We arrived in Vilnius at 5am after an uncomfortable night of broken sleep and numb body parts on an overnight coach from Warsaw. The journey had been going well, we’d managed to get the whole back seat to ourselves and I’d been asleep for a couple of hours but at 1am I was woken suddenly by a scary lady slapping my legs and shouting at me. I guessed she wanted me to move up, so I moved over to sit with Andy and for the remaining 4 hours it was all but impossible to get back to sleep.

The lady in the chair in front was rather large to say the least and every time we went over a bump, which was about every 5 minutes, her chair bounced back with the weight an banged into my knees. I thought the whole chair was going to collapse and she’d crush me. What a nightmare.

We made it alive though and luckily our hostel, the Old Town Hostel was not too far from the station. We dropped our bags off and had a snooze in the common room until our room was available. The room turned out to be really nice. Practically a small flat, it had a little kitchen and our own bathroom which we weren’t expecting. Great stuff. I’d definitely recommend staying there.

Vilnius itself is absolutely beautiful. It was -15 degree and 6″ deep in snow the day we arrived, with perfect clear blue skies. The town is one of, if not the, prettiest town I’ve ever seen. It’s one of the largest baroque style towns and was inscribed on the UNESCO world heritage list in 1994 due to its uniqueness.

For lunch the first day we went to meet some people from couch surfing who had helped us to buy train tickets to St Petersburg. This is a great example of how valuable couch surfers can be when travelling. We’d posted a message on the forum as when we’d tried to book the tickets ourselves no one on the phones spoke any English and it was not possible to book over the internet. We asked if anyone had any idea of how we could do it. One person rang the station for us and found that there were actually only 2 spaces left in the train we needed to get and that you had to pay for them and then collect them in person within 6 working days! This would be completely impossible for us to do as we were still in the UK so we began to panic a little. But then another person offered to go buy the tickets for us if we transferred him the money and then we could go meet him to collect them when we arrived. Now everyone we told this to thought we were a little bonkers, but that’s the great thing about couch surfing. I think it’s pretty unlikely you’re going to get anyone who will rip you off. Maybe it does happen, you obviously need to be careful and check people’s references but mostly you should be able to judge that a person is trustworthy. Amazing.

So we met Augustus who had bought us the tickets and his girlfriend Katja and went to Balti Drambliai for lunch. You guessed it, more soup. Very good spicy soup.

Augustus and katja had been travelling around South America for the last 3 years on $10 a day and had only been back in Vilnius for a few days. The contrast must have been quite hard. After travelling for so long with the kind of freedom of lifestyle and mind that will develop I imagine it must be very difficult to come back. While Vilnius is undoubtedly very pretty it is, like any main town, based mainly around working and shopping. They said a lot had changed since they had left and I got the impression maybe not in a good way. They said they planned to go travelling again soon, I really hope everything works out well for them. They were very inspiring and helped us out so much for no reason other than they are good people.

Apart from Balti Drambliai we went to a couple of other places that definitely deserve a mention. The first was Sue’s Indian. I normally wouldn’t specially recommend going to have something like a curry in a country that has it’s own speciality cuisines, but this place was really fantastic. Better than any curry I’ve had at home. Even in Rusholme. The tastes were just different somehow. The spices seemed so fresh and we had the most amazing peswari naan ever. It was just perfect. Almost worth going to Vilnius just to go there. It would take about 3 days to get there the most direct route though, so don’t wait till you’re too hungry to set off.

The other place was restaurant called Zeppelin. It was here we had our first of I imagine many experiences of not getting exactly what we thought we’d ordered. We’d walked all the way across town to go to this place as I wanted to try Zeppelins which are a traditional Lithuanian dish of a kind of potato shape stuffed with cheese. However despite being named after the things and apparently specialising in them, at the exact time we arrived they had ran out and wouldn’t have any more for at least an hour. It was already quite late so we opted an alternative potato dish, described on the menu as “Potato pancake served with sour cream”. What actually arrived was the most greasy plate of grated potato covered in little pieces of pork and fried onion, topped with a few rashers of bacon for good measure the whole thing was dripping in pork fat. Yum.

I expect this is going to happen to us quite a lot during our journey across the world, so we decided we just had to get on with it, scraped the meat off and ate the greasy, pig flavoured potato cake. It was actually pretty tasty, if I can admit that. The waiter must have thought we were mad when collected our plates and found we’d only eaten the potato and left all the ‘good bits’.

Overall Vilnius was really a great place. Maybe my favourite few days so far, apart obviously from the lovely events of Paris. I’ll definitely be going back, it is just so amazingly pretty, and a good size too. You can really get a feel for the place after only a day or so, which is great when you’re moving around quite quickly as we are at the moment. There are loads of great bars and restaurants too. One of the main reasons why I think it was so pleasant was  that it hadn’t been spoilt by the kind of stag weekend invasions that seems to have happened to other similar European cities. I hear some blinkin budget airline is planning on starting flights there next year, so this may all be about to change. I really really hope it doesn’t.