Our First "Real" Day - Arrival in Lithuania

Hello! Or perhaps I should say, Labas!

This post is all about our day yesterday (Monday May 28th, 2018). Let's jump right in!

The day started off relaxed. We made some amazing coffee in the French Press we have in our flat, which was so delicious! For breakfast I ate toast with jam, and Tim had some cereal, which was good. After breakfast we went to a bank inside the nearby mall to get some of our money exchanged from U.S. dollars to Euros, which we think is much prettier than our American money. After that we roamed around the mall and checked out all the shops they have. Most of them are very similar to the ones we see in the United States! For example, there is a shoe shop that reminded us a lot of the Payless stores we have back home. They also have identical stores for companies that are global, such as Guess, H&M, Coach, and The New Yorker. We splurged a little.

Once we were done at the mall we came back to our flat for a bit to have lunch before heading out to casually explore our local area. We walked through a University campus that is about a two minute walk from our flat. The campus had some cute wooden swings, which I made a comment to Tim about coming back to swing on later. Eventually we came to a main highway, near a bridge that gave us a view of the Vilnius cityscape. We made a plan to come back here sometime to take a picture of this amazing viewpoint.

At this point we were starting to get hungry, and we knew we would be out a little late because we were scheduled to attend a speaking class to observe how other teachers in the program work. By the way, the program we are working with is called Anglu Kalbos Studija (The English Speaking Studio), or AKS for short. So anyway, we returned to our flat to cook dinner - a simple meal of spaghetti and tomato sauce. Or so we thought...

You see, we made some mistakes that affected the quality of this dish. First of all, when we went grocery shopping on our first day, we had some trouble determining the difference between spaghetti sauce and ketchup. The reason for this is that, while they surprisingly do have the Heinz ketchup we know and love from our Pittsburgh side of the family, they also have some sort of "tomato sauce" in a jar that was hanging out in the same place as the ketchup. In our defense, there also were some jars of other sauces in the same section that seemed to be actual pasta sauce, but in our quest to be as frugal as possible, we opted to go with the less expensive "tomato sauce" option thinking it was just very plain pasta sauce. Well, today we discovered that it was, in fact, basically just ketchup in a jar.

The second mistake we made was to cook the pasta wrong. Our stove is really just an electric cook-top, and we still aren't 100% sure how the temperature settings work, but we are pretty sure we had the heat up too high when cooking the pasta. Why, you ask? Well, because we basically made a loaf of spaghetti with a gooey outside and barely-cooked inside, despite the fact that we stirred it nearly constantly. So here we are, with a blob of doughy string and some ketchup... but at this point, we were in a bit of a rush to finish preparing our dinner so we could speak with one of the AKS managers about how to get to the class we were scheduled to observe. We quickly did our best to fix up the "sauce" with a little salt, basically whisked it into the pasta to break it up a bit, then ran upstairs to the AKS main office.

The office was packed with teachers, and one of our managers, Ligita. She gave us our bus passes and wrote down instructions for how to get to the other school location on the bus system. Tim (being the wonderful tech expert he is) was able to figure out the route on Google maps, and we realized the next bus left in seven minutes! The bus stop was a 5 minute walk from the office, so we hurried out and hustled to the bus stop, making it just moments before our bus pulled up! There are two types of buses here: the typical bus we are used to, and the "trolly bus" which is basically a street car or lightrail but without the rails on the road. We made it to the speaking class with plenty of time to spare, and spent some time chatting with the teacher, Edvinas (Edwin), who is native Lithuanian but speaks very fluent English. The class was small, just three adult students, the teacher, and us, which we found to be very nice because everyone had a lot of chances to participate. The topic of the speaking class could not have been more perfect for us: Eco-guilt, or in other words, "How Environmentally-Friendly are you?" The format was very casual, and everyone in the class just took a survey about what they do or don't do in their daily life to help the environment then we discussed our answers as a group.

Since we are going to be expected to teach this same class on Wednesday, we were paying close attention to how the teacher prepared for class, and what the dynamic in the classroom was like. After seeing how it went, we both felt pretty comfortable and confident that we will be ready to do it when our time comes.

After class, as we were leaving the school, we looked up to see a flock (yes, this is really what they are called) of hot air balloons floating in the sky! It was completely breathtaking to see! Tim had already seen some other balloons earlier when we were at the mall, but I missed seeing them that time, so I was very glad I got another opportunity to witness them. We have only been here a couple days so far, but we are thinking this might not be a very unusual sight, which is totally amazing to us!

We were able to get the bus home with no trouble, and we were especially glad to see that the bus let us off right near the bridge we had walked to earlier in the day!

We took this opportunity to get some pictures of the cityscape from the bridge, and take another walk through the campus - which also gave us our opportunity to swing on those wooden swings I had wanted to try out before!

Tim and I each swung for a while and just enjoyed the cool evening air. As we walked the short remaining distance back to our flat, we felt as light as one of the hot air balloons and so giddy to be living out our dream of traveling to new places!

Good night from lovely Lithuania! 

Checkout all of our photos in our European Adventure 2018 album:

https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0WGrq0zwG7hjZE