The cepelinai looked like a pair of bedroom slippers: two potato dumplings filled with ground meat, sort of Little Nemo in Slumberland Peking raviolis. At Neringa they were delicious, served in an onion-cream sauce. Edward seemed disappointed. “Are you sure they’re delicious? Have another bite. It’s bad luck to leave a piece of cepelinas on your plate.”
In fact, we didn’t have a bad meal in Vilnius. At }emaiˇciai, which specializes in traditional Lithuanian cuisine, we had a dish called Landlord’s Skillet, meat on potatoes and cabbage, charcuterie-style. At Freskos, in the town hall, we ate steak and veal liver among theater memorabilia, and at Tores, across the river in the U~upis Republic artists’ district, we discovered that pork neck tastes better than it sounds, as we looked down on the lights of the city from the enormous terrace. Nearby, a table of Irish visitors sang “Ol’ Man River.”
Unfortunately, Edward had not forgotten the pigs’ ears. “We’ve got to get you a pig’s ear,” he said affectionately, the way I imagine a 1950s husband might have said, “We’ve got to get you a mink coat.” “We’ll order one as a beer snack. They come smoked and cut into strips.”
So I caved. We went back to }emaiˇciai, to the warren of rooms in the cellar. (There are many lovely restaurants and bars in the old stone cellars of Vilnius, with ridiculously steep low-ceilinged stairs. Be warned: It is easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven than for a fat man to make his way into some of these places.) If the pig’s ear were cut into strips, I reasoned, it wouldn’t be so upsetting. But it arrived completely recognizable, a single julienned pig’s ear, the world’s easiest jigsaw puzzle. I bit into a piece. I’m a game girl.
I can’t recommend the pig’s ear.
I’ve hesitated to use the word charming, which, when applied to places in travel writing, generally means, “pretty, but lacking Michelangelo’s David, the Eiffel Tower, etc.” It’s sort of a such-a-pretty-face for places. Still, some cities are novels—it would take you a long time to feel you’d gotten to the real end of them—and some, like Vilnius, are closer to short stories, no less important or exciting because of that. Their pleasures are in circling back, in recognizing streets and sights, in discovering and then rediscovering alleyways and shortcuts. One day we turned into a courtyard off Auaros Vartų and found it inhabited by carved wooden creatures, oddball birdhouses, even a Madonna snuggled