From one three-striped country to another

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Trip to the Market

So after around three weeks of living here, I finally found the courage (and inner warmth) to venture out into the winter wonderland that is my home, dragging along an incredibly amiable boyfriend. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we both only have one morning class, leaving the rest of the day completely open to spontaneous adventures in the city. 


I've been dreaming lately about fresh vegetables and fruit, handmade scarves and mittens, open air and native people, so when my Introductory Lithuanian professor (who is the funnest teacher - I always have great language professors) taught us the word "turgus", the Lithuanian word for "market", I knew exactly where we needed to go. 

After some directions from my very knowledgeable roommate, we left the LCC campus and boarded a bus towards "senamiestis" - "old town". 

Kirk was way more excited than he looks in this picture. I promise.

On the way, we saw an extraordinary amount of brick buildings. Again, I love the oldness of this place and the snow and the brick together look so handsome. 

We finally made it to the market, but it didn't impress me too much. I guess the big day is Saturday or Sunday, so maybe this weekend I'll drag more people out into the cold in search of the good stuff. There was a bread section that was pretty good, except it was lacking in small and simple loaves of bread, like my panecitos back home. There was also a flower section, full of roses, which I fantasized were from the motherland, a.k.a. Ecuador ("Ekvadoros" in Lithuanian). 


Kirk tried to buy a hat because his beanie got lost somewhere along the way from Vilnius to Klaipeda (I think it's at Trakai Castle). The woman selling it to us at first said it was 20 Lt in English and we were so impressed. It was only after Kirk had the hat on his head that she changed the price to 120 Lt. To be fair, it did have an Adidas symbol on it :)

We found a nice little alleyway with a few different restaurants. This guy was in the process of taking down Christmas decorations (the Eastern Orthodox tradition celebrates Christmas in early January).

Tomorrow's the weekend and I have big plans including, but not limited to: doing my laundry by hand (each load of laundry costs 4 Lt - about $2 - here and the machines are pretty small), maybe hitting up the market again, and figuring out new recipes. News flash: cooking is actually fun to do, even if I just do it from necessity.