First Impressions

Labadiena!

We arrived in Klaipeda last night at around 6:00 with all of our luggage. This is good news. However, it does mean that I was unable to use one of my five Lithuanian phrases, “Kur yra lagaminai?” or, “Where are the suitcases?” which, it turns out, I have over-rehearsed, along with “Ar cia saugu plaukioti” (Is it safe to swim here?) and, to my chagrin, “Ar ju suprantita Lietuviske?” (Why would I want to ask anyone if they understand Lithuanian? So I could then ask them where my suitcases are?)

Instead, I should have over-rehearsed the politeness words: “please,” “thank you,” “sorry,” and “cheers!” Then, at the Ikiukas corner grocery, I would not have sincerely apologized to the woman who rang up our milk, nor would I have toasted a glass to the harried man whom I gouged in the stomach with my shopping basket. Ah, well. Such things come with time. So says the overly-optimistic, overly-enthusiastic American.

As to particulars, we have unpacked our clothes and books and settled happily in to our apartment, which is surprisingly homey despite that it is a former Soviet building. We have also made acquaintances with our landlord, a kind and patient man despite that we blew out the entire building’s electricity in one fell swoop, then accidentally stole all of the high speed Internet for ourselves. Today we are meeting our new friends (recruited by the university), who will help us trade in our dollars for litas, negotiate the daily market and bus system, and find light bulbs.

Thus far, I have found a few natural ways in which Lithuania resembles home. For one thing, here too the clouds are all flat on the bottom and heaped up on top, like a bunch of mutated meringues on a sheet of Plexiglas. (I’m sure that’s true of clouds everywhere at one time or another, but having noticed it as the plane dipped down, I couldn’t resist the description.) The weather here is also emotionally unstable: blindingly bright one minute, then darkly morose, then sobbing. The trees are the same as well: balding cedars, ubiquitous maples, tall and slender clumps of white-limbed birches, poplars with their whispering disks of leaves. Lithuania is remarkably flat, as southern Michigan is, with a brown water meticulously filling any and all depressions, be they mud puddles that line the roads in a beaded necklace or entire lakes. And that, so far, is where the similarities end. The infinite differences will be forthcoming.