After another night out, we took the customary lie-in until about 1030. Waking up refreshed I had to wait an astonishing 40 minutes for a shower, despite being next in line for the bathroom (turning the handle at regular intervals so ignorance of the occupant was certainly not an excuse).

Up, up, up and away to Double Coffee we flew for the usual post-drink breakfast of excess egg and meat and then onwards we went to the Catholic Cathedral that boasted a beautiful interior with many paintings and some lovely architecture. Outside, between itself and the belfry, there is a tile with the Lithuanian for ‘miracle’ on it. This is where the two million person ‘Baltic Chain’ started from Vilnius, going through Riga and all the way to Tallinn, as a way of showing unity against the USSR in the late 1980s.

At this point the heavens decided to open and my fliopflops showed themselves to be woefully inadequate in the rain, so umbrella in hand me and NS made haste to the KGB museum (after a quick spin past the Presidential Palace – he wasn’t in).

The KGB museum/Museum of Genocide Victims is the Lithuainian equivalent of other Baltic States’ occupation museums, but this was by far the most haunting. The museum itself is located within the old KGB headquarters/prison and features many in-depth displays from the partisan movements during the first Soviet occupation, to the deportations of thousands of Lithuanians to work camps in Russia right up to the 1991 independence.

For me, however, the most moving part was the prison cells in the basement – these included solitary confinement cells, cells that were filled with a layer of cold water and a padded cell (to muffle the sounds of torture and the anguished screams of those who had eventually cracked under the mental pressure of such treatment).

The prison also included the execution chamber – standing in a room where so many had lost their lives was an extremely harrowing experience and I’m sure I’ll get that feeling again when we visit Auschwitz in about a week or so.

Coming out of museum the rain still hadn’t stopped, so onto full wets it was (i.e opening the umbrella because we still hadn’t got anything waterproof) and off to Double Double Coffee Coffee.

[INSERT PANCAKE TO CONTINUE SIGHTSEEING]

Refuelled, we decided to continue the rest of our sightseeing tomorrow, but still managed to see the statue of Frank Zappa on the way back. Frankly, this was a massive disappointment, being a small bust on a tall metal pole, but I guess you must take the good with the bad.

Dr Oetker again kindly provided us with pizza (via the supermarket) and after the dodgy oven failed to heat up for about an hour, we finally managed to sit down in our kitchen among various other intrepid travellers. At this point we were party to a frankly riveting conversation between an African gentleman and a Dutchman. Although this sounds like the beginning of a joke, I can assure you it was not.  Basically, the Dutchman was a vegetarian and had just refused the African’s generous offering of chicken. However, this somehow lead to the African announcing to the entire room his fervent belief in God and then grilling the Dutchman as to why he was a non-believer (via a small detour about the divine right to kill animals).  After the African told the Nederlander why he was going to Hell, I was sitting in the corner hoping desperately not to get involved (”I’m technically Methodist, we play acoustic guitar and let children make macaroni pictures” – I don’t think that was this man’s idea of a religion)…

After slipping away unnoticed we went in search of Tarantino’s bar/club. Named after the director himself  and rumored to play only songs from his films, we found it to be completely empty. After last night’s escapades we did not have too much of a desire to go out again tonight so we weren’t too disappointed.  We briefly admired the film stills on the walls and returned to the hostel for some well earned blogging.