First you have to get there: Doing Vilnius

Trying to “do” Vilnius almost did me in. But my initial misadventures aside, I relish the memories of my first five days in the capital of Lithuania as much as any travel I’ve ever undertaken. Those 700,000 or so Vilnians have made an astonishing recovery from their 50 years of servitude (although they seemed, while I was there, to be doing a little backsliding—under the pressure of Russians threatening their oil and natural gas supplies).
 
But first the bad news, to aid travelers unfamiliar with the minute particulars of that place. Let them avoid the frustrations I stumbled upon in my ignorance. Because the only usable tracks between Warsaw and Vilnius run through Grodno in Belarus, you need to waste five or more hours getting a transit visa from the Russian embassy, a goodly cab ride from Central Station.
 
But in order for them to accept your two passport photos and $27 for a “transit” visa, you must first get a Lithuanian visa, a few steps from the U.S. Embassy. But not so fast. To get a Lithuanian visa, you need a rail ticket which you can pay for with your Visa at the Orbis office in the Hotel Metropole.
 
If there are long lines at any of these three points, you can blow more than five hours. I would have preferred spending that time at Warsaw’s marvelous Poster Museum (a 4,000 zloty bus to Wilanow), or at the equally delectable Caricature Museum (at the Center City end of the 122 bus, kitty korner from the Adam Miekiewicz statue in Old Town).
 
My original plan had been to hop, skip, and jump to Helsinki with day-long stops in Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn. The sleeper from Warsaw to Vilnius was only a slightly improved box car, but it does have a safe place to stow your luggage—the board bed pulls up to reveal a trunk-like box underneath, not a small boon in a train system that is experiencing a robbery boom.
 
In the Russian Embassy I listened to the lament of a German businessman on his way to Moscow whose shoulder bag had been nicked while he dozed off for a few winks on the overnight train form Berlin to Warsaw. Part of his misery was the low, low-tech Russian passport office where the miracle FAX had yet to rear its electronic head.
 
My “bunkmate,” incidentally, was a thirtysomething housewife returning to her two children in Grodno. She showed me her brand-new passport proudly, with her kids’ photos included. She eyed me dourly at first when she perceived that due to the lack of an electronic reservation system, I was to be her nocturnal companion. Soon we were sharing each other’s travel snacks.
 
Nary a comprehensible word (other than my halting spasibo) passed between us the whole night. And we both flinched about midnight when a barbarous Russian passport officer nearly banged our door down. He mimed me an impromptu lecture on the battered condition of my passport, which made me wish I knew enough Russian to reciprocate with a homily on the terminal rumpledness of his uniform, not to mention his tacky manners when awakening weary travelers.
 
Once again I noticed the most dispiriting aspect of the totalitarian heritage: the powerless compensate for their powerlessness by throwing their pitiful powers around when given any chance.
 
Alas, as we pulled into the Vilnius station at 8 a.m., little did I know the hurdles I still had to jump before starting to relish Vilnius. To put your luggage in a locker, you need three rubles (two cents at the exchange rate) as well as a 15 kopeck piece to activate the Rube Goldberg mechanism. No place to change the rubles in the station. I mimed that they should guard my gear as a went out on the town in search of three rubles!
 
No sign indicated where the center of the city was, so I started following the first tram line radiating out from the station plaza. Wrong, Mercator-breath: It turned out, I inferred several misdirected blocks later, it was going to a distant suburb. Finally, by relentlessly plying my infantile German on anyone who could be distracted from their trying to get to work on time, I found a woman who knew where a bank was. Except I eventually discovered it was the wrong branch.
 
A crude map and more interrogating of people in the street got me to the right branch, except that my last informant was a fiftyish woman with a relentless intent to get my dollars for her rubles. (She was planning a trip to Chicago!) She waxed eloquent over her generously giving me 130 rubles to the dollar instead of the current 126, as we hiked quickly down the street. Finally, I had to outsprint her and climb quickly to the third floor where the exchange office was.
 
Now sufficiently rubled, I wondered which bus would take me back to the train station. Be advised that no familiar word like gare or bahnhof is involved. The Lithuanian word for station is SOTOS! So I had to pretend I was the little train that couldn’t (making chuffing sounds) until a young man held up five fingers and pointed to a tram stop. I bought tickets at the adjacent newsstand and crammed myself on the next #5. (And I mean sardine city! I have done rush hours on Tokyo subways that seemed expansive by comparison.)
 
A warning. Write down the tumbler numbers of your locker—actually four letters. I couldn’t remember mine, and when I came to collect my stuff the next morning, the attendant had to undo five before finding mine—to the cacophony of security bells clanging loudly at each wrong number. (That operation cost me a 28 ruble surcharge, and you’d think I had just given them a $10 tip instead of a two-bit penalty!) The low cost of living in Lithuania (as opposed to the high cost of fleeing out of there by Lufthansa because I couldn’t bear another train ride!) still staggers my inflationary mind. Luggage stowed, I was now free to cruise until the night train to Riga.
 
As it turned out, I couldn’t think of leaving Vilnius—until five days later, when an Air France pass was about to run out. I hadn’t been walking for ten minutes before I stumbled on the divine Hotel Astorija, 1902, but deeply into a Neo Deco rehabbing under a joint Norwegian-Lithuanian venture.
 
A Danish ecologist told me at breakfast one morning that he had stayed there six months before when it was a pigpen and cost $2 a night. (That’s the price of the fleabag across from the station.) My bathless room now cost me $29. A thoroughly beguiling Avis-try-harder staff is fast turning their two-star into a four-star.
 
“The Corner,” a little café making do until the restaurant is restored, has a limited menu with just enough Lithuanian goodies to make it zesty. They only take MasterCard (which I had left in my luggage) but decided I looked too tired to be a crook. I came down from my ruble-induced funk by soaking in one of their huge bath tubs.
 
And now for the good news:
 
The trouble with the good news is that it is so good that it invites skepticism. The people are euphoric from having stared down the Bear successfully, and are so grateful to their own firmly held heritage—which seemed to me the principal source of their strength and endurance—that to an outsider their psychological condition appears too good to be true.
 
So into the third day, I began to test my theory about their sweetness as a people against any and everyone I ran into from outside. To a person, they not only agreed, but they also were astonished as I was by the evident energy and purpose of so recently liberated a people. Didn’t matter whom I grilled (a Mercedes Benz truck salesman from Munich, a retired postmaster from Fort Lauderdale, an electrical engineer from Stockholm), they agreed I was not exaggerating in my belief in a rare condition of post-liberation bonhomie.
 
Take the assistant director of ARKA, the avant-garde art gallery next to the Philharmonia Hall, two minutes by foot from the Astoria. Like his mother, he trained to be a pharmacist and practiced this profession for ten years, until he tired of the venality of the Moscow professors who wouldn’t approve his doctoral dissertation (on the ecological impact of pollution on certain herbs like thyme) unless he plied them with the free vodka he had to schlep to Moscow every three months.
 
At the gallery he makes a measly $30 a month, has to borrow his father’s car to get to his high-rise apartment on the outskirts of town, and depends on the second salary of his wife, a trained psychologist, to make ends meet. Nobody in his right mind, however, would feel sorry for him, his beautiful wife, and two lovely girls, 6 and 11. (End of Part I.)
 
(Editor’s note: We think Patrick went to Vilnius within the past 18 months, but since he’s once more somewhere over there, we can’t ask.)
 
From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, April 6, 1994