Day 1: Home to Kaunas

After years of waiting for it, I'm off to an Esperanto event in Lithuania, a week-long programme called the Baltic Esperanto Days. It's an annual event but I haven't been able to go until now for a combination of reasons. Firstly, it alternates between the three Baltic nations, and I'd been informed that one is excellent, one is okay-ish, and the other is poor. I can't remember who gets the participation award and who the booby prize, but Lithuania is the host with the outstanding reputation. Secondly, the dates clashed with our holiday to Sicily in 2019 and the USA in 2022. There was no such collision in store this year, and so I signed up to the event all the way back in January.

This trip is quite notable from our others in one key aspect: I'm flying solo. Unfortunately, Clare has her busiest spell of the year currently ongoing, which means that she's trapped in the UK, shaking hands and scribbling signatures. I booked a lovely apartment with scope for working just in case the stars aligned but the unlikely never happened. That means that Clare won't be blogging ... which also means that there's a high likelihood that there won't be any more blogs. I just don't have her discipline!

Taking the train

I think I'd first decided I wanted to come to this event around the time I'd finished writing Complete Esperanto but it was awaiting publication. (I got 18 weeks to write the first draft; production was given nine months to create the book. Not the most equitable distribution, now that I consider it!) I had been invited to participate in a session at the World Esperanto Congress in Lisbon in 2018, and asked a friend in Russia whether he was going to it. Nope: the big world congresses are for wealthy people, he told me, adding that the Baltic Esperanto Days are the same length but much more affordable. He was the man who informed me that events in Lithuania are excellent, far exceeding the offerings of the neighbours. And so, following his advice, here I am, having skipped occasions when I could have gone to Latvia or Estonia.

Getting here involved a 5:55 flight from Luton with Wizzair. That's so early that you couldn't imagine a provincial airport being overrun, could you? (It was the fourth flight listed for the day.) Nonetheless, Wizzair recommended getting to the airport three hours before take-off: 2:55! I'm a particularly unpunctual person so wouldn't have made that even if I'd wanted to but I chose to take my chances with an arrival between 3:30 and 4:00. And I'd chosen to stay at a hotel the night before so as not to set off from home within two hours of going to bed, so the alarm was duly set for 3:00.

Here's a novelty: I took the train down! Since I'm on my own there's only the expense of one person, and I liked the idea of being able to take my time and read something for a couple of hours. It could have gone very wrong because, as you may have read, I'm a particularly unpunctual person. I'd finished work for the day and was packed with about fifteen minutes to go before I needed to leave the house at the point when I checked the weight of my suitcase. There was about 4 kg of spare capacity in there. (Not bad when you factor into things that I have a mobile bomb shelter which weighs in at bot far off 6 kg.) And my backpack had barely anything in it. “I could bring some books to give away to Lithuanian Esperantists at the end of my presentation.”

Now, I look after books. I never write in them, and I don't even read my own copies of books I've produced, so that their spines remain pristine. So out came the bubblewrap and the sticky tape. And soon a fresh roll of sticky tape because the one in the dispenser ran out midway through the second book. Guess who, having to work with a new roll, had just clipped his fingernails? A two-minute job quickly ate up about five times that. But I'd had fifteen minutes of leeway, so things were fine, wouldn't you say?

”Oh, I've forgotten to pack the special editions of Rimleteroj and recent copies of La Brita Esperantisto”, which I'd intended to bring for a few friends. They were quickly dug out. But they too require protection ... and I couldn't find my sleeves. I knew I had a tonne of them in the garage but I also have a small supply in the office: in fact, I'd used two of them a day or two before. Could I find them? Noting that they weren't where they should be, did I do the sensible thing and go to the garage? Or perhaps you'd like to take the bet that I might've kept looking and looking, assuming that I must have moved them. (It's rare for me to tidy up: for all the aesthetic improvements, I lose the fact that I do actually know where everything lives among my various piles. If I move bits and pieces to new locations in the name of tidying, I struggle to find them afterwards.) Five minutes later, I was in the garage, retrieving the protective sleeves in a matter of seconds. (It now dawns on me that the sleeves I used earlier in the week were exactly where I expected them to be. I must've just used the last two!)

That gave me precisely 40 minutes to get to the train station. I always think of it as being 40 minutes away, and end up jogging parts of the downhill sections to make up for the fact that I'm ten minutes late leaving. And then I discover that it's actually 30 minutes away, and so I arrive with plenty of time to spare. As usual, I had forgotten yesterday that I only need 30 minutes and so was fine to leave with 40 minutes to go; my thoughts were taken up by the fact that I had a 20 kg suitcase and a heavy backpack – the magazines were really heavy, eating up nearly 4 kg themselves, and most of the books were in my backpack rather than the suitcase – with me.

