LITHUANIA | Not what we expected!

This avocado should just be thrown away. All right. All the windows closed. No more bugs. Get in.

Yeah.

Sunglasses. You have your sunglasses?

Yeah.

Show me my rain jacket.

Yeah.

Is that it? Ready?

Yeah.

What in the world? This is a two handed operation.

Today is day two in Jer. Or not. Jur Gurmala, Latvia. But we are leaving Latvia today and going to our 59th country.

Today we are going to Lithuania, which is like a two hour drive from where we are now. And we're going to this really interesting looking place that I found online called the Hill of Crosses. It's a hill that has over 100,000 crosses on it.

100,000?

Yeah. I really don't know very much about it but it looked crazy online. So we wanted to drive and check it out.

Another day trip to another country. I love Europe.

Europe's making our country count easy on us. To be fair, we should probably be spending more time in each of these countries. But we're never going to reach our goal of 100 if we don't do little stuff like this.

Let's.

It's. The drive into Lithuania was super easy. We didn't get stopped to show our passports or anything. Now we're here.

Took about two hours. It is now 1pm I won't say the drive was like the prettiest road trip that I've ever done in my life. But it's a part of the world that I also never thought I would see. It was just perfectly flat and then filled on both sides the entire two hours.

And we passed like a hundred tractors.

I've never seen so many tractors in one drive. It was crazy. But I still have no earthly idea what they grow here because all of the fields were cut like they must have like just cut all the fields. It kind of looked like wheat. But they grow a lot of something.

Keep waiting to go to a country that's really warm and I can wear all my dresses and. But it's been really cold since like Brussels.

Yeah. It's August.

Yeah.

I don't. I guess we're a bit further north than I thought we would be. I just assume like all of Europe is on the same like latitudinal. But that's not a word for sure. It's at the same latitude as like Tennessee and North America.

It's cold.

Where we come from, August is hot. Here it is. The 100,000 crosses.

Here they are.

It's huge.

I know. But it's cool. Apparently amber is the thing here. So there's amber everything. Necklaces earrings, rings, bracelets. It's beautiful.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

I love my new ane.

We've only been here for five minutes and we're already making our second purchase. We are buying a cross to add to the hill. Ah, there's a sign to read about it. At the present, some 200,000 crosses of various sizes adorn the hill. The Hill of Crosses gained immense significance in the lives of Lithuanian believers during the Soviet era as a sign of resistance to the Totalian regime.

Also, this was only €2. Normally touristy things like this, if you have to buy something to participate, it's so overpriced and we never do it. This was a great deal, so I'm super excited.

On first impression, the hill is much, much smaller than I thought it was going to be. I expect it like a mountain of crosses. But it is appropriately named the Hill of Crosses because that's what it is, is a very small hill.

All the pictures I had seen, I guess people were like, like close to the ground, like facing their camera up. So in my head, like it was like this thing that had to look up to like this. But it's pretty much. It's still extremely impressive. I mean, there's 200,000 plus crosses over here. But it was just funny. We were both like, oh, it's a hill.

This is a ton of crosses. Even the crosses have crosses hanging on them.

Sa.

This place is crazy. There's just no way we could possibly capture how many crosses are here. Also, I have no clue who came up with the 200,000 number because I do not know how you could possibly count this many crosses.

So we've written on our cross and we left lots of space for other people. If you want to find it, you can sign it too. We're going to show you where to go. So this is the entrance, the big cross in the middle. And we chose a spot to plant it this way.

Make a right at this wooden Mary and Jesus statue.

We're planting it right here.

Here, Further back.

Here? Yeah.

Doesn't look very stable. No, it's already falling over.

So we've done a little bit more research online while we've been here, trying to figure out, like how this hill came to be. And what we've learned is that they think in the 1830s is when they first first started putting crosses here. And that was when the Lithuanians and the Polish rebelled against the Russian Empire. I don't know if that's the right word for it, but basically that's when they started putting crosses on this hill and then it's been used as a memorial for a bunch of different things between now and then. But one of the most interesting things that we learned is that this hill has actually been bulldozed multiple times when Lithuania was under Soviet rule. So there's probably like this many crosses that are under the dirt here, which is pretty crazy to think about. And they even tried to build a dam to flood this whole area so the Lithuanians would stop planting more crosses. People just continued to plant and plant and plant. And I think as more tourists start to come here and the crosses are super cheap out front, it's just only going to continue to grow and get bigger and bigger and bigger.

We can stay till 9. 52 for €1.

Perfect. Siri, where are we? You're on Vitautocat 76A 80A Sihuliami S.

With the squiggle. I A U L A I A I tried to tripadvisor places to eat lunch on the way over here and there were very few options. So I'm thinking this isn't a super touristy town because nobody rates anything here. Or maybe there's just four restaurants here. We'll see.

This smells like bacon. We found a huge walking street, so this is feeling promising for a good restaurant.

Huge might be a bit of an exaggeration.

Is it? Look how far it goes.

Huge. From where?

For where we are, this is a huge walking street.

So I think we've pretty much walked down the entire main street, looked at every single restaurant and finally picked one.

We picked one that has the fried bread that we had the first night that we were in Riga.

It was like the best garlic bread we had ever had. So that made the decision for us.

Half the menus we looked at weren't in English, which we love, and the other half of the restaurants were. Weren't even open. But this is a huge street and there's no people.

It is a kind of a. Has a weird feel.

I love restaurants that have blankets. This is so fun.

So it's a mush. They have a mushroom bake. It's mushrooms, potatoes, carrots, onions and cream.

Cheese pancakes with meat filling. Hello.

Are you ready? I think we need them in. Do you have any suggestions?

Everything looks very. Oh, I do. We're going to get the fried or. No, no, no, no, no. Fried bread with cheese. Okay. The potato pancakes with meat pie and the fried dumplings with mushroom sauce. Look at this cheese sauce.

Yes.

Being such a weirdo.

I love fried bread and cheese with garlic. I mean, does it get any better than that? This is totally different than the bread we had in Latvian. First of all, it's a different color. The Latvian bread was like almost black. It's not nearly as garlicky. There's just a little bit of garlic. The Latvian bread, you just took one bite and you could taste garlic the.

Rest of the week.

Just a big four fried mushroom ball with cheese on it.

We couldn't do it. We had to throw in the napkin. I'm pretty sure we are gonna die a few days early for that meal. But it was delicious.

It was. And we passed a really cool church on our drive into the city. So we're gonna go check it out and then we're probably gonna go home. Yeah.

Pretty good day in Lithuania so far.

Does the this church remind anybody else of Disney World? Yeah, it kind of reminds me of the Magic Kingdom castle.

Yeah. The one that Tinkerbell flies out of.

Does she?

I think she used to. I haven't been since I was younger.

Feeling that hunchback conversation coming on again. And now we have a two hour drive back to Yermala the same way we came. So we're gonna end the vlog here.

We hope you enjoyed watching our 59th country of Lithuania back to Latvia and.

Then to a new country the next day.

Crazy.