Best Western Hotel Central Druskininkai

... public squares and garden were quickly dismentled and removed from their pedastal. These "work of art " were left decaying and dying. People don't really know what to do with these former Soviet symbol. Until 200, millionaire forest mushroom tycoon Viliumas Malinauskas decided to take all these decaying statues and make a park out of them at his 2 km square estate. When he open this Stalin World park, there were lot of ...

... thoughts, sold his idea to the Government, and Bobs your uncle, truck loads of old Soviet statues appeared !!! We paid, we entered and everywhere we went were statues of Lenin. He was in loads of different poses. Standing, sitting, looking gay and many others. There were two Stalins, loads of other old Soviet heros including Kapsukas, Marx, Engels and some other guy who was described as a radical bell ringer and ...

hi again, it might be strange to start with the last entry but I cannot help it, 'cause I am in Belarus right now, packing and getting ready for Bremen. Here are some more pics from Grodno (Belarus), which will be celebrating its 880th anniversary next week. Congrats! Bye-bye and see u soon! Tanja

... we'd picked to see if he could identify. He sat with us and another local guy for ages going through them one by one - check out the photo of one of the innocuous looking ones..........as he said, you can eat all of the mushrooms here, but some of them you eat.....only once! And man, the choice chantarelle mushrooms we picked were soooo good - never thought we'd get to the point where we'd rave about mushrooms! What have we become?

Hi all, this travel blog is still work in progress. It might take some time before I update some entries and upload all the photos. Sorry about this and thank u for ur patience! My home town Grodno I marked as a starting point for my trip PHOTO_ID_L=4-grodno.jpg Tanja

... and back successfully, it was dead now. As I'm no master mechanic, there was not much use of me. On such a slippery ground I couldn't as much as push the car. After several consecutive attempts to start it and a self-evident statement "I don't know what's going on, it started just fine today", Ruta gave up the idea that she might make it. "Why don't you go inside and ask for help?", I motioned towards the petrol station house. She nodded and few minutes later returned ...

Another morning very much like the one before dawned today, which translated into grim and cold. It also meant I saw no point in going to Gruto Parkas. If Ruta had been around, we might have thought up something to do which otherwise didn't occur to me while on my own. This way, though, I decided to repeat by now my common walk to supermarket and ...

... dealt with my breakfast. No hurry. And then I peeked through the window to check whether it snowed, wrapped myself warm and went out. It didn't snow. And not only that. For some reason unknown to me, temperature rose considerably, so today it was around zero, and without any particularly bad winds on top of it. All in all, it was rather pleasant. My plan was simple. I had two or three minor goals like visiting tourist information office, searching for an Internet café and ...

... Temperature still lingered around healthy -4 or -5°C, and the guy didn't seem to be in a particular hurry. But after a fair share of freezing, since we could not move too far away as he might come "any moment", he finally showed up. It was a relatively young guy who didn't have a clue about English. It didn't matter much to me, though, as Ruta was there. The two of them held a parley for a while and then reached an agreement. Everybody sat in their own car and we ...

... in Brest, it's completely ripped up amidst an ongoing construction project. Off in the blocks and sidestreets just over, there are a number of fine 18th and 19th century buildings. Nothing particularly special, but at least something to remind the visitor that Belarus wasn't always moribund collective farms and Stalinist buildings. The biggest "attractions" though would be Hrodna's churches, the star of which being the tall, sheer white Polish Catholic Farny Cathedral. Sitting on pl ...