Arriving in Vilnius – One Day Like Two

After waking up and getting off the bus, I hurriedly change into my winter coat, it’s 7:30 in the morning and about 7 degrees.  I find the bus easily, buy a ticket from the driver without speaking and sit down for 40 more minutes. Listening to the continuous announcements and reading the signs in the street I start to get a feeling for this language that doesn’t really sound foreign to me although I don’t understand anything.

It still is really strange for me to speak English in the street in Eastern Europe. I usually go to Latvia where I never need it or I stayed with people who speak the local language and were fluent in English or German themselves. It feels more appropriate for me to ask simple questions in Russian although I don’t really know more than some sentences. Enough to find my host’s house, anyway. After a warm welcome and some tea I leave for a first day of sightseeing and getting to know the city. Only once it crosses my mind that my (now I have to say former) class mates start the clinical years of their studies.

I spend most of the day walking up and down the streets of the old town. The sky is grey, but it’s not cold and it doesn’t rain, so the weather is nice enough to just take in the city by walking, it’s also small enough to more or less walk the Old Town’s edges in a short time. And I feel I would fall asleep if I sat down after the night on the bus. I’ve been to Vilnius for three hours before when I changed buses on my way from Riga to Bydgoszcz two years ago. It was so hot then that I couldn’t enjoy the city. But still it’s not completely new to me and it also doesn’t feel foreign. There really seems to be something like Baltic everyday culture, it surely doesn’t feel Latvian, but not all that far from it. The main difference seems to be that houses are a bit lower than in Riga and the decorations are of another style. Sometimes it even reminds me of pictures of Southeast Europe. Also there seem to be more churches. Maybe I’m just more aware of them as they are catholic and more decorated. In spite of the grey weather I get the impression that this is a lively city with a lot of bigger and smaller things going on, strong creative energy and quite a lot of young people around.

 

Archbishop's Cathedral

 

In the afternoon I am joined by my host Virginija and two French girls who just arrived at her house, too. So I get some more walking this time with some insider information about both landmarks and small details that I would not have noticed or at least not understood on my own. She shows us the “Miracle” stone in front of the cathedral, this is where the Via Baltica of the Singing Revolution started that eventually brought freedom to the Baltic countries, a development that was hoped for in the way you hope for a miracle throughout Soviet occupation. Now there is the tradition in Vilnius that you have to stand on this stone and turn around three times and make a wish. It will be fulfilled. We’ll see.

 

 

Bus Across Poland

After an extended late Sunday morning breakfast I arrive at the international bus station 15 minutes before the bus to Vilnius is supposed to leave. Unfortunately the bus is caught somewhere in Berlin traffic, so it’s more than one hour late, so I get to exchange impressions of and experiences in the Baltic countries with a German guy waiting for his Lithuanian wife returning from her home country.

 

After the conference with so much input and external structure the bus ride is utterly relaxing. It is completely booked, but only a few people got on in Berlin, I have a window seat on the first floor, there are only ten more people on the whole floor, it is very quiet. It’s quite nice to have absolutely nothing to do, no appointments to keep. I get to read a lot of magazines I took along and just look out of the window at the very flat German and Polish landscape, sometimes a stretch of forest, sometimes apple plantations with small trees overloaded with red fruit. One of the articles I read is on travelling and understanding between different parts of the world as well as changes in travelling due to technical developments. I think about this blog and how it’s often much easier and cheaper to buy tickets online these days and how the offline infrastructure is reduced in favor of the digital option until it’s not an option anymore. I decide that like it or not, some travel experiences just aren’t the same as 20 years ago just like our lives are very different from the way we lived in the 1990s…

Read on the bus: Free magazine to be found in the more expensive and presumably faster German trains, neofeminism, protestant magazine that sometimes comes with some big newspapers

 

Another article is about the author’s search for the maid her mother’s family had during the war, a young girl forcibly taken from a Ukrainian village. Though those who have their own memories of that time are dying out, this cruel injustice that wasn’t even recognized by the German side for a long time will remain an issue between my country and our neighbors to the east. Both the suffered and the caused pain are passed on through the generations and there is no way not to deal with them especially in a more and more closely intertwined macro-neighborhood such as the EU.

