Dalija hotel Druskininkai

... Lithuanians protesting of Mr. Malinauskas bring back the horrorific memory of the Soviet days. But Mr. Malinauskas emphasized that is park is done for educational purposes only, to educate the younger generation NEVER to forget about the past and know about their tragic history. After a 2 hour ride from Vilnius, I entered Stalin World. The main entrance has this barbed wires and a red cattle cargo train that was used to ...

... even made a couple appearances !!! And all around the outside, there was barbed wire and guards posts. Apparently, it was meant to make you feel like you were in an old gulag !!! Trust me, it didn't !!! After running around for a couple of hours, we ended up in the kiddies zoo. There was a two humped camel, and then I heard a Lith say kangaroo. Actually, it was a wallaby, but these ****ers thought I was ****ed when ...

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

Through the little spa town of Druskininkai (day spas everywhere, suitable for those big living city folk from the capital to pamper themselves by being scorched with hot lava or whatever exotic stuff they're all doing now) to a little known National Park called Dzukija. To be honest we were really looking forward to some 'nature stuff' - the region's really known for its forests and wildlife. But first, another oddity. Grutas ...

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

Both Poland and Lithuania are catholic countries, but, so it seemed, people worked in both of them today regardless of the Epiphany. Well, all right, as I was on my vacation, it didn't matter to me much. Ruta appeared earlier than usual. Whether for the Epiphany or the upcoming weekend - or both - she was already there a few minutes before it got dark. We even had time to go to that restaurant for lunch. So we hastily packed, bundled things into her car, summoned the house ...

... café, and spend the rest of the day indoors. There was a respectable backlog of things to read piling up on my table anyway. So when best to take a lick of it than on a day like this? With outside temperature way below zero and nothing to draw me out, listening to Croatian radio on satellite and reading in the warm house was no mean proposition at all.

... some food. Along the way I didn't plan to walk exactly the straightest possible line. I reckoned that such an approach would suffice to get myself familiar with a place like Druskininkai, whose size, according to my knowledge, reached up to some 20000 inhabitants at most. Owing to the fact that I didn't consider it in any sense so crucially important to reach the very centre of the town, at least not straight away, it didn't take me long to chance upon a Russian Orthodox church. In ...

... him. He took us to the edge of town and brought us to the yard of a wooden house. That was where we were going to spend the next few days. Of course, the road was not trodden here any more, but rather all under snow, same as everything else that hadn't constantly been under some kind of traffic. We entered the house, which was actually very nicely fit out and cosily furnished. He showed us rooms, bathroom, kitchen and even a cellar space where there were pool and ...

... it commands a dominant position in town, somewhat cementing the town's former position as an eastern provincial outpost in Poland. All in all, Hrodna's a nice place to while away a day or two, but it ain't exactly a hip, happening metropolis. I spent most of the day today wandering around its streets and plazas, looking for any stand-out historic remnants. Apart from the odd church, there really isn't much. The promise of two castles facing each other on the edge of the river ...