12 | July | 2024 | Tales from the Hutt

Tuesday, 18-June-2024

Lithuania passed by the bus windows, and Poland came into view.

I mean, I definitely wouldn’t have noticed when we switched from one country to another if we hadn’t stopped for a passport check by the Polish authorities. I hadn’t noticed when I transitioned from Norway to Sweden, or from Estonia into Latvia or into Lithuania, and this border crossing wouldn’t really have been any different.

Outside the bus were beautiful fields of crops, some stands of trees, and lots of sun-drenched landscapes. Towns came and went, and the bus rolled on. It was a long ride, this time, starting at 7am and arriving in Warsaw at nearly 3pm, so I had quite a bit of time to watch the fields between naps. We even had a few rest stops to stretch out legs, which were definitely appreciated… even with the rather intense amount of napping that I got in over the hours.

I was feeling good, though, with the worst of the food poisoning behind me. Tired, still, but more energetic… and a bit more of an appetite to boot. I’d packed some snacks, grabbed coffee from the bus’s onboard coffee machine, and kept myself feeling good. It got warmer, and I was ready for some adventures in the first of my ancestral lands!

Sunday, 16-June-2024

I’ve mentioned, once or twice, how beautiful Vilnius is.

Literatu street is a great example of that – simply put, it’s a street with a ton of neat pieces of art put up on the sidewalls. Simple, elegant, and clean. An outdoor art gallery created in 2009, with 150 artists contributing their work (mainly small items, about 1ft x 1ft) that now hangs permanently around the street.

It’s a neat way to expand art, and to beautify a city… Similar to something I remember from Caracas, Venezuela, in 2011 where the government had hired artists to paint the construction barriers that were being put up around the city. A way to change the landscape from grey concrete to vibrant colors.

Little things like this, in my mind, make a really big difference to life in cities. I’ve seen it around a fair bit (think the electric boxes with paintings on them), but Literatu street is one of the only actual “gallery” styles that I’ve seen.