Solutions? Drive and pay for ten days of parking? I don't think so! Ask the neighbour to drop me off? I could but it would be embarrassing. I had an ace in the sleeve: although my train was for a specific time, I'd noted down that the screen when I was buying it said that the ticket was for any off-peak time on the day of travel. And I happened to have downloaded the app earlier that day so that I would have my tickets accessible. Bingo: it was all of a couple of clicks to get the tickets shifted to the next train, leaving 40 minutes later. I was in the clear ... although barely: I still left with 40 minutes to go, meaning that, in my own mind, I was right at the limit! Nope: I was on the platform at Nuneaton with ten minutes to go. Ah, yes: the station is 30 minutes from home. Maybe I'll remember that one day.

It was an uneventful train journey, although not as easy to relax on as I might have hoped because of the number of changes. 30 minutes to Leicester. A similar time to Kettering. An hour to Luton Parkway. A complicating factor is that the two latter changes were both on routes to London St. Pancras, and there were several other trains at both stations terminating there too. I had to make sure not to get on the wrong train since they all get to the terminus by different routes. Everything went according to plan, and about 20 minutes after disembarking I was checking in to the PremierInn.

Whizzing and Wizzing

I knew that I was going to take the Luton DART service to get to the airport the following day, and that, though it's a constant service, the frequency wasn't so often in the small hours. I didn't know the exact times, and so I resolved to get up at 03:00 just in case: I could always read for 25 minutes if a train departed just as I was seconds away from boarding, and the subsequent one would still get me there on time. As it happens, things couldn't have gone better: I paid £4.95 for my ticket, and boarded a train which was sitting there as I got off the escalator. 20 seconds after I sat down in a near-empty carriage, it set off.

Things weren't busy at Luton. Somebody at check-in called me straight over to him because there was nobody ahead of me in the queue. Security was similarly efficient, aside from my backpack being flagged up alongside plenty of others. I stood waiting my turn whilst people had their big bottles of shampoo and drinks removed. An understandable oversight: it's only been TWENTY YEARS since these rules have been in place. To cap it off, there was nothing wrong with my bag, and it was handed over to me after a two-second examination.

I was so early at this stage that the gate for my flight hadn't been called, so I had breakfast. The order was placed promptly, the pancakes arrived quickly, and I had time to sit back for a quarter of an hour before deciding I needed to flag down the waiter to request the bill; clearly they weren't overrun with demand for tables, so nobody had seen fit to move me along. I arrived at the gate at a little after 5:00, joined the queue, and was through in minutes, the two people operating the gates hastening us. SCHOOLBOY ERROR. Once I was through I went ... well, nowhere really. We weren't actually boarding. I had joined a queue going through some doors and winding down some stairs. And within two minutes we had backed up to the gate, causing a frustrated member of staff to ask us to bunch up to make space for the other people they were forcing through in spite of the fact that we weren't actually boarding. I think I'd been led into a false sense of security by how swimmingly everything had gone until that point, forgetting that the budget airlines seem to feel an obligation to herd people like cattle. (If you only ever fly with these airlines you most likely won't be aware that the whole process can be an awful lot more civilised. Give British Airways and similar carriers a go at some point as a treat to yourself!)

Sitting down on the aeroplane ought to have been a piece of cake for me: I'd booked 1C, the aisle seat of the first row. It's sold as a premium Extra Legroom seat. My legs are short; legroom has never been an issue. But there was a thought in my mind when I was booking that Wizzair seats are claustrophobically close to the one in front, so I paid extra. This isn't the first time I've done this, and it didn't differ from the experience of the previous instances: when you're in the front row, you cannot stow your luggage under the seat in front. You're obligated to use the overhead storage. And what happens when you try to do that? You find that there's no capacity because selfish people who aren't in that row have already stolen the space. As I say each time to the flight crew: “Why do you allow this?” Surely it's beyond obvious, and yet ...

A bonus of sitting in the first row – and which hadn't factored into my decision – was that you're one of the first off the plane. That made for a pleasant surprise when I caught myself fourth in line at passport control with a massive queue snaking behind me. (I had to be told to go the queue for UK passports, after trying to go through the wrong one. I promise, I'm not one of those idiots you read about who don't know the implications of Brexit, but the display on the gate had a large UK flag on it besides a Lithuanian one. It turned out that it was an icon to switch languages.)

