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After two and a half days in Riga, it was time to move to a new location and new country - Lithuania. Artjoms had to go to work early again, so we left with him towards the city centre, he dropped us off and we said our farewells. Artjoms was a top guy who really added something to our experience in Riga, I hope he will come and visit us in Galicia because he was in the process of planning a bike trip to Portugal.
Our bus was not leaving for another few hours, so we dumped our bags at the bus station and went to check out a couple of little things we hadn't yet seen up until that point. One of the principal attractions was Alberta Iela (Albert Steeet), a street filled with old buildings from the beginning of the 20th century. Most of these buildings were actually designed by a single architect, and therefore constructed in the same Art Noveau style, known locally as Jūgendstil. Though some of the buildings were a bit run down or under renovation, lots of them were covered in strange heads and other figures. Overall it was reasonably impressive, but probably would have been more so if we were architecture nerds.
After a little bit of shopping and eating it was time to farewell Riga - perhaps not the most exciting city, but with pretty good atmosphere and some of the best food we had on the trip. Interestingly it also seemed to have the highest number of amputees walking in the street I can remember seeing in a particular location. We had a reasonably long bus trip to get to Klaipėda, a small Lithuanian city on the Baltic Sea coast. It was a pleasant bus ride, although I was a bit disappointed to drive right by the famous Hill of Crosses just outside of Šiauliai (I had really wanted to go but logistically we couldn't really make it happen).
Eventually we arrived in Klaipėda. We were only staying overnight, because we were planning on spending most of our time in Nida, a little town on the Curonian Spit about an hour or so away, but not accessible at the time if day we arrived. Now we had to find our hostel and do something we hadn't had to do yet on the trip - exchange money. However we had a problem with both of these things, as the location of our hostel on the website turned out to be completely wrong (a good 5-6kms wrong), and we had arrived too late in the day to change money at the exchange offices. After a lot of walking we found the city centre, asked around a little bit and discovered that we could exchange money at the casinos, which (of course) basically never close. We went to the first one but it was obvious that the security there didn't like the idea of sweaty, informally dressed people with big backpacks entering their 'fine' establishment, and they told us they couldn't do it. After some more searching we found a second one, and fortunately they were much more friendly about the whole thing.
Now that we had a few Lithuanian Litas in our pockets, we could catch a bus to the real location of the hostel, although working that out wasn't so easy either. Eventually we found the bloody place, tucked away in the middle of suburban Klaipėda, surrounded by old communist apartment blocks. The woman running the place barely knew a word of English (which hadn't been a problem for us prior to Klaipėda), but like many Lithuanians she knew how to speak German, so at least I could understand her more or less. Trying to channel my basic German knowledge (something I had hardly used in ten years) to speak was a different story, and in the moment I could barely even say 'danke schön', but we managed.
After settling down, we went to a local supermarket to get a few things and this time we got a more pleasant surprise - Lithuania was seriously cheap! Each country so far had been a little cheaper than the last, but since we weren't using Euros this time, the price drop was significant. We wouldn't have to use Euros again until we got to Austria, so this seemed like a very positive omen.
We wanted to get to Nida as early as possible in the morning, so we stayed in and had a fairly quiet night. However tonight was also the night that Brazil was demolished by Germany in the World Cup semi-finals, so I watched that and laughed as Mari was overwhelmed by feelings of national shame.
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