Day 2: Kaunas

I never sleep well on the first night in a new place and sunrise is before 5 here, so I'd been awake for a while before having a second sleep from 8-ish, giving me a wake-up time of 10 or therebouts. That's when I switched the computer on, and today, Saturday, became a work day. For some reason the site of the Esperanto Association, which was fine when I went to bed, was offline in the morning. Another identical site on the same server was still operational, and I could still log in to the admin area, so it doesn't make much sense. It's still offline now, frustratingly.

My workday came to an end when I left the apartment because of a message which arrived in my inbox from a friend's wife. I might claim to be the only Brit here but that's only because an old friend insists on the label Scot in his case. His wife said that he wasn't answering his phone and was very ill, and asked whether I had seen him. I could see that she'd sent the same message to a particular hotel, so thought I'd head there, and left my apartment on a twisty, downhill journey.

One of the downsides of planning where to get an apartment here is that the name of the university where the event is being held has been translated: I don't know the Lithuanian name. As I got within a few minutes of the hotel I was heading for, I noticed a building bearing a large crest:

The inscription looked as though it contained a name I recognised as part of the university's name:

A-ha: Universitas Vytauto Magni in Latin: The University of Vytautas the Great. That corresponds with the Esperanto name we'd been given, Universitato Vytautas la Granda. And if I needed further corroboration, I got it right in front of my eyes:

I am the world's most easily distracted man, so instead of continuing my planned welfare check, I went in. My lack of discipline proved equally inspired, for there sat my friend. Mission accomplished.

Since I was there, I registered, picking up my namebadge and goody bag. I also registered to receive a lunch every day. This is the first time I've done this, having finally learned my lesson that leaving the building to find food often means not coming back for hours. At 40 € for four days, you can't complain. Clare was right again: they only accepted cash, so I set off to find an ATM. That didn't take long, and so I was soon back, booking in my lunches. The lady at the desk made me laugh with the phrasing of her comment, attempting to be inclusive: “Vegan food, vegetarian, or normal?”

The university is centrally located. Within a minute I was at a large fountain:

This marks the crossroads between the university campus to the north:

a cathedral to the east:

the river to the south, and the main shopping boulevard westwards:

That's the direction I headed in, with the intention of getting something to eat. There were plenty of restaurants, and I'm comparatively rich here, so everything would've seemed very reasonable. But this is, as you can see from the photo above, a boulevard housing elite establishments such as United Colors of Benetton, and I'm no ponce. I carried on walking towards the Old Town.

I didn't make it that far without a distraction. I'm a sucker for bookshops when we're overseas. There's no point in my going into them here, though: Lithuanian is impenetrable to me, radically different from any language I know. But I caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a children's-style booked called Easy Lithuanian in the window, and so headed in: I wouldn't mind dipping into a short book for an hour or so every evening whilst I'm here.

I couldn't find it, so got help from the bookseller. She produced it and, at the point she was handing me the supplementary exercise book, I noticed the price: 49.99 €. No thanks. I did pick up a hardcover (for a bargain 6 €) of a book I intend to translate one day, though. I already have it in English, French and Italian, and will get the German one for Clare one day. The more, the merrier because it contains some intricacies, and it would be handy to see how different translators handled them. I can navigate to the relevant pages in the Lithuanian version, with Google Translate helping me to get to the bottom of things. So that counts as “research” rather than my adding to my already gargantuan pile of unread books.

Once I got to the end of this major artery there was an underpass I'd crossed yesterday, taking me to Vilnius Street, the Old Town's main road. I decided I might as well go back to yesterday's restaurant – this time forgoing pizza! – but via the length of Zamenhof Street first, since until now I'd only stood on the corner.

The buildings on it are fairly pretty:

Well, as long as you can look past one particularly grotty and delapidated one:

I was aware from Google that this particular address was something to do with Esperanto: the Google label indicates Esperanto-speakers unite.

The property which was our headquarters until we surrendered the lease in October had been broken into many times over the previous years and didn't look anything like this bad!

The doorway did indeed hint at an association with Esperanto:

That's a sticker for the Youth Esperanto Association of Lithuania:

and the world's worst attempt at labelling a sign. How can you write a nine-letter word and yet have crossed the midpoint as you segue from letter three to four? Of course you weren't going to be able to fit in the entire word ... so maybe write it smaller and lose the left margin? A digression but things like this really bug me!

Anyway, that was the end of tour, so I went back to the Italian restaurant, Casa della Pasta, and, for the second time in a row failed to order pasta there:

The usual scenario played out of the waitress double-checking that I really did want two pints of beer at the same time, and the lady who brought them to me similarly wanting to make sure. Upon receiving confirmation, she whisked away the cutlery I would require for my meal. Perhaps she had me pinned as an alky.

Once eating was out of the way, I returned home, although via the supermarket. Proving I'm not an alky I've picked up a raspberry shandy for sentimental reasons: after our adventure in Marcinkonys, which I thought was great but proved torturous to Clare, we bought a tonne of remarkably cheap drinks once, exhausted and exceedingly thirsty, we had returned to civilisation. Unfortunately for Clare, the only water was carbonated, so she snatched one of my pints, which she despises moderately less: