B is for Beginnings

My journeys and visits to Lithuania have always begun at Vilnius International Airport. When I first arrived in September 2005 it wasn’t much different in size than the main train station*. By the time the final passenger has left the plane, boarded the bus and been driven two hundred metres to “arrivals”, the first passenger has probably been through passport control, collected their luggage and entered through the frosted “Stars in Their Eyes” doors. Through these doors lies Lithuania – all it’s beauty, oddity, unknown. On the public side of these doors, your crowd awaits. All walks of Lithuanian life gather; old ladies, parents, students, children, all clutching gifts for their friends and family recently returned from “the West” – Ireland, the UK, Spain, etc. Despite the pushing and standing on tip-toes, straining for that first glimpse of a long-missed loved one, the crowd allows a narrow parting for people to walk down. Occasionally, when a reunion is a little too emotional, the narrow line to the doors can get blocked, but this is rectified quickly, either by an apologetic Englishman asking if it “would be possible to get past”, or by the embracing women’s father/ husband urging them to move, “we’re paying for the car park remember”.
Lined around this melee are the taxi drivers holding signs for names of investors, businessmen and sometimes tourists. Most of these names tend to be Scandinavian.
Vilnius Airport is not a tourist airport. By which I mean it isn’t primarily an airport where foreigners arrive on their holidays. It’s not full of tacky shops or car hire booths or tour guides. It is functional. It has a single bureau de change, a small kiosk where you can buy bus tickets, magazines, chocolate and cigarettes, an information desk, which will be closed if you’re arriving on any of the direct flights from the UK. Though I have never used it, there is a desk somewhere for car hire; at least, there is a sign to such a desk.
I first walked through those doors two years feeling apprehensive…

“Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Adomas”.

I was met in the airport by Jurga and Edita (typical Lithuanian names). Blonde hair, blue eyes, long coats, scarves and I think one of them even wore a hat. Think, the French Resistance from ‘Allo ‘Allo, only with much better English. Out we passed into the Lithuanian day, cold, very cold, and made our way to our lift, Rita and her trusty Vauxhall (Opel) Nova. First language experience, “err, labas” I said, or something that probably sounded more like “laa-bas” (which is, I am told, the common greeting in Tunisia!). Rita didn’t speak English.

Like most people arriving in Vilnius, I headed straight to the centre, to Old Town Senamiestis. The drive from the Airport to the Centre is like unwrapping a present in a game of pass-the-parcel. Its outer layers of Soviet blocks and decrepit industry are like grey, dusty newspaper and as a Londoner, I reflected, even less colourful than the Old Kent Road, which is where I had lived previously. You peel off the layers of newspaper, trying to read the Latin script, yet bewildered at every word, instead looking at the pictures - the train station with it's large-gauged trains, some heading to Kaliningrad, Minsk or St Petersburg and a reminder of both Vilnius' geographical and historical location. Suddenly you turn a corner, off with the last layer of the newspaper and in your hands sits the kind of wrapping paper your Mum would tell you to carefully unwrap and not spoil - “You can use it next year”. Vilnius Old Town, to everyone from the most hardened capitalist, to the stag-do drunkard would agree, that Vilnius’s architecture, little streets and magnificent churches make a beautiful beginning to any visit in Lithuania.
If it was edible it would taste of Gingerbread and cinnamon.
Here begins your adventure in Vilnius, and hopefully of the rest of Lithuania. If you arrive in summer the small cobbled streets will be alive with tables and chairs and tourists and locals, all mixing together, enjoying the short lived sunshine. If you come in the winter, you’ll find places to unwrap your layers from the snow and ice, and get cosy in one of the cafes or restaurants.

*The airport has since been expanded and has lost a little of its original charm and character, though the atmosphere of expectation hasn't deminished.