The Baltics

It's been a while since I blogged but basically, since we left Warsaw we have been to Vilnius, Stalin World, Riga and here, Rouge. Vilnius was really nice. One highlight was going to check out the constitution of Uzupis, a slightly hippy-ish neighbourhood who have (jokingly) declared a breakaway state. Their constitution includes all sorts of important, and unimportant things such as...

10.Everyone has the right to love and take care of a cat.

23.Everyone has the right to understand.

24.Everyone has the right to understand nothing.

37.Everyone has the right to have no rights.

And those are only a few.

Stalin World was cool. The Soviet playground, while not up to Canadian safety standards was tons of fun. Dad wrote about it in detail so check his blog.

From Vilnius we took a 4 hour bus to Riga, it then took two hours in the rain to find our hostel. Riga was nice, but I preferred Vilnius. Riga was too big. There were plenty of old buildings, a few churches and unfortunately, no shortage of Amber shops and stalls. We actually spent two out of three days at Jurmala, the number one beach in the Baltics. The 32 km long, fine white sand beach was one of the number one holiday destinations in the USSR. It's vintage wooden cottages are owned by rich Russians who aren't quite rich enough for frequent flights to the Caribbean.

I must admit I'm not a beach person. If I have somewhere to settle down and clean off then I'm fine but day trips are not my thing. However it was three against one so I manned up and just tried to stay in the shade.

Because our hostel kitchen was so useless, we ended up eating a lot of cheap perogies and pancakes, not that that's a problem of course. We could each get a filling bowl of perogies for about 10 dollars total, and a pancake each for desert was 4 dollars total. On our way up into Estonia we had a 6 hour wait in Valga, a town cut in half by the Latvia-Estonia border. Because of the Schengen treaty the borders since Poland have been completely open. We went from Poland to Lithuania, to Latvia, to Estonia, to Latvia, to Estonia, to Latvia and then into Estonia. We had a bit of fun.

Her is a selection of photos from Poland and the Baltics

Birkenau barracks

The road that led to the gas chambers

"Work makes free"

Stolen spectacles 

Riga old town

I think they mean "sport zone"

Palace of Culture and Science

Warsaw old town

Warsaw new town (not quite as old as the old town)

Vilnius church

Uzupis Republic main square

Stalinworld