Travel is difficult, and travel is exhilarating. I like my home comforts and routine as much as anyone else, and travel throws that out the window. Strange beds and strange hours and strange foods and strange customs all make normal activities harder. Add in that day three of my European vacations tend to find me at my most tired, and today could have been a long day. But then things happen – good things, unplanned things, delightful things. And that makes up for the hard.

We started the day by heading over to the university quarter of Vilnius to see the school. On the way, I got distracted by a silver and stone shop; I like both silver and stone, and we walked out with some new earrings for Meredith. We got just up to the university area, and I saw the bell tower for St. John’s church, which our guide had recommended. It is the tallest tower in the old town, and, as a bonus, it has an elevator. I decided to get distracted again and go tour it. I was delighted to discover that St. John’s is the church on the university grounds, so I’d found the university as well.

But first, the tower. There was a small museum about the founding of the university and some distinguished scholars from the school. My favorite was a display of a preserved cut-away human head, with the note that the professor of anatomy who’d acquired it was “the head of the department.” That made both me and Mer smile.

We climbed the small set of stairs to the main level, where there was a Foucault’s pendulum, which reassured us the world was still spinning. We got into the elevator and zoomed up to the top level, where there were safely barred windows with good views of the city. Except I saw a dicey-looking set of stairs going up, and I have a compulsion to climb. Up I went. And I found myself on a level with four doors that went outside to a catwalk around the edge of the tower, and two of the doors were wide open. I yelled down to Meredith that she needed to come up, because she loves that sort of thing. She scrambled up the steep stairs and popped out onto the ledge to see what she could see.

Mer wandered slowly around the exterior of the tower while I stayed safely inside. Whenever Mer got to one of the four door openings, she tried to reason with me that the balloon had been much higher. Silly girl. A balloon and a tower are totally different things! How did I know that the tower with its “railing” wouldn’t fail me? I did step out on the ledge to get a picture of Meredith. It was terrifying, and I whimpered loudly the whole time I was dangling out in space before getting back inside the tower where I belonged.

We made our way down to the ground and proceeded to try to find as many of the university’s thirteen courtyards as we could. I think we found five. A couple of them were very pretty, with lots of shade and plants. We also stepped into St. John’s church, which was very very Baroque in all of its gold-and-cherubim glory around and above the altar.

We strolled the short distance from the university back to the Vilnius Cathedral. I wanted to see inside again since it had been a quick pop-in yesterday. We were only inside for a couple of minutes when we heard some very beautiful vocal music, so we went up more into the church and sat down to listen. It turned out to be the start of 12:30 mass. We were there, so we stayed. It was an interesting experience. We aren’t familiar with the Catholic liturgy and certainly don’t know Lithuanian, so we stood when others stood and sat when others sat. There was some really great music, and we thought we caught the rhythms of the Lord’s Prayer being said, as well as some other small parts (like “Have mercy on us” as a response to prayers). It was a pretty great unplanned event for us, and that was fun.

We stopped for a quick snack. It seems that making desserts really beautiful is important here – small cakes are somehow glossed up to have a shiny gloss to the outside. They’re little works of art. We still ate them, of course. It wasn’t the first time, or last, that we noticed how much less sweet European desserts are. They are still good, but often are pleasant instead of decadent.

After fortifying ourselves, we visited the Museum of Church Heritage, which is in an old monastery church. It is a treasury museum, meaning it holds silver and gold and linen objects that were used in worship. Many were very elaborate, and it seems to have been a fashion to beat gold and/or silver into coverings for parts of paintings, so that Mary’s dress would end up being of beaten gold. As far as I could tell, the original painting was complete and the gilding was an afterthought. In my opinion, the plain paintings would probably have been better, but it wasn’t my painting or gold, so my thoughts don’t matter much.

The church items were interesting for us – we like that sort of thing. But we’ve seen a ton of European church art over the years, so what really brought us to the museum was my desire to see the “Scenes of the Easter Prelude.” Back around 1700, churches used paintings and props to tell Bible stories leading up to Easter. They could be coverings for the altar that would be huge, with twenty or more panels of stories. There were also stand-alone figures used to enact the Passion narrative, from Roman guards to Mary to Jesus (both in the tomb and gloriously raised from the dead). We had never seen anything like that in our travels, and so the collection and information about the pieces were excellent.

On the way out, we also found an outdoor installation of artists’ interpretations of the twelve apostles and the scene of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. Each representation tried to take something from the Bible or from associated legend for each disciple, so that the drawing of Peter had a rooster in it (since he denied Christ before the rooster crowed). One of the most interesting was for Andrew – little is known about Andrew, so the artist did the life of Andrew in eight-bit graphics, like an old video game. The idea was we could see Andrew’s story, but not much detail. It was fun.

More up awaited, so we had to get to that. There is one tower from the city walls that still survives, and that is on top of a hill overlooking the cathedral. It seemed we should go up there, but happily, there is a funicular to get you up the hill. As we went up the hill, a band was doing a soundcheck at the base of the funicular, so we had quite good musical background noise while we toured the tower complex. The views from the top were good, but we didn’t pay to go in the tower itself. We had been nearly as high earlier in St. John’s tower, and we were headed to the Hill of Three Crosses next, which is free to climb and has better views.

We walked down from the tower and about a half mile over to the stairs to get to the Three Crosses. The Three Crosses commemorate when Lithuania converted to Christianity (sometime around 1450, I think). They are three huge white crosses that can be seen from all over the city. They were the last thing visible to me in the old town area when I was in the balloon drifting away from town. We were told the Soviets took them down, but the Lithuanians rebuilt them after the country became independent in the early 1990s.

The views from the Three Crosses were special. You could easily see all of the old town, which you couldn’t see even from St. John’s tower, since it was in the middle of the old town. From the Hill of Three Crosses, you can see all of the streets and red roofs in one panorama. Oddly, there was a different band doing a sound check on the back side of this hill, so both of our hill climbs had bands warming up.

We stayed up on the hill for a fair amount of time – twenty minutes or more – and then made our way back into town. We walked all the way up to the town hall area, where we had supper at an Italian restaurant. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped to get donuts to go, and looked for a place to eat them, but couldn’t find a clean bench.

That was when happy surprise number two happened. As we approached the town hall square, we heard beautiful a cappella music and saw a crowd of people sitting in the square. We sat down and ate our food while a women’s group sang do-wop and swing-style songs in Lithuanian (except for singing “Who Could Ask for Anything More?” in English to finish up their set). And in case you were wondering, Lithuanian women’s a cappella groups also snap their fingers while singing, like every college group I ever saw. Once they were done, the “BigBendas” (big band) took over, playing great swing numbers while featuring a man and a woman as singers. They also did two numbers with an accordion player who was incredible. Oddly, after his two numbers, he hurried off to his nearby van, threw his accordion in the back, and sped away. I guess there was a polka emergency somewhere.

The music was so much fun that we stayed, even though it was in Lithuanian, and even though it began to shower lightly halfway through the concert. It was delightful to see so many people enjoying big band sound being sung in a language only three million people speak. I had a ball, and went home floating. My legs were tired, my feet were sore, and now I really need some sleep, but the delightful things that come from travel, planned or unplanned, are worth the extra effort.