Another installment today from Dr. Petrie, Associate Professor and English Department Chair at Colorado Christian University, who was a Fulbright grantee to Lithuania in 2006.
Vilnius has long been a cosmopolitan city with many cultures
and ethnicities, and the Old-Town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since
I was teaching at the University there, it made sense for us to live in the
center of Old-Town Vilnius, but our location offered much more than
convenience. The energetic mish-mash of
cultures, shops, entertainment, and dining experiences there was unique and
unforgettable. With every day that
passed, our street, Totoriu Gatve, named in reference to the fact that it was,
long ago, the Tatar quarter of the city (just as Vokieciu Gatve means “German
Street” for the same reason) fascinated
me more and more. Across the street from our flat was an antique shop, run by
an antique lady who lived in the flat above it and featured lace curtains in
all her windows, each of a different pattern.
Directly next to her lies the Transylvania, a pub which advertises +Guinness GB and seemed to be very popular with
motorcyclists and British tourists. My husband still claims that you haven't
lived until you've seen a tipsy Brit singing Diana Ross's "Stop in the
Name of Love" to a passing Taxi in Lithuania. When the Scots were in town
for the Lithuania/Scotland football match, we heard a lot of "Auld Lang
Syne" coming from there, and our street was flooded by men in kilts. The
pub and the antique shop seemed to exist in a semi-armed detente, in which the
proprietor of the shop shook her head and clicked her tongue out the window,
and the motorcyclists made their bikes backfire in response.
