Day 4: Underway in Kaunas

Today was the first full day of activities here. Mine started off not going to plan. It was my job today to look after my friend, who has been on a sudden downturn recently. Unfortunately, I couldn't find him: at some point between having a very good breakfast in his hotel (confirmed by witnesses) and the start of the day in the hotel about 100 m away, he'd gone off an adventure. After not being able to track him down, I shrugged my shoulders and decided I'd sit in the second main presentation of the day, which was to be given by an Esperantist whom I greatly respect: in fact, he was my supervisor when I did my post-graduate diploma in Interlinguistics at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland.

He'd arrived only 30 minutes before his talk. He needn't have rushed, owing to the trademark lack of punctuality of the previous presenter. Slightly under an hour later (he'd inevitably overrun his slot but nonetheless cut his presentation short), I was on my way to a brief presentation about Lithuanian. Considering part of my own presentation tomorrow will be the pitfalls of taking images off the internet to be used in print or enlarged, it was ironic that we were supposed to read these conjugations in Powerpoint:

I grew bored of this presentation about two-thirds the way through. It's a feature of Esperanto events that you'll find people willing to interrupt the flow by commenting on something. (Except when I'm presenting. It happens one time at the maximum.) As a result, I was preparing to leave when the presenter taught the expression “I come from” and then asked people to give the entire sentence. It's a bit unfair given that Lithuanian doesn't use the common international forms, but I hazarded a guess at “Britanios” when she nodded at me. Got it! There was an intake of breath from a Turkish lady and Italian bloke at that: was it the shock of getting it correct, or of a Brit without a British accent?

At the point when singing came into things I cut my losses and left. I hadn't been able to track down my friend and so went for a stroll. This time I headed to the nearby fountain and continued southbound.

Within a couple of minutes I caught better sight of a bridge crossing the River Nemunas:

And soon I was crossing it:

The next part of the adventure was to walk through a park for a while:

And then head back.

Lunch was chaotic. I'd but a coupon but this time things ran differently. Instead of eating in, say, a university canteen, a restaurant had been hired out. It couldn't accommodate everybody at the same time, so our tickets indicated a slot. Mine was 14:00. I started eating at 14:50. Tomorrow I'm supposed to be presenting at 15:00, so things might go a bit awry if things don't improve.

My friend had been spotted in the meantime, so I headed back to the university, sitting in a fascinating talk about the transition to a heliocentric view of the solar system:

My friend headed out of the lecture towards the end, which was my cue to go, but our mutual friend was already en route to intercept him. That left little to do other than enjoy a concert:

And then I went for a walk, bumped into a friend for a chat, and then spotted my missing friend in a group heading to a restaurant. And so I accompanied them, getting to sit by his side. I've had two favourite trustees (if you exclude Clare) during all my years with the Esperanto Association. One died last year; the other is this friend. You might imagine that we both enjoyed our first proper catch-up since before the pandemic.

And then it was time to go home: