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Važiuoju i Tibeta saves atrasti.

“I’M GOING to Tibet to find myself” - yes, you almost feel that way after a hard day seeing the sights. There is a limit to what the eyes can take in and the feet can stand. But for now, it’s enough to be sitting here outside the Kauna Spauda restaurant sipping a half litre of Kalnopilis beer. We’ve eaten our cepelinai and can watch the evening strollers along the Laisvès Aleja, the Freedom Boulevard, especially those girls who seem to appear only in the evenings between 8 and 10pm, very tall, very slim and elegantly dressed, and always accompanied by much shorter young men in T-shirts, trainers and blue jeans. The girls walk slowly under the trees and past the benches in the centre of this wide pedestrianised street which stretches 1.6km from the blueish white stone of the neo-Byzantine Church of St Michael the Archangel right up to Vilniaus Street, leading down into the Old Town (Senamiestis), which perches at the junction of the Nemunas and the Neris rivers. It’s very quiet here. Old couples sit silently on the benches. Occasionally a sparrow swoops down on to the pavement. We have time to think at last.

     “Yes, I will have another glass of Kalnopilis.” Why not? It’s a good beer and it’s a warm evening. Soon the street lights will come on (although sometimes they get switched off around l0pm). There’s music coming from an alleyway across the road where every evening a young man sets out a table full of pirated music tapes. He plays the same piece every evening: it’s the theme music from an old British TV series about Lloyd George (Philip Madoc as LG) - a high, stow melody on strings. Pleasant and unirritating though it is, it does seem strange to hear it so near the shores of the Eastern Baltic. Well, anyway, I Svelkata! / Cheers!

     It’s hard to remember everything we saw this morning. First there was the Devil Museum (over 1,000 devils) followed by a short walk to the M K Ciurlionis State Art Museum (second-rate Expressionism); then the art nouveau Post Office with its mosaic frieze of stamps under the ceiling, the Kovno ghetto, the Military Museum of Vytautas the Great, the Aukštieji Šanciai Cemetery, Napoleon’s Hill (from where he first looked towards Russia); the Orthodox churches in Ramybes Park, the Old Town itself, with its 53m high white baroque Town Hall looking like an extruded cake, and Santakas Park where the two rivers meet each other.

     There are traces of the country’s heroes everywhere: on stamps, on banknotes, coins and statues, in the Garden of the Presidents, in catalogues, city guides and texts in museums - Vytautas who defeated the Teutonic Knights in 1410, the poet Adomas Mickeviçius as they call him here, President Smetona (two terms in between the wars and always pictured wearing a bowler), but especially the two aviators Steponas Darius and Stasys Girènas.

     They took off from New York in July 1933 to fly non-stop to their homeland but crashed in what was then East Prussia. The wreck of their plane, the Lituanica, rests now in the Military Museum, but their bodies were to have a disturbed after-life. Buried first of all in the Medical Faculty’s chapel, they were then re-buried in a mausoleum in the Old City Cemetery. In 1944 they were removed from there and hidden from the Russians in a wall in the Medical Faculty. Finally, in August 1964, they achieved their last resting place in the Aukštieji Cemetery.

     Of course, there are traces of the Russians everywhere (it’s not so long since they left), in particular out at the lake. Needing time to digest all we’ve seen, we go there in the afternoon. The 22 bus from outside the Neris Hotel takes us all the way in 20 minutes by the Al road. And then a short walk along a dusty path, forest on both sides. In the car park by the lake there are stalls selling snacks and cold drinks. Down under the trees by the lake-side people are stretched on the ground, sunbathing. There are lots of Russian girls in bikinis chattering away:

/ “It’s so hot! Wonderful!”

Echoes of other languages, too, drift around us: Polish, sometimes a little German, possibly Ukrainian and some we can’t quite grasp at all - maybe Estonian, Lettish. So: Apgailestauju. Aš nekalbu lietuvškai / Sorry. I don’t speak Lithuanian.

     The sun shining through the leaves above us makes patterns on the dry grass. The lake is longer than wide, the far shore lined with low trees. The land all around appears to be totally flat, no hills or mountains to enliven the horizon. We drink bottled water with added ice. The Rumšiškes Folk Museum is 2km further along at the end of the lake but it’s too hot to walk to, or even to the Pažaislis Cloister which is nearer, up by the road - somewhere there is the grave of A F Lvov, composer of the Tsarist national anthem. But we’ve seen enough for one day. All we want to do is lie in the sun like everyone else. Prašom, kur yra fualetas? / Please, where is the toilet? It’s not far, it’s back near the food stalls. Aciu jums / Thank you. Bees hum, there are butterflies but, strangely, hardly any birds. Time passes.

     And so, now, here we are, finishing our beers, watching the light begin to fade in the Aleja. Prašau, saskaita / The bill, please. The tall girls have disappeared and all the benches are empty. Even the man with the music has begun to pack his tapes into cardboard boxes. A cool wind blows down the street. Does it come from the east? We can almost sense the excitement of anticipation Napoleon must have felt looking towards Russia from his bill top. It’s time to leave and wander back to the hotel. Tomorrow we shall visit another city not far off and like tonight, fall exhausted into bed and sleep. Labanakt / Goodnight. Or should we say ‘goodbye’?:

Viso gero!