Pictures

We sat in a smoky airport lounge in Prague, attempting to pronouce ‘excuse me’: atsiprašau. It was afternoon and in only a few more hours we would be in Vilnius, Lithuania. I was tired, having gotten up at 5:00am. We looked at the travel book some more, but Lithuanian didn’t look like any of our known languages. Carmen, a German, was having the easiest time. Although born in Germany, her mother was from Croatia and so she grew up speaking both Croatian and German. Her English is pretty good too, having studied and spent a half year in Ireland. Vanessa, my other companion, still had her mind wrapped around Polish. Also German, she studied French in school and had to learn a fair amount of English for her Informatics degree. At the time she was taking a Polish course in school for fun, and the Lithuanian words weren’t helping.

The three of us were traveling to Lithuania to fence at the Lithuanian Cup, a tournament we had heard about through a friend of Carmen. Jurate had been through Germany a couple years earlier and had fenced at our club in Munich, MTV. She and Carmen kept up an email correspondance since, and now Carmen and Vanessa and I had found the time and money to accept an invitation to fence in Lithuania.

Jurate met us at the airport, which was small and resembled a train station more than an airport. She shuttled us out to her car, and we somehow managed to squeeze our three bulky fencing bags into the back. And we were off. We drove to Kaunas, the second biggest city in Lithuania after Vilnius, and about an hour and a half away. There are no highways per se in Lithuania. The biggest road is a couple lanes across and it is legal for people to walk across it. In fact they did, which made for some exciting driving. On the way to Kaunas, introductions were made and we talked about the fencing tournament and the weekend.

Jurate drove us to Kaunas and into a suburb where massive bleak Soviet-era apartment buildings loomed up, one after another after another. The sheer quantity of these old worn buildings was overwhelming. We drove for perhaps ten minutes with more buildings popping up around every turn. Eventually we turned off the main road and into the driveway of one of the complexes. I was amazed that residents find their way home, as each building looked the same as the previous one and the following one. But we had come to the building in which Rite lives with her family. A friend and co-tournament-organizer of Jurate, Rite had kindly offered to put us up for our stay, since her apartment was bigger than Jurate’s.

So I trepidaciously climbed the steps up to the gray monolith, its fascade in disrepair, and then up another flight of steps to the second floor. And there was Rite’s door: a beautifully carved wooden piece of art, completely out of place in the dim, cold grayness of the hallway. Jurate rung and Rite answered. We were welcomed inside into a whirlwind of activity. Two children ran through the hall, half-dressed for the outside in hats and mittens. A father pursued. Rite smiled a bright smile and showed us to our room: small, sparce, and warm with wooden walls and floor and a decorative arangement of ten lights across the ceiling. Three futons were lain out on the floor and there was a chair and small table besides. Perfect. The rest of the apartment was similar: small but bright, and wood everywhere, with few but multi-purpose furnishings. The entry hall and bathroom were tiled and the floor heated. That floor was the most wonderful thing after a day of walking around in the cold.

Later in the evening, we accompanied Rite and Jurate to the “Halle” where the tournament was to be held the next day. As we entered, I was dismayed to see that the place was a small old crumbling gym. Paint was peeling from the rafters and a net had been erected along one wall to keep wayward balls from smashing through the windows near the ceilling. The air reeked of the ten basketball players who played half-court while the fencers were allowed to start setting up on the other half. An old strip was being rolled out, and one end was nailed directly into the gym’s wooden floor. I could tell immediately that no more than three strips would fit in the gym and wondered about how the tournament would work. Meanwhile Rite and Jurate started decorating the place as best they could with pictures, posters, and baloons.

And they achieved a good deal of success. The next day, as we returned to the gym for the tournament, the gym felt definitely festive. Rite manned a raffle table and the walls were covered with decorations. There were, in fact, three metal strips, but another had been taped out directly on the floor, making four in all. The scoring machines, I was pleased to see, were new and my worries of constant electric equipment problems faded. The facilities were meager, but adequate: one toilet for the women, one for the men, no toilet paper. And a changing room for each.

As I warmed up, the other competitors entered the room and began their pre-tournament exercises. In all, there were twenty-two of us: fifteen Lithuanians (including Jurate), mostly from Kaunus, but a couple from Vilnius; four Latvians from Daugavpils, who turned out to be the country’s best; and Carmen and Vanessa and me, from Munich. In round of pools, I got off to a rocky start, losing first to a strong opponent 5-3 and then a not-as-strong one 3-2. The competition was quite good, and I was worried that all my bouts were going to be just as difficult. The next bout I managed to pull out at 5-4 squeaker and the final bout I won 5-0. Looking back, I realized that I had fenced my opponents in descendeing order from strongest to weakest, and that though the tournament was strong, I could hold my own. I was 2-2 with a +3 indicator. Not too bad.

I waited for Carmen’s and Vanessa’s pools finish; they each had five bouts to fence. Carmen fenced well with a 4-1 record. Vanessa didn’t fare as well; she had a 2-3 record. Jurate, who was in the other five-person pool won all her bouts. So we all did well enough to avoid the first cut to twenty fencers and then Vanessa was the only one to fence the incomplete 32 (which she won) while the rest of us had byes. So we were all in the round of 16.

My opponent turned out to be the very woman from the pool who I had fenced first, a Lithuanian named Živile Blauzdyte. Strong and fast, I knew that she would be a difficult opponent, but I determined to fence well and to have fun. And it was an intense bout. Throughout, the difference in the score was never more than two. At the first break, I was ahead 7-6. At the second, I was ahead 13-12. And then, I lost. It was upsetting, but it was over, and there was nothing else to do.

