Third, that weekend 10 days ago past:

When I was out of the country in Vilnius, Lithuania and its surroundings.

As the pictures have already been posted, you can see the kind of things that I was up to while taking a break from the hectic chaos and exhaustion that is St. Petersburg and Russia in general. But, as way of explanation of those photographs, let me list the things that kept us busy during our weekend away:

FRIDAY 4/17/09:
-- Rather spontaneously, during my 1PM - 2:30PM RSL class I finally could not take it anymore and decided I needed to get the hell out this weekend, and so at 2:31, right as soon as I was out of my class, Louis and I checked the availability of tickets for trains to Vilnius, Lithuania. By 5:00PM I had purchased the tickets, and by 8:00PM we were on our train, on our way out.

SATURDAY 4/18/09:
-- We arrived in Vilnius at 8:30AM (Vilnius time, which is an hour behind St. Petersburg) and were greeted by sun and not just cold, wintry, St. Petersburg kind of sun, but actual, real, warming sun.
-- We obtained a map at the train station, and walked an out-of-the-way-way to our hostel, but the city is so small, that everything is sillily close together so even our roundabout route took only 10 minutes. What a joke of a city.
-- During our roundabout route, we found a nice little out of the way park and sat there and ate some breakfast and marveled at the fact that there were buds on all of the trees and how blue, blue, blue and cloudless the sky was.
-- We checked in to our hostel, dropped off our stuff, and went out again.
-- We ate lunch (ham sandwiches) in the main market square, people-watching.
-- We walked up to the top of Gediminas Hill, the medevail fortress in the city, one of the highest points and looked out over the orangey roofs and white walls.
-- There was wandering through the beautiful, huge park, where we marveled at seeing a stream (and a clean one at that!) for the first time in months.
-- We hiked up to the top of the tallest hill in the park (it was funny being in such a hilly place again, you forget just how flat St. Petersburg is until you think about how you can see down straight streets for so far) which has three crosses on the top, a memorial to some monks who were executed back in the day.
-- While sitting in this park, we could not believe what we were seeing as organized groups of people wandered about picking up trash. We then remembered that the 20th of April was Earth Day, and it baffled my mind to see people actually not only not littering, but picking up litter to celebrate Earth Day. What the hell.
-- We sat the Cathedral Square, watched a little girl feed pigeons and almost get carried away by them.
-- Then Louis, who is into historical events, got me to go to the Victims of Genocide Museum with him which is located in the former KGB headquarters of Vilnius. Vilnius is actually an extremely historical place, and the city and Lithuania in general played a pretty important role in both WWII (as Lithuania separates Poland and Germany from Russia) and in the Soviet Union. The former headquarters has been converted into one of those vaguely tacky Russian-style museums that are just rooms full of weird lights and old newspapers articles glued to the wall in an overwhelming, too-many-to-actually-read kind of style. We didn't have much stamina for that part of the museum -- Louis explained to me all that basic history himself in a much clearer, concise way -- but we went down to the basement of the museum where they have left the cells where the KGB would bring its prisoners. This part was extremely and disturbingly effective, and I felt completely overwhelmed and upset by it, and all they had done was leave the rooms exactly as they had been and label them as what they were. Such as the padded cell that was probably used for torture. Or the cells with pools on the bottom where water torture took place. Or the execution cell where 45 people were killed every single night during the worst part of the Stalin years. You could see the bullet holes in the wall. The bullet holes. And then the exercise yard outside, with a chained fence over the top, and beautiful blue sky, the only thing peering through, giving any hope. After we left the museum we had to walk for a while through a park in the sun for me to regain any hope about life and people. It made me sort of ashamed to be a Russian Studies person seeing the kind of thing the Soviet government did to the Lithuanian people. What was most disturbing to both me and Louis though was the fact that headquarters exactly like this exist all over Russia, in St. Petersburg and everywhere, but they are not museums or anything of the sort but still used as real, operating, police and government buildings. Who knows what they use the old cells for now....
-- Our weekend in Vilnius could pretty much be summed up as strange juxstapositions of something dark, historic and depressing, followed by something completely beautiful, happy, sunny, and in the case of what we did immediately after the KGB museum, ridiculous. One of the major reasons that Louis and I wanted to go to Vilnius specifically of all places (besides it being the only Baltic capital Emma and I did not make it to this summer), was that we read that in Vilnius, Lithuania, there is the first and the only monument to Frank Zappa in the whole world. No, Frank Zappa was not Lithuanian, no, he did not spend any quality time in Vilnius, but simply that the Lithuanian Frank Zappa Fan Club was so upset by his death from prostrate cancer in 1993 that they petitioned the government to approve the monument, raised the proper funds, and Frank Zappa's head was cast in bronze and mounted on a pole.
-- After this we tried to do the one thing that I really wanted to do in Vilnius which was check out the exhibit at the Union of Lithuania Photographers, but after much trouble finding it (it was located in a small, strange little dvor), it turns out that the exhibit was currently closed and they were working on installing a new one to be open next year. Oh well.
-- We were tired at this point, and found a great coffee place called Coffee Inn where the coffee was actually delicious, and not that expensive. In our mere weekend in Vilnius we became regulars at this establishment.
-- Walked arond a little more, saw St. Anne's Church which is all made of brick, we saw the sun setting at the river.
-- We found a nice place called Piles Mene to try Blonde Baltika Beer, and then we went home and slept, exhausted, as we both hadn't woken up at 8:30AM in years. Well, since the summer program at least.

