Our last country to visit

Finally, we arrive in the last country to visit, Lithuania so we tried to make the best of it. Later on we will be visiting the capital, which is Vilnius.

First, some more information about Lithuania because it is important to know the country was first part of the Soviet Union, later on they were the first Soviet republic to declare independence. Nowadays, it has one of the fastest growing economies in the European Union. Moreover Lithuania has a high average income, only 2% live in poverty, also the country has a well-developed  modern infrastructure of railways and airports. Lithuania has 99 kilometers of sandy coastline. The tourism is very important to this country too.

I read an article about Lithuania in which they say that Lithuania is a phenomenon in various ways. As I said before the tourism is so popular among the local population, because of that prices have gone up and Lithuania became stronger and stronger. The article even mentions the most popular activities in Lithuania, simply sauna and beer tourism. You can find the link of the article at the end of this blog.

Enough about that, over the years Lithuania surely developed a lot. When we were visiting, luckily it was warm weather the entire week but I heard that during the winter the temperatures can be more than -20°C. The most extreme is -40°C! Gee, I would not like to visit Lithuania during the winter.

During the week we took the bus a couple of times because we had been taking the metro in the last countries so we wanted to try something else. When we arrived some more in the centre of Lithuania we were so hungry we bought something that is called zeppelins which are meat filled potatoes based zeppelin-shaped. You do not want to be a vegetarian in Lithuania because pork is used in almost everything. 

Lithuania is also a country that has a lot of different beers so we tried some to see if they were better than in Belgium. They were actually quite nice, but I can’t say I like them better.

We were very tired at the end of the day but we were very lucky when someone offered us a place to sleep. They must have heard we were tourists and that we were looking for a hotel. Apparently home stays are typical. The next day we had a typical Lithuanian breakfast!

That day, we visited a city called Kaunas. We have seen several churches, even a forth that was used as a defensive fortress once and some museums too. We really enjoyed our stay, in other cities there were botanical gardens, large shopping streets etc.

To end with an interesting fact, basketball is the most popular sport, they have a lot of success on an international level. Another fact is that the ‘Strongest Man in The World’ lives in Lithuania, he has won so many competitions during his career as a strongman.

We are almost out of money but we still have to visit Vilnius, by train we are heading to our last city to visit. 

Sofie Van Laeken

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuania
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attractions-g274948-Activities-Kaunas.html

Article:

http://www.propertywisebulgaria.com/article/lithuania-flourishing-rural-tourism/id_655/catid_6