Vanessa had also been knocked out that round – by Jurate, and Carmen had won. So I watched Carmen’s fence the round of 8, a close bout she lost in part due to an injured knee. Jurate fenced my opponent, Blauzdyte, and lost 15-14. So we were all out, and ready to head back to Rite’s to take showers.

Before we did that, however, we made our way over to the raffle table, to play the Lotterija and to buy T-shirts from the competition. We had helped Rite make raffle tickets the night before and were eager to both support the rather poor Kaunus club and to have some fun. Every ticket was a winner, with all the prizes donations from companies and individuals. There were several hundred raffle tickets, many of which were pens and car air fresheners. The best prizes were concert tickets to a Tango performance the following weeking, but there were only eight raffle tickets to get the concert tickets. My tickets yielded a baseball cap and a car air freshener. Carmen got three pens and a car air freshener. But Vanessa’s luck was really the most amazing. On her first draw she pulled out concert tickets. The second, she drew a pen. On the third, she again pulled out concert tickes. And again on the fourth: concert tickets. So she had taken three of the eight concert tickets and couldn’t even go to the concert! It was a joke that lasted the rest of the trip.

We returned to the gym later in the afternoon, after a lunch out, to watch the finals. The way the tournament was run, the women fenced first down to the final four. Then the men fenced down to the final four. Then was the (coed) veterans tournament. And then the finals of the women’s and men’s tournaments are fenced at a set time, to allow for spectators. And spectators there were. The benches and chairs set up around the gym’s perimeter were full and I watched most of the finals sitting on the floor. The semi finals and finals were fenced with women’s and men’s bouts alternating, so that there was no empty time. In between bouts, while the fencers hooked up, a local troupe of cheerleaders hired for the occasion did one-minute coordinated dances to the music of a stereo. It worked quite well.

The first semi-final was between a Latvian named Julija Vancovic, the first-place seed and a former Olympian, currently ranked 36^th in the world, and a local fencer, Ieva Rimgailaite. It was a fun bout to watch, very athletic and technical and very close. In the end, Vancovic was the victor 15-14. The next semi-final was between Blauzdyte and Latvian Viktorija Kostrykina, to whom Carmen had lost, and who is ranked in the 200’s in both the junior and senior world points. It was another intense bout, with the lead switching back and forth. And Blauzdyte won again, 15-14. The finals were, surprisingly, not as exciting as the semis. Vancovic took an early lead and easily defeated Blauzdyte 15-7.

While Carmen, Vanessa, and I had gone to Lithuania to fence, we also went to do some tourism. It was the first time for all of us there and so we had made our weekend into a five-day extended weekend. The day after the tournament was a Sunday and as our hosts had the day off, they drove us around to see the sites. It was a merry group of eight of us: Jurate and the three of us in one car; Rite, her husband Grežuydes, and two children Ugne and Rytis in another. We first made our way to Trakai Castle, originally built at the beginning of the 1400’s. It’s location is scenic, out on an island, and it had snowed the night before, lending a white blanket covering to the castle roofs. We toured the museum rooms in the castle, popping in and out of courtyards, trying to avoid spending too long in the bitter cold.

And then we continued on to Vilnius, stopping for tea (arbata) and coffee (kava) almost immediately. We met up with a friend of Grežuydes’ who lives in Vilnius and was able to tell us a bit more about the city. After tea and coffee, he took us up a hill where the remains of an old castle stand. But it was the view from the top of the hill that was most interesting. To the right, over an old wall, one can see the old part of the city with low-lying houses covered in snow. To the left, one can see the beginnings of the new Vilnius with a few brand new sky-scrapers clustered self-consciously together, a shiny metal bridge connecting this modern Vilnius to the historic part. We then walked through the streets of the old town, stopping into cathedrals and churches to admire the insides and warm up a bit. We saw the parliament building where Lithuanian officials barricaded themselves in against the Soviet army in 1991, the Gates of Dawn, which is a Catholic pilgrimage site, and the European style main squares.

Towards evening we headed back to Kaunas and stopped off at a traditional restaurant where we let our Lithuanian hosts suggest food for us. I had a tasty soup served in a bread bowl and then potato dumplings – one stuffed with cheese and the other with meat – all drenched in a butter cream sauce. It was a heavy (but delicious) affair.

Monday we were on our own, as it was a work day. Jurate headed off to her job as a children’s physical therapist. Rite went to work on an advertising campaign at her new job. And Grežuydes left, but was able to return mid-morning to give us a lift into the old part of Kaunas, where we spent the day sight-seeing and browsing shops. Kaunas’ old city consists of a long pedestrian boulevard with a church at one end and the town hall at the other, and the side streets off of it. For lunch, we ate at a Rite-recommended restaurant where much of the food is cooked with beer. I had a scrumptous dish of beer-roasted vegetables followed by honeyed chicken fingers. Together with a honey beer. Jurate met up with us in the afternoon. We originally were going to fence at the Kaunas club for practice, but apparently not too many people decided to go that day and so Jurate took us down one of her favorite streets, with cut-out figures of angels floating above the street and art galleries lining the sides. We then walked a ways down to where the Neris river joins the Nemunas and back up to town again. Dinner was at Rite’s, where she stuffed us with traditional food and Grežuydes plied us with traditional drink. More potatoes and meat, a couple of dishes of shredded vegetables, and a dessert traditionally reserved for weddings, but being eaten now during the holidays: a tree cake, made mostly out of eggs and sugar and very delicious.