Exploring Old Town

Once I was able to rouse Kevin from his hibernation, we made our was down to Old Town to check out the sights.

The main gathering place seemed to be the square around the Vilnius Cathedral. There were various groups of people enjoying the beautiful weather from little kids to high schoolers, to college students. We even saw a game of hacky sack being played. The cathedral was closed, so we just walked around it, then we started walking up one of the streets to find somewhere to eat.

This particular street had quite a few restaurants, and all of the restaurants had outdoor dining, so most of the time we walked on the cobblestone street because the sidewalk was full of people eating. After walking up and down the street (Kevin likes to always explore his options, and I just wanted to try some more authentic Lithuanian food, so my criteria for an eating establishment just excluded pizza.), we found a nicer restaurant. At Lithuanian restaurants you always just found a table, and then the waitress would come to you. I find it an improvement over having to wait to be seated.

After Kevin explained everything to me, I decided to get koldunai. It is called a dumpling, but to me it is kind of a mixture of gnocchi and ravioli, except made with potatoes (which is probably the definition of gnocchi, but oh well). It was delectable. Below is a picture from the internet of koldunai, Kevin was hit or miss at remembering to photograph our food. I think mine were a little bit smaller and they had more of the sour cream sauce on them.

After dinner we made our way back to our hotel. I had taken Kevin's guide skills for granted while we were in Kaunas since he almost always knew where we were and where we were going. I though such would be the case in Vilnius. However, Vilnius is much more spread out, and instead of 10 months spent there, Kevin only served in Vilnius for two months and not really in the area we were in. Anyways, we got horribly lost. We wandered around for about 30 minutes before we spotted a cab and asked for directions. Thankfully he was nice and just gave us directions because we were just around the corner from where we needed to be. By this time, my knee was furious about all of the walking, so I was getting quite whiny and was very glad to take an Aleve and crawl in bed.