(The story so far ..... Mike Duck and me have got on the plane ... and I've taken some cloud pictures and have marvelled at how sensible cloud systems look from above.) After a mind-boggling woosh over the North Sea we arrived at Copenhagen in pouring rain. So much for my Danish list which after a frantic dash around all the airport windows stands at 5. All too soon we boarded a Honking Great Jet for Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital.We flew high above the Baltic, then turned inland over seemingly endless forests interspersed with agricultural land and little settlements. It looked good. We came down into Vilnius in a cloudburst. It is fair to say that Vilnius airport was somewhat different to Manchester and Copenhagen.For a start it was about 60 miles from Kaunas where our conference was. Needless to say our pre-arranged taxi did not turn up. We had been warned about taxi-drivers ripping tourists off so we decided to walk round to the bus station which was " just round the corner." That cloud I mentioned earlier was still bursting as we set off and we got very very wet in the first few yards. Mike was distinctly displeased as, being a bit of a snappy dresser, he had a massive suitcase full, rather appropriately, with suits. However, I was feeling very pleased because my Lithuanian list was now, after only 5 minutes, a lot bigger that any of yours, dear readers. Yes, Tree Sparrows were everywhere, and as we tramped down that wide, wet road Swallows flitted about us and Jackdaws called happily. The Jackdaws, by the way, were considerably blacker-and-whiter than ours. There's a cline going on there. It took two buses and a long soggy walk to get us to the coach station, from which we were transported in Lithuanian luxury to Kaunas. All the way my nose was glued to the coach window as we swept past a totally agricultural landscape with miles of forests interspersed with fields and the odd cottage. Key sightings were a White Stork and a Honey Buzzard, plus my first World Tick ... Short-Toed Eagle ! Ever since that day my world list has been 1 more than my UK list. I'm a domestic old Hector ! We arrived in the semi-dark and rain at our hotel in Kaunas to find our fellow delegates partying it up and swapping gifts. It's a big local tradition. But we hadn't brought any .... nobody told us about that. That got us off to a great start. We went up to our hotel rooms to change into dry clothes .... and I was bit irked to find that mine were covered in some sort of oil, presumably from the luggage compartment of the coach. All week I looked like some bedraggled mechanic ! Ace. But less "ace" was the meal .... my introduction to what must be the crappest food in the world. Fat is very big in their diet, followed closely by salt. I'm not allowed to eat salt. There'll be more about the food as we go along. But the basic theme was ... bloody awful. I did enjoy the bottled water though ...we were all warned NOT to drink any of the tap-water. How reassuring. Lovely. (We also discovered that the reason we had no taxi and had got soaked and oiled and knackered was because three of the aforesaid party-goers had nicked ours 20 minutes before we arrived.)(Grrrr.) Oily or not, ill-fed or not, I was up at 0530 and out into the drizzle to the local park, Azuolynas Park by name. It didn't look much on the map, but ........ ( There's a bit of a cliff-hanger for you.What exotic birds will I spot in the mysterious Azuolynas Park ? Will I stink of oil for the whole week? Are Mike's suits going to be OK? Will I remember not to drink any of the tap-water, which was remarkably brown in colour ? What am I going to eat ? Will we be shunned by the others for not bringing any presents ? Is the journey back going to be an equally soggy disaster ? Will my Zeiss bins get nicked by the ubiquitous street gangs that roam the, er, streets ? Will I even survive in this land of huge blokes with vicious dogs ?) That's the view from my hotel room. Those trees look promising. A forest really.......... Aha ! The Cure ... "A Forest" Robert Smith is very underappreciated as a guitar player ..... I've met him you know .... I bet he never stops talking about it. This next bit is the "answer" to a tricky question I'm going to ask you in the future .. on the 14th of March 2020 to be precise ....
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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