SUNDAY 4/19/09:
-- First we had to start out our day with coffee again at Coffee Inn. I had a mocha, the best mocha I have had since Mocha Java or Diesel, for about $2.00.
-- Then we went to the train station and caught a 1:10PM (we arrived there just in time, at 1:07PM) out of the city in the direction of Trakai, the old Lithuanian capital.
-- We got off first though at the Panerai stop, to see the memorials in the woods to the place where 70,000 Jews and political prisoners from all over Eastern Europe where shot and buried in mass graves and then later burned. It was a harrowing experience, this beautiful, beautiful, green and lush and mossy wood, full of this dark awful history. There were monuments of several kinds in the main part of the memorials, right when you first walk in, but the rest of it is just winding, looping paths, connecting huge pits that used to be mass graves, with Soviet-era stone plaques talking about the "Soviet Citizens" who were destroyed by Hitler there. Only on the more modern monument, installed by friends of Israel or whoever, did it specifically mention that they were Jews who were shot and killed there. Perhaps the most disturbing thing to both me and Louis though was the fact that the train tracks -- the same train tracks we had just been happily riding along in our commuter rail train -- run directly past these woods, of course they do, of course a place of mass execution of Jews from the Holocaust would be near train tracks, I mean, why would the Nazis have made things difficult for themselves? What was nice though was how clean and trash-free and clearly respected the place was. If it had been in Russia, not that that kind of memorial would ever be in Russia, the place would have been full of Baltika 7 cans and cigarette butts.
-- We then waited, a little nervously, for the next train, not sure if the schedule posted on the window of the closed train station in Panerai was correct, but right at 3:52 the next train pulled up and we jumped on (not having to pay again) and went all the way out to Trakai.
-- Trakai is located on a peninsula surrounded by three gorgeous, lushious, blue blue BLUE lakes. All we did there was walk up and back along a dusty, windy bike path along the edge of the lakes, but it was so beautiful and calm and peaceful that I had never felt more relaxed in my life. There are old castles out in Trakai, and those were pretty cool to look at, and this floating bridge-dock-like structure that was kind of fun, kind of scary to walk across. We fed some ducks the last of our picnic-food bread. We sat and watched little kids ride bikes and play admist birches. We then caught the 6:50PM train back into Vilnius without any problems.
-- Back in Vilnius we decided to splurge on going out to dinner at the Piles Mene place, and tried some "Lithuanian" food which was basically the same as Russian food -- blini that went by a different name, tvorog cheese that went by a different name, fried black bread garlic sticks that went by a different name, smoked pig ears that.... were just gross.
-- And, you will be pleased to know, that upon returning to the hostel and looking in the mirror, I noticed that I did indeed get the slightest, slightest of sun burns from our day outside. It was thrilling.

MONDAY 4/20/09:
-- Ah, yes, Hitler's birthday, a great day of violence towards foreigners in Russia, the perfect day to still be out of the country in peaceful, friendly, nice-to-tourists Vilnius.
-- This was our most uneventful day, basically spent wandering around the city, doing last little things we wanted to do in Vilnius.
-- We had coffee one more time at the delicious, reasonably priced Coffee Inn.
-- Coffee Inn also sells muffins and sandwiches, and we bought two sandwiches (after having their great muffins for breakfast) and sat by the stream in the park with the hill with the three crosses and had a small picnic, watching three twelve-year-old Lithuanian boys run across the stream in their shoes and socks and get completely wet but seem happy and carefree.
-- I found a present for Agnes, the only souvenir I bought in all of Lithuania.
-- We had one more Blonde Baltic Beer at Piles Mene.
-- We found a produkti, tried to use up exactly the last of our Lithuanian change on groceries for the train.
-- Sat in the same park we first sat in so early on Saturday morning, eating an ice cream bar before leaving.
-- And then, by 5:50PM we were on our train, leaving Vilnius behind after a nice, restful weeked. Exactly the thing I needed.

TUESDAY 4/21/09:
-- Our train got back in at 8:30AM (St. Petersburg time, so it felt like 7:30AM to us), just in time for me to haul my ass to Smolny and photograph a bunch of classes for the brochure and have an exhausting, back-to-reality kind of day. At least though, after our weekend, I felt sufficiently rested and ready for it.