Our Third Day!

Wednesday May 30, 2018

What a wonderful day!

After a tasty breakfast of eggs and a slice of toast with jam, we made our way upstairs to the office to chat with the manager, Ligita, and play with the pups. You saw pictures of them in our previous post. Their names are Uma, Festa, and Azija and they are all super cute and friendly! We chatted with Ligita a bit while we made some coffee, then we hit the road for a day of exploration and fun!

We rode the bus to the area we were in on Monday, which is pretty close to downtown Vilnius.

Since the class we were teaching tonight didn't start until 6:30pm, we decided to get to the area early and wander around a bit. We got off the bus at a random stop and started aimlessly walking any direction that seemed good to us!

The first interesting landmark we came across was this church that had golden spire tops.

It was probably just some normal church around here, but to us it was very extraordinary! We kept walking past many shops and restaurants, some of which we could see had some cool, fancy decor. One in particular caught our eyes, with the Gothic-themed doors and interior design.

Around this point in the day Tim and I both had to admit we weren't feeling very well. As mundane as it seems, our allergies have been getting the better of us since we've been here so we really needed some headache and allergy medicine. We happened to come across a Pharmacy, which we were a little nervous about going into because we knew we wouldn't be able to read any of the medications or what they were for. Still, we were getting pretty desperate after three days of dealing with our unpleasant symptoms, so we decided to go for it. The clerks in the Pharmacy did not know much English, so we had to rely on very broken communication to obtain a box of something we did not recognize as any sort of allergy medication we've ever seen before. However, after some thorough Google searching and translating, we discovered that it was basically Clariton-D. The headache medicine was much easier to find, since the name on the box was basically the same as what we get in the States.

After our brief detour into the world of Lithuanian medication confusion, we decided it might be fun to pull out our old Pokemon Go games and see what kind of Pokemon we could find around here.

It's been a long time since either of us have really played Pokemon Go, and I needed to download an update for the app - which required us to seek out some free Wi-Fi so the game file would actually be able download. Finally we stumbled across a spot where I could connect to the free Wi-Fi from a nearby shop, and soon after the Pokemon hunt was on! We had a good time catching some unique Pokemon that we haven't seen before today, but sadly the app was experiencing some connection issues, and kept crashing on us. So we really only played for a short time, before putting it away and re-focusing on some of the city sights.

At one point we came across an intriguing display of gloves and mittens that we figured might be a combination of an art exhibit and a free donation for people who are house-less and may need some warm clothes.

The fact is, however, that we really haven't seen many people at all who appear house-less since we have been here. I've just done a little research on the topic, and apparently there is a fair amount of people living without homes in Lithuania, but overall the problem doesn't seem to reach the crisis points we have seen in the cities back home. Still, we thought these gloves were a beautiful gesture of social support for those less-advantaged than others!

A few hours before we had to get to our class we started to feel a bit too tired from walking around in 85 degree heat, so we decided to hang out in the nearby Rimi Hypermarket. This one was a free-standing store and was much larger than the one we have visited in the mall near our flat. In fact, it was almost like a mall itself! We settled in for a bit at the little cafe they have inside the store and ate the lunch we brought from home - a bowl of our leftover pasta and "sauce" that we cooked up last night. It was actually very good, and we felt proud of ourselves for being able to create something tasty out of a total mistake! After refueling our bodies, we did a little grocery shopping for a few basics like more bread, and discounted "day-old" pastries for quick "grab-and-go" breakfasts throughout the next week.

On our way out we saw a booth where a lady was selling the most delicious-looking fresh strawberries! Of course, these are a weakness for Tim, and we just couldn't pass them up. They were a bit more expensive than the food we've been buying, but at just 6 euros for 1 kg (roughly $3/pound) it was still a pretty good deal - especially since they were literally some of the best strawberries we have ever had!

They made a great snack before our class, and we still have some left over for breakfast tomorrow!

Speaking of the class we taught tonight, we felt like it went really well! Basically, AKS has several services they provide. The position we applied for was to teach English to children in the Summer Camp but, since we got here a little earlier than the camp program starts, the managers have been having us observe some of the English-speaking lessons for adults. Apparently, one of the teachers has been out for a little while so they asked us if we could fill in for them today. After seeing how three different teacher have operated the class, we felt confident we would be able to do it, too! Basically, it's a small group of usually 3-5 adult students (all of them seem to have been 30 years or older) that get together to have a guided discussion with the "teacher" - who is really just a person who is fluent in English that chooses the topic for the day, guides the conversation, and helps the students with pronunciation and explanations of unknown words/phrases. Most of the teachers for these classes we have met are native Lithuanian's, but they are very good at speaking English. Still, everyone has been very excited to have us in their classes, because they don't get many opportunities to hear the language from a native English-speaker.

Our lesson plan was simply to ask them questions about life in Lithuania, such as "what are the seasons like here" and "what do people like to do for entertainment". We also had a great conversation about all the movies we like! The students we had tonight were all super nice, and everyone participated pretty equally in the discussions. I feel like we were able to teach them a lot of new words and phrases that are specific to America, like "that's a bummer" and "hunker down", which they seemed to really enjoy! Tim and I both had a great feeling about it, and we were super proud of ourselves!

Well, it's late here now, so time for me to get to bed. Tim will update the blog with pictures for today's post sometime tomorrow.

Love from Lithuania! <3   

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

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