Somewhere in the middle of Poland

 

The bus feels like a space ship to me, probably a transit phenomenon as I won’t get off in Poland this time. I get the chance to start adjusting my language. The conductor speaks Russian, Lithuanian, Polish and (some) English. The announcements are made in Russian and (very shortened) in English with a heavy accent. Once we stop and I feel I should understand the announcement this time, so I ask the girl sitting near by, for some reason in English, she isn’t comfortable. I tell her in Latvian I understand that language, too, as I had heard her make a phone call in Latvian while reading a Russian magazine. She is surprised and happy and tells me that we stop for 15 minutes. Everyone leaves the bus at this small parking place in the middle of Poland. There is a vending machine and I find some Polish coins in the paper bag holding the remaining coins from my last trip to this region, but I don’t understand the instructions on the machine. I ask the guy waiting in line behind me, he understands enough Polish to help, as he sees the Latvian coins in my collection he switches from English to Latvian. It is a bit weird to speak Latvian in a third country and between other languages. When everyone returns to the bus a young guy politely offers to let me enter first. OK, now I know I’m back in Eastern Europe, it feels like home.

We arrive in Warsaw after 10pm. I’ve never been here, the tall buildings with huge advertisements in front of the dark sky are a sharp contrast to the dark forests and meadows we passed before. After the second stop every seat in the bus is occupied. I chat with two Lithuanian guys who spent the weekend partying in Warsaw and will be back in time for work on Monday as we will reach Vilnius at 7:30am. After a while the Russian, Polish and Lithuanian conversations die down and everyone tries to sleep in their seats.

Berlin in Fall

Even after I knew I wouldn’t take my intermediates, plans continued to change, originally I planned to go round the Baltic Sea clockwise, possibly including Sweden. But then I stumbled across the final conference of a research project concerning mental health and migration to be held in Berlin on the second weekend of October. So I adapted my plan to see my parents for two days, continue to Berlin to attend the conference, and take the night bus to Vilnius.

Homebase: Hamburg

 

Berlin is unusually charming this weekend, mild temperatures, blue skies and trees blazing with changing leaves. After I arrived even later than planned on Thursday (thanks to German Railway), I leave Dana’s place in Moabit with all my luggage including a new green backpack and a cotton shopping bag holding my winter jacket as I will spend the next two nights at another friend’s house. The bus station is next to a bridge crossing an entrance of the Westhafen (western harbor), smooth black water still covered in some morning mist. After storing my bags at the central station I take a short walk to the lecture hall next to the hospital.

View from the Wall memorial at the Invalidenpark in Berlin

 

Although there is a huge construction site covering more or less the whole area between the central station and the Charité University Hospital, the whole city seems calm to me. I realize Cairo has more or less established itself as my benchmark for big cities, so every place with multi lane crossroads, but less traffic, shouting and blowing horns feels tidy and quiet to me.

The conference is aiming at the center of my research interest and I’m not disappointed by the talks and discussions. Some information on the project dealing with epidemiological differences between Germans, Turks in Turkey and people of Turkish descent living in Germany, their different illness models and access to and usage of the health care system can be found here. I successfully invite one of the professors to hold a session at my university in a Global Health course some friends and I are developing and I get an internship at the Charité for next year, so it’s been a 100% success.

On Saturday night Susanne, Hanne another friend of theirs and I have dinner in a new Korean restaurant in their neighborhood. The owner also is an opera singer and she agrees that it’s a quite courageous thing to start a new restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg, as there are so many places to eat in this area and competition is tough. I never ate Korean food before and find it quite different from Chienese, Japanese or any Asian (or other) cuisine I know, but very delicious. Susanne has to finish my fish soup, though, it is too spicy even for me. I in turn finish Hanne’s cabbage wraps and the evening passes in an animated exchange of travel experiences from different Asian countries. And I definitely recommend Kochu Karu, delicious food from best ingredients with a charming owner, a kitchen behind glass and a very balanced interior combining an old fashioned ceiling with plain furniture from light wood blocks and a custom made painting all around the three walls that tells the story of a tiger carrying great food from Korea to Berlin.

 

Travel Plans and Other Plans

Many things didn’t turn out as planned this year, but I’ve come to see it’s really for the best. I was not admitted to take my intermediate exams. So instead of joining most of my class mates in the toughest eight weeks of German medical education and finishing my preclinical studies by the end of September I took some time off in July, returned to the library to prepare for a comprehensive physiology retake in early October and left for the Baltics and Finland after now having fulfilled all requirements to take the intermediate state exam next spring.

The itinerary (Vilnius – Riga – Tallinn – Turku –Helsinki) is a mix of new destinations (Vilnius, Finland) and coming home (Latvia) with some new aspects, as my brother recently started med school there.