Previous stop: Warsaw!
Highway forests between Poland and Lithuania.
I believe this church was in/near Bialystok, Poland, where we stopped for lunch. Caught it just before it was blocked by a moving van.
This building is all about the letter A. I did not see any other alphabetically-themed buildings nearby.
Market square, pretty quiet right now. Everyone else went for pub lunch/ice cream but I ate a terrible-beer-bread-and-cheese sandwich and then went to take pictures.
It’s JP2 again! Can’t escape him in Poland.
At points along this plaza they’d turned on sprinklers, not that you can see any in this picture. Some kids were playing by one. It was pretty hot – actually, it was around 30 degrees C most days, which I think is hot for Europe, especially northern-ish Europe, and also it was still only June.
I haven’t put this text through Google Translate yet, but I’m pretty sure there used to be some sort of medieval/Renaissance shopping mall here.
Getting into Lithuania.
Not quite a Windows desktop.
Wtf is up with this advertisement, it’s terrifying. This was at one of our bathroom/coffee breaks.
We got to our hotel in the evening, and I chatted with my FFXIV friends before bed as I forgot to mention I’d been doing daily since Leipzig (it’s so weird to be the first one to bed, on the west coast I’m usually the last one!); the next morning I had coffee with breakfast, as I’d finally figured out that while coffee never ‘woke me up’ in the morning as it’s purported to do for normal people, it actually helped me in the afternoon. Then, after a rehearsal in a rather warm room with insufficient air conditioning for the number of choristers present (though I didn’t suffer like the people in the back did), we went in the bus downtown with a guide. First we drove about the old town, steadily going uphill, until we arrived at a place marked on our tour maps as the Gates of Dawn which is a pretty awesome fantasy title.
But first, a charming balcony.
The Gates of Dawn from the exterior, and our tour guide.
The street beyond the gate.
The more distant churchy thing is the other side of the Gates of Dawn; on the top is another chapel to the Black Madonna (same deal as the other one, I assume), which was celebrating another Mass so I discretely didn’t take any closer pictures – though you can see the icon from the street if you stand at the correct angle. Google says the closer thing is the Church of St. Theresa.
The square by the Church of St. Kasimir (on the right edge of the picture; see below), while our guide was explaining to us that in the old city, different sections would be named after the majority of the nationality/ethnicity who lived there in the middle ages/Renaissance. So there was the German Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, the Russian Quarter, etc. Of course these designations didn’t stop people from living wherever they wanted, but as humans tend to do, they stuck a bit with people they were familiar with. But it was all quite close together as it was not a very big city.
The Church of St. Kasimir. The crown is very distinctive and appears over the tops of other buildings, yet you can only see the church itself when you’re right next to it : P
While under Soviet rule, the church was converted into, of all things, a Museum of Atheism. ???
This was at the Town Hall square, facing north away from the Town Hall.
St. Nicholas’ Church
I wonder how this room is set up inside? It looks like something cozy should be done with it.
These two women, as you probably guessed, are on the same building.
The Bell Tower of St. John’s Church. It’s not attached to the church which I think is maybe a little weird.
Also do you like amber? Visit this street. Sheesh.
The streets here were quite narrow and cobbled, largely the domain of pedestrians, but that didn’t stop cars from inching their way down, honking whenever people didn’t notice they were coming. This was the case in every other old city we visited, I just forgot to mention.
The Gediminas Tower, the only surviving piece of the medieval fortifications, peeking over the trees.
An hour for lunch? Who needs lunch? Gonna climb that tower go go go!
But first backtracking to take pictures of the amazing Cathedral Basilica (you can see the tower is still over on the left there, I haven’t technically gotten any closer yet)
The square in front of the Cathedral had outlines of medieval fortifications on it, but I didn’t get a good picture of them as I had no elevation.
Coming around the Palace of the Grand Dukes, here’s the tower in all its glory. I wonder what made the hills here? They’re quite convenient.
The small Vilnia River, after which the city is named, which flows into the larger Neris River below the tower.
Looking the other way.
One of the paths up to the tower was closed for construction, so I had to go 3/4 of the way around the hill to find this extremely steep cobbled path. It was murder on my thin-sandalled feet and I can’t imagine how it is in the rain.
There’s a cablecar-ish lift up from the National Museum of Lithuania, but I didn’t know that when I started and hey that would be too easy and also probably cost money.
The remains of the rest of the castle, currently I believe under reconstruction/restoration.
IT’S A TOWER HI TOWER I’VE COME TO CONQUER YOU
Model showing the old layout of the original town and fortifications. They’re the ones shown on the square by the Cathedral so it really was not a very big town to start with.
The tower also had a couple suits of armour and racks of swords, and one floor had a ‘time travel’ video where they projected pictures and CG recreations of how the town used to look from the tower, and one floor had a presentation on the Baltic Way, when two million people joined hands to show solidarity with each other in their work to gain independence.
Made it to the top! As you can see compared to the model, the fortifications on the second hill across the river is now the site of a monument called Hill of Three Crosses which is pretty self-explanatory.
Looking north-east across the Neris River. Makes me wish I had a panorama camera. You can see the top station of the cable-car; it goes down to the buildings below.
Northwest across the Neris towards modern downtown.
Looking down on the Palace of the Grand Dukes and the Cathedral Basilica.
Looking in the direction of the Gates of Dawn.
We drove past that brick church (the closer, darker one) but I didn’t get a good picture of it from the bus.
The street we walked down, again.
The Hill of Three Crosses again.
Lithuania!
Our agreed meetingplace was by this old Renaissance brick building. I dashed back down the hill, trying not to fall on my butt, and I made it in time to get back to the bus! The bus met us at the square by the Palace of the Grand Dukes so we didn’t have to go back up to the Gates of Dawn or anything.
Next stop: Riga!