Into Kaunas

Passport control was prompt, baggage reclaim was fast, and my Lithuanian eSIM meant that I was able to confirm what I'd already read at home: bus 29 went to Kaunas, the frequency is irregular, and you get a ticket from the driver. I was the second person at the bus-stop with about 20 minutes to go. You can probably predict what happened next: at the point the bus pulled up, I was far from the second person in line, a swarm of people having surrounded the doors. (Like all idiots, they didn't seem aware that if other people can't get off, you're not getting on.) This bus was going to be packed and, oh, of course! Yet another airport bus with no provisions for suitcases! (Why do so many administrators overlook this?) Not that this proved a problem to me because I attempted to pay with my card. Nope. Cash only. BOOM. No getting on for me. (Clare did tell me beforehand that I should make sure I had some euros with me just in case. I didn't listen.)

I remember having walked into Kaunas with Clare before, so I consulted the route. I think we must have travelled by train or bus because it's 14 km from the airport. It was around 10:00 so I had plenty of time. In the end, I decided to get a taxi: a guide on the pricing indicated that it would come out at about 24 €. I took a look back at the overloaded bus with no storage space and decided that even if I did decide to go to an ATM to withdraw some money, 40 minutes on that thing in stifling heat wouldn't be compensated by the 1 € fare. And then I got lucky: an enterprising private driver called me to go with him. I gave him the universal symbol for money. Twenty, came back the reply. Cheaper than a taxi! Why did I call him enterprising? Because he called another man with me and there was already a woman in the front. So he got 20 € from me, plus what the other two paid. Good for him! It turned out to be a good job that I hadn't walked: the route was predominantly a two-lane main road with no paths.

Less than half an hour later I was in the Old Town of Kaunas, nearly three hours too early to check into my apartment. Since we've been here before, although not since 2018, there was a particular street I decided to head towards. Plenty of Kaunas is cobbled streets. I really dislike making an unprovoked disturbance and so had some unwelcome exercise in carrying rather than pulling my suitcase for ten minutes or so, until reaching Vilnius Street, the main road in the Old Town. After a couple of minutes, I had arrived:

There's an Italian restaurant a few paces away, and so I settled down there for an early lunch, particularly by UK standards. If you have sharp eyes, you might make out the street sign from the table:

I don't particularly like pizza (unless we're in Italy or I've made it myself) but I'd had lasagna the previous evening, and I knew exactly what Clare would have done in this situation, so I ordered a Hawaiian on the silly notion that I could therefore think of her being here in spirit:

It was good but I made two silly mistakes. (I'm not counting the pineapple on a pizza.) Number 1: I ordered the “house bread”, assuming it would be garlic bread or pieces of a baguette. What do I need more pizza base for? Look at what the primary component of the pizza is! I managed one bite.

Number 2: There were two local beers on the menu. The waitress asked me whether I wanted the lager or the white one. I shook my head immediately at the prospect of the latter: I have an intolerance to wheat. Some wheats, at least: the thing is that I can't predict it. I just have to know that, for example, much as I love Tesco's thickly sliced white bread, I can't eat it. (That hasn't always stopped me: the prospect of a hangover doesn't stop people drinking, after all.) I can report that the service was lovely, as was the food. And I really enjoy the experience of going to what is clearly somewhere a bit upmarket, and yet the menus have the same figures on them as they would if you swapped the € marker for £ and were back home ten or fifteen years ago. I may well be back but it won't involve me eating a pizza. Read into that what you will.

My new home

Having successfully killed a good 90 minutes, I was soon off to my apartment, precisely one mile away. I didn't realise that it would mainly involve an uphill climb but, even in the heat, it was fairly easy.

The apartment is fantastic! I get the impression that it's somebody's home but that she now lives in the UK. (She has a UK phone number.) There's a good-sized lounge:

A well-equipped kitchen:

And a spacious bed:

I had a nap for a couple of hours and then set up my workstation for the week:

Once I'd got a few hours' work done, I headed out to a supermarket to pick up supplies. I came a cropper at the – yikes! – self-service check-out. I had switched the language to English, which altered the audio but not always the message on screen. A red light started flashing whilst a voice informed me that I was attempting to make an illegal purchase. I was a bit wary because I'd bought some pastries, which, lacking barcodes, had to be inputted by hand. The problem was that I didn't know their names in Lithuanian so just selected croissant or whatever judging by the picture, even though they didn't perfectly coincide. Along came a gentleman to help me. Phew, I wasn't in trouble: it's that I had a can of shandy, and it's only possible for supermarkets to sell alcohol until 8pm. (I've not turned into a Shandy Pandy, but I'd had three pints earlier in the day and was picking up a bottle of wine, which then had to go back on the shelves, too.) Since we were nearing 10pm, the machine wasn't allowing the sale.

Not that you'd have known that 10 pm was approaching. We're more northerly than back home, and so were still in daylight. I'm on the top floor of this building. My room's the only one with the windows open, of course:

Two minutes later, I was back in the apartment accompanying my crisps with water ...