Sport For My Neighbors: Klaipeda

Sunday, February 7, 2016

We just got back from our weekend in Klaipeda (KLIE-peh-duh). When we walked through the door of our apartment, Jacob called out, "Yay! We're home!" Yes, we have come to love our little red apartment. (I'll get some pictures posted, but all of the accents in our apartment are in red and we love it.)

But we loved our time in Klaipeda, mostly because we have come back feeling more bonded as a family and that feeling has been missing with all of the challenges of this Fall - Adam's sickness, the remodel, the craziness of the holidays, getting ready for the trip...

Our weekend didn't start out all warm-fuzzy-like. We had a driver from the film company drive us to the train station Friday afternoon and help us find the right platform. It was an almost 4 hour train ride. We ate and talked some and slept.

On our way to Klaipeda

Everyone around us had food - a banana or a sandwich.

And then there was us, the Americans...

Tyson sleeping

By the time we got there, we were tired and unsure of where to go. As we were walking back to the train station today, the boys kept pointing out, "That's the spot where we got mad at each other." "There's where we started pacing and no one wanted to talk to each other." And that's how the journey began. It didn't help that the apartment we had booked had no markings on the door. We knew we were in the right spot, but we didn't know how to get in. We had a phone number, but it took us several tries before we successfully made an international call. Then there was the language barrier. The lady waiting to check us in finally came down to the street, but spoke no English, so through hand gestures and a little bit of google translate, she got us in the building and settled.

Alis Apartments - we were the two windows above the

door front with the little iron balconies.

The apartment there was quirky and much smaller, especially the kitchen and bathroom, so that helped everyone's love for our Vilnius apartment grow. However, it had working Satellite TV with about 5 English stations. The guys were thrilled to find the National Geographic channel while I enjoyed my book.

Hanging out on our awesome bed - a daybed...

We let Adam sleep in Saturday morning, but Jacob's stomach and an empty fridge finally convinced him to get up at10:30. Our goal for the day: see the Baltic Sea. My plan was to find the Information booth, get an English map and directions to the right ferry and we would be set. Except that I didn't know the booth is closed on the weekends. So we wandered. We accidentally walked past where they are excavating and preparing to renovate the old Klaipeda castle, just as they had done with Trakai. That was a site I had been interested in seeing.

Where Klaipeda Castle once stood

With the help of Google maps and some data time on my cell phone's temporary international plan, we found the Old Ferry Terminal. There, we were lucky to find a waitress at the restaurant in the terminal who spoke English. She said we just needed to take the ferry, catch the bus to Nida, the only bus on the island, and that would get us to the beautiful sand dunes I had seen pictures of and we would see the Baltic Sea.

We ate lunch while waiting for our 2:00 ferry - and watched the water get more and more choppy as rain and fog moved in. The ferry got us across, but didn't land where we had expected. But everyone got off the ferry, including a company of Lithuanian soldiers, so we followed the crowd. I had seen a sign at the terminal and joked that there was a Dolpharium - a dolphin aquarium. Adam teased me that there was no such word. Well, there as we got of the ferry was a sign for the Dolpharium. I was right! Unfortunately, there was no bus. Just a dolphin aquarium.

Eating lunch at "Meat Lovers" while waiting for our ferry.

Getting off of the ferry

Lithuanian Soldiers

Between the city of Klaipeda and the Baltic Sea is a long, skinny peninsula that creates the Curonian Lagoon. To see the Baltic Sea, you have to go to the other side of the peninsula to see the actual sea. (The lagoon water was calm like a lake and had chunks of ice in it. The Baltic side had waves like an ocean, but apparently it can freeze as well. You can google it. It looks pretty amazing!)

I pulled this image off of the internet to show what I'm talking about.

We were at the tip right at the top of the "L" in the word Klaipeda.

We were almost at the tip of the peninsula, and although I wasn't going to get to go to Nida and see the pretty sand dunes, I was still determined to see the Baltic Sea. Tyson really wanted to see the dolphins, so we decided to see the Sea and then the dolphins. By this time is was quite foggy, grey and drizzling. But we made the mile trek to the tip of the island. We got to see the Baltic Sea! And touch it. And feel the sand. And collect seashells. We were happy.

I think we've been dressed in just about as many layers

at the beaches in San Diego on spring break. LOL

The Baltic Sea and some sand dunes, though not as cool

as the dunes I had seen in pictures of Nida.

We got back to the Dolpharium... just as it was closing. How was I to know that it closed at 3 on a Saturday? And then the real shocker. We had been dropped off at the top of the island, a special drop off from the normal schedule. Normally it drops off a little further down. So now we had to walk another mile down to the lower pick up spot - and when we got there, there was the bus to Nida we hadn't been able to find at the higher drop off spot. We could have taken the bus and seen the sand dunes after all. But now it was almost 4 and it gets dark by about 5:30, so there was no point in an hour drive to have it be almost dark when we got there. We just took the ferry back to Klaipeda.

Thankfully, I still had international phone data usage time and was able to look up top rated restaurants in Klaipeda. We found a DELICIOUS seafood restaurant. All was right with the world again. And from that point on, we all seemed to start to get along really well with each other. Good food can do that. My phone also helped us find a grocery store nearby so we could grab some treats, breakfast food and train snacks. There is a chain here called Iki. We all crack up that a food store would want the name Icky.

Prawns and Tuna. (Not shown: Halibut and fish fingers)

(A side note about Adam's prawns. They were served in a cast iron pan on a piece of wood with actual evergreen sprigs in the pan. The other day I made chicken noodle soup for dinner and flavored it by putting in a sprig of rosemary, which look a lot like evergreen leaves. They were all complaining as they picked out the "pine leaves" from their soup. Now I had proof that they had turned their noses up at my fancy food making skills.)

After missing church last week, we were determined to go this week. However, none of us slept well that night. By 2 in the morning, National Geographic was back on and we were laying all over our room watching it, hoping to dose off to sleep. We did finally dose, but no one set an alarm. We all overslept. We flew about the house to get ready in the morning and ran out the door, walking as fast as we could to where we thought the church was. We were still wandering around about the time we figured the Sacrament was over, so we finally gave up trying to find the church. We found a Catholic mass instead and spent a little time in that church listening to the choir and organ.

Beautiful buildings and streets of Old Town Klaipeda

Newer Klaipeda:

This has to be what the Soviets built when they occupied the city. Lovely.

There was also a synagogue in Old Town Klaipeda that I wanted to find. We kept getting really disoriented because the streets curve around and we only had a map in Lithuanian (again, the frustration with the closed Info booth!) Instead, we passed a Chinese restaurant that called to us and had some of the best Chinese food we've ever had. But when we were ordering, we just had to point to the menu because of that darn language barrier (thankfully, the menu had English translations). Our waitress was smiling like something was funny. Then she brought us our food. The portions were HUGE. We had ordered way too much food, although our bottomless-pit boys sure tried to eat it all. I wish we had taken a picture because it was quite funny how much food we had.

Our train ride home became one of the highlights of the weekend. The apartment people let us check out late, so we were able to rest about an hour before the trek with heavy backpacks back to the train station. That seemed to put everyone in a good mood. The ride home was spent sharing stories, playing games and really enjoying each other.