthansa ladies on these international routes must have great access to shopping.  Most wear different designs of pearl earrings.  My own faux silver hoops are rapidly oxidizing from air pollution and travel abuse, so they may not make it home.  It’s a vacarious treat to see that some women fare well in the good jewelry department!

The flight cruises into Moscow over long stretches of pine forest.  There are new neighborhoods carved into the terrain, with expansive new homes.   At the airport, runways are under construction and a modern, new terminal awaits our arrival.

As we exit on the covered jetway, three unsmiling officials stand mute.  They look very young in their uniforms with broad-crowned, hard billed hats.

A series of posters showing scenes from each season, shout Welcome in silence.

Berlin Holocaust Memorial

We ask where to find Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial.  We thoroughly underestimated what we would actually find.

Our guide said the site was relatively new (2008), and was near the bunker where Hitler directed WWII.  But she said we shouldn’t look for the bunker because when she searched, it wasn’t there anymore.  She thought the Holocaust Memorial may be near the same spot, close to Brandenburg Gate.

After more than 60 years, a memorial to the six million Jews killed by the German Administration was finally open.  Fascist headquarters was razed decades before, but the same site now faces the American Embassy.  It presents a powerful exhibit.

A field of unmarked stellae, looking like unnamed, up-ended gravestones, covers the block in grey granite.  The real power lies just underground.

Attendees enter the underground museum in small numbers.  They must pass through a security checkpoint that is like an airport’s.  It is sobering to realize that world events leave even this public memorial as a continuing, potential target of world evil.

The crowd is silent as it moves through darkened rooms of evidentiary photographs.  Reproduced, damning documentation track the  systematic destruction of Jewry throughout Europe and especially in Germany and Europe’s East.

Judi hoped to see someone in the Baltic region  or on Russian streets who would look like her.  The trail of surviving relatives, however, ended abruptly in the 1940s.

Judi shared the research with us, her fellow travellers.  Profound conversations marked our wanderings through what could have been her relatives’ homelands.  Her cousin warned, however, and she soon came to her own realization, that there were no survivors in-country for her to recognize.  Hitler and his proxies not only murdered them, they destroyed entire settlements along with any record that Jewish inhabitants existed where they did prior to the 1940s.

By the time we arrived in Berlin, Judi was resigned to the finality of her family’s historic, perversely wicked situation.

As I turn into another recess of the underground memorial, Annie came running for me.  She said that Judi was outside, very undone, and that I must photograph a particular display panel for her.  I immediately follow Annie to one of the fifteen family stories selected by the 50-year-old Shoah, an organization which formed to chronicle what could be found of disappeared Jewry.

The displays feature fifteen families from out of two million individuals who died.  Researchers isolated a family through oral histories and privately held pictures, who had roots like Judi’s in what now is Belarus.  One member of the Kazan family was oddly named London.  This mirrored Judi’s cousin’s research which threaded the pre-War past to two sisters.  They married two brothers, thereby introducing the surname London to the Kazans, whose own surname later evolved to Coen.   The young woman pictured in the museum’s archive undeniably resembles Judi.

Instead of running into a living relative, here was Judi, face to face with the ghostly possibility of a lost relative.  The link is brought to contemporary, public view on the very ground that once sheltered the Exterminator of Judi’s and countless other Jewish families.

It was a possiblity that sent Judi to ground.

Helen sees her exit the underground museum and sees her crumble against the outside granite wall.  Annie got word from others and then to me. I take over the task of bringing the discovered evidence back to Judi and ultimately to who her family is today.

Judi regains composure and returns to collect the contact info for the museum curators, themselves a generation later than most of whom they memorialize.

We travellers gather silently around Judi, suddenly a newly formed, extended family of international friends.  Some aer young, some old, some religious, some not so much.  We regroup in the fading light, above ground, and between the stone columns that wait with their secrets for Judi to find.

BBC films a Swedish detective in Latvia

photo (c) BBC

The third BBC series of the popular, Swedish detective series, WALLANDER, was originally published in the early 1990s by author, Henning Mankell.  The series includes as its second episode, “Dogs of Riga.”  It’s supported by the Riga Film Institute, and stars Kenneth Branagh and the beautiful Russian actress, Ingeborga Dapkunaite.  “Dogs of Riga” makes use of Riga, Latvia’s Central Market as well as actual Riga police cars with their markings changed to fit the film.  Filmed in 2011, it was released through NPR tv stations in the US in September 2012.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSalPGWZq3k

Warsaw

Yes!  A warm and sunny day and we are in really vibrant Warsaw, Poland.

Our hotel is from a French chain, so decoration leans toward bright oranges and small rooms.  Our hotel room would make any Jacques Cousteau feel right on board.  It is small.  Very small.

I regret not knowing Polish.  The sign on the bathroom door warns about the hazard of wet floors.  However, it is three lines long while the translation is not even half of that.  Perhaps the Polish language says it more scientifically, or even as a politician would say it. It leaves me wondering if Fidel Castro, whose speeches often last all day, was not the sign writer here.

We begin with a 6:30AM breakfast because, sadly, we have only one day to be in Warsaw.  We squeeze into  a tram during morning rush hour, enroute to the old town.  We pass the infamous Wedding Cake sky scraper built by Stalin at a cost of much money and many lives.  From far away, the upper ornamentation looks appropriately like tombstones.

In a nearby gift shop, I see note paper with the Wedding Cake and an added graphic of an arrow, piercing the tower.  I find no one who will comment on this, though street artists repeat the image in vandalized walls that are easily visible to the downtown public.

Our tour takes us quickly through the old town.  We pause at large posters with a smiling Pope in front of Catholic churches.  Our guide says that the locals like to say that the Pope was responsible for the Solidarity movement.  We wait for the real attribution, but it doesn’t come.  There’s no mention of Lech Walesa, albeit a strident Catholic himself, and the actual activitist for Solidarity who became Poland’s elected President and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

A decorated veteran of the WWII Warsaw Uprising travels to meet us at the museum.  His grandson also comes to assist for translation.  After a grand greeting, our vet was abandoned before he can address the group.  I am confused, and later – so sad.

We are also told at the door to the Uprising Museum that the Jews of Poland left for Israel when it began to look bad for them before WWII broke out.  (Seriously?)  Actually, Israel didn’t form until 1948.  Virtually all of the Polish Jews died of starvation or disease once interred in the Ghetto or forced enroute or imprisoned at Treblinka during WWII.  Warsaw’s Uprising Museum covers this dark history with film footage and other documentation. In Warsaw, no Jewish settlement remains.

An ugly remnant of past hostilities sits on gift shop shelves:  small wooden figures of Hassidim with a real coin fixed to the chest,  a prayer shawl, and holding a money bag.

It is an uneasy, creepy, distasteful, and omininous series of impressions for one day.

Such is the ebb and flow of our travel days.  We are amused by the banal, then in an instant, sickened by the sinister conundrum of histories, both national and personal.

Train to Warsaw

It’s decided that our leader, Christina, is Irish and not Bavarian.  Her use of logic
qualifies.   Along with the fictitious, “it’s just a short walk to (fill in the
blank),” her information about our travel out of Lithuania to
Warsaw, Poland,  is also an interpretive blend of fact and
optimism.
 
We will change time zones, and arrive by train after a  fifteen hour
trip, door to door.   Christina has befriended the conductors of
each train on our route so that each connection knows we will
come as a group to the platform.  We counted four trains, but
Christina said it is only three – the first 2-hour local train doesn’t
count.  She counts only inter-City trains.  Ok.   We don’t have to
run with baggage pounding because all trains are on time and we
have about 20 plus minutes to change trains and carriages.
 
Train 2 has a farmer in worn, woollen pants and even older, sturdy
Wellies.  He carries a huge basket that’s piled high with fresh mushrooms
like the ones we saw while hiking the woods.  Each station has side rails with rail cars
stacked high with cut timber.  A few hours before Warsaw, we pass a
railyard loaded with black coal, shining in the afternoon sun.
 The landscape is a pastoral Fall.  Most of the hay is already baled
inside white, plastic balls, or is left in short cylinders at even intervals in the
fields.
 
Train 3 has many young families.  A father with two young sons
are embarrassingly ADHD or similar.  It’s all the Dad can manage
to keep the boys in the car as they bolt up and down the aisles,
try to open the doors between cars, and pull at the clothes or belongings of other passengers.  There are three screaming tantrums during the  hour and a half ride.  I cannot imagine the 24 hour/365 day life they must live together.  The thought eclipses any annoyance I may feel. 
 
Train 4 is seven hours long.  We read, play games, listen to iPod,
tinker with iPad.  Fon finds herself emptying her daypack to look
at its bits and pieces, simply to pass the time.  Spritzer, gum,
jewelry, water, etc.  Spritzer, gum, jewelry, water, etc.  Repeat.
 
We have seats assigned to three cabins that are obviously modified to seat eight.
 This train line learned well from its airline cousins for removing
most comfort from passenger areas.   All luggage must stow in
these cabins, too.  It is a challenge for even the aspiring engineers
among us to pack it all in.  Shoes come off for fear of attracting a fine from the
conductor.  No one is keen to pay 50 euros if caught with their
shoes propped on the upholstered banquettes.  
 
We spread wider to occupy an extra cabin so that four of us ride in
each.  At each station, people come on board.  We hope they pass our
already cramped cabins, and find seats elsewhere.  They do.  Several hours
before our destination, at least one toilet stops working.  As long as
the train moves, the odor doesn’t collect in our second class car.
 The smokers are instructed to use the broken bathrooms to smoke.
 That’s one way to break a habit.  
 
It’s worthless to try to ventilate the cabins by lowering the outside
windows;  Manure that fertilizes the Polish fields competes with
the WCs for what little free air is left.  Luckily, by nightfall the
sweet smell of burning fields masks the day’s odors. 
 
Despite the foul environment, we snack on crackers, sip water bought at the first station, nibble chocolates
from the States, knaw apples from the park’s trees, and bite into sandwiches made
at the homestay with cheese, salami, and cucumbers brought from
Vilnius.  It also passes the time.
 
Conductors and station matrons, as well as aproned cleaning
women for the carriage aisles, change as we go along.  It appears
that there is a correlation between shoe heighth and station status.
 The more historical the station appears, or the more affluent the
station’s village, the higher the heels on the station matron.  She
comes to the platform, stands straight with feet together, and
signals with a raised, round circle on a stick for 
the conductor to know that everyone is boarded. 
 
I spend only part of the day under the sleep spell of motion
sickness meds. I must rely on meds for these endless train rides or wavy ferry
passages or nauseatingly long bus trips.   I had hoped that my
childhood’s kinetic bearings and inner ear would work it all
out by now, but at 64, those chances are slim and none.    If it
wasn’t for the daisy chain of wondrous destinations that we must
reach in a short time, I would really slam this part of the Intrepid
adventure.
 
We’re graced with a lingering, pastel sweep of sunset over stands
of trees and darkening, open fields.  Fon and I take the 50 euro risk and stand on the seats
to get a photo through the lowered cabin window.  Fon’s Canon
bests my Nikon with a priceless shot that makes it look like the sun
itself is setting the harvest bonfires.

A Pagan Place

We have whispered our wishes into the ear of the brass mouse in Klaipeda, rubbed the wishing nose of the brass animal sculptures in Old Town Riga,  and crossed the lovers bridges in every town where keys are thrown into the water for all time to lock in Love. Some lit candles to send prayers aloft from churches of varying creeds in Talinn or in Curonia.

So in Lithuania where the Christian church is much younger than the pagan past, we retreat to the lakes and forests of Austaitija, a verdant temple to the spirit life of rocks and water and trees.

Our double kayaks wind through bowered rivers, into the reeds, and onto a lake.  As the channel broadens to a 30 ft deep lake, thunder rolls and lightning sparks over the far hills. But we get safe passage. 

One photo reveals a luminant purple light topped by orange where the water meets the trees. As the full moon rises above the marsh grasses, Bill walks to the low, wooden dock as white light dances in different spots and a traveling orb hovers above his head.

Two barking dogs are chained with heavy links, facing each other on neighboring properties with a road between.  The camera fails to focus and the dogs’ eyes show Red Eye in the camera’s viewfinder, despite new technology that eliminates red eye.   Purple wildflowers have similar power to thwart the focus of the camera.  Each attempt reflects a white light, blurring the flower while allowing the surrounding grasses to stay in sharp focus.

We pick up a stone to bring to the top of wishing hill.  We climb 400 feet from the lake shore, up a steep staircase, to a hilltop that has a single wishing tree anchoring a 360 degree view of six lakes and their forests.  A mound of all size stones surrounds the base of the single tree at the summit.

Each stone represents the wish of its bearer.  We each add our stone.  

The air invigorates.  We breathe.

Homestay in Aukstaitija, Lithuania

75-year-old Regina and her 85-year-old husband turn over their
country home to their visitors from Intrepid several times each month.  They live in a tiny village wrapped by the large Lithuanian National Park.

Their hand- hewn house is pine with many fireplaces.  It has well water with
enough iron and sulfur to create a toxic vacuum during any shower.

This inside water situation is in stark contrast to the crystalline
lake outside that the house and garden overlook.

A wood-fired sauna, stoked by Regina’s tireless husband, doubles as a  clothes dryer.  Bessie and Bill benefit from this rustic laundry service when it appears that their jeans will never dry in the dank, forest air.

Regina enlists a neighbor and her daughter-in-law, Laima, to prepare and serve twelve of us two delicious breakfasts, two dinners, and a lunch.

Eggs are the bright yellow of a recent laying.  Porridge, aka oatmeal, is sweetened with home-made jams made from the fruit trees beside the house.  The soups simmer with robust aromas of cabbage from the garden and two kinds of wild mushrooms from the forest.  Chicken comes at dinner, ground and rolled with prunes or dipped in egg batter and baked.  Small, sweet filets of local fish come from the lakes, to be enjoyed with boiled potatoes along with crisp cukes and red and yellow tomatoes directly from the garden.

 There is a mother and son pair of dogs who keep track of everyone,.  They bark as they consider necessary.  We see a lot of these
stout, short legged dogs with long bodies, silky coats, and pointed
faces.  It makes us  wonder how long it took to develop this particular Lithuanian pup into their adorable shape and sweet temperament.

Like family, we take the foldouts and day beds and couches for  our two night stay.  I find a particularly cozy quilt, and convert the free time of one rainy afternoon into a delicously long nap.  The home stay is meant as a respite to the pace driven by visits to the cities, after all.

Or that’s what I say. I also say this:

Time in the country, with great hospitality, and no contact with the electronic world, is just the ticket!