First on the train to Riga, a kupe of 4 old(ish) men, all Russians, living in Riga now. They so wanted us to drink with them, or smoke with them, or. I have made a specific rule not to drink with Russian men I don't want to get kissed by, as that seems to be the trajectory. I did not drink with them. But they drank to us a lot, and gave us good salmon and asked us lots of lots of questions about America. The usual: Do people have heads in America? Are they on their necks? How many eyes do they have? etc. And then they snored SO loud all night. All four of them, in strange snoring harmonies. It was awful. It took great self control not to become exceedingly violent. There's only so much old man condescencion followed by old man drunk snoring that one can take in a day.

In the entirely deserted Spanish restaurant, where I ate delicious gazpacho, paella, and an Avacado Mousse for desert, some old school friends of the young waiter came in, and started up a party in the basement, because they'd just released some album. The two friends of the waiter came back up and tried and tried to get us to come downstairs and drink with them. They were already a bit trashed, and therefore seemed to think it was a good idea (once they found that their evasive description of vodka and applejuice drinks weren't going over) to lure us with jam. Sara told them to bring the jam to us. So they did. I had to go register for classes, so all we got out of it in the end was a tub of jam, and a business card of some young Latvian record producer.

In Vilnius we arrived with no place to stay, and quickly found that it was going to be exceedingly hard to find one, due to the large quantity of scottish football fans in town. Hiking through old town two of them replete in kilts and little caps with feathers in them offered to carry our bags, escorted us to the tourism agency, paid for our hotel when they wouldn't take credit cards, escorted us to our hotel, (a really nice ($$$) bed and breakfast, and then took us out for lunch and a couple of beers. The Scots are generally quite genial, aside from the burning hate of the British, and the tendency to break out into song when drinking heavily at 3 in the afternoon. So now I've got a connection in the Scottish printing business, if I ever need to make use of it. Donny and Dave.

Then on our last day in Lithuania, we ate dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant that had a belly dancer and Hookahs for rent. So we rented a hookah and smoked Peach Tobacco and drank a lot of tea (in addition to the good food), and just as we were about to leave, an older Azerbaijanets came in and narrowed straight in on Sara, came over and asked us about the Hookah, trying to ascertain whether it was just tobacco, or "herbs" that we had been smoking, claiming to never have smoked before. He then ordered us coffee and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. At some point along here Sara recieved her 3rd marriage proposal in Russia (well, first in Lithuania, I suppose, third since she came to Russia) and the man grabbed her around the waist, to which she screamed and jumped towards me. He apologized and Sara coninued to chat with him. He wouldn't believe us that we weren't from the Baltics. He said that we had Baltic accents. We explained at first that we're living in Voronezh. That didn't go down, so we added that we were from America. We had to show him our Voronezh student IDs to get him to shut up about how we had to be from the Baltics. Then he started in on some problems that he was having with the Mafia, and how since we were from America, clearly couldn't we help him? I decided it was time to leave.

alright. That's my story about travelling the baltics with Sara.

The End.