Kaunas

 I took a short train to Kaunas, just over an hour. Got coffee & cake with my 1st class ticket (€13). In the centre of the new town in Kaunas there are large wide streets on a grid. Liberty Boulevard runs down the middle, an impressive mile long pedestranised tree lined street through the centre of town, lined with pubs, restaurants and shops.

At the Art Museum 'Woman in Yellow' was the exhibit, seems like a famous painting, as what interesting was the amount of artists who had done their own version of it.

A decidely odder museum around the corner, enter the Devil Museum. Just the place to see a bombast of devils! Mostly carved from wood and painted, there is a suprising variety. On one floors, there are 'devils' from around the world, though taking a few liberties at times, such as the trolls from Scandinavia. It has orginated from a private collector and grew from there, devilish different.

Also nearby was the large War Museum, which houses all sort of rifles & guns, proceeding from basic bored wood rifles, up to semi-automatic machine guns. An unusual exhibit was a crashed plane, Lituanica which crashed en route to Kaunas.

 At a more contempary art galler, there was short exhibit, Black Hole, in which you entered a pitch black room and guided yourself only by a handrail. Ultimately you zig zag back to the start and emerge back into the light. Upstairs, as part of a large exhibit, dealing with senses other than sight, was a similar idea but this time artificial 'vines' dangle down, and you brush against something like crinkely tinsel. On another floor some strikingly vivid, geometric art.

Another day and down to the old town, some grand old churches around the town square. The Kaunas Castle stands as a tower fortress, nearby old building seem to be being transformed into stylish flats. Just down, through the park is the confluence of the two main rivers flowing through Kaunas, Nemunas and Neris. On Mondays, a lot of things are shut, but I visited the Botanical Gardens which, aside from the glasshouses was open, and it was a beautiful sunny day. Lots of rhododendrons, peonies and tulips. Even got into the butterfly house, which was many cocoons evenly placed dangling from a perch. Plenty of actual large butterflies fluttering around also, one escaped, but the staff quickly managed to scoop it back up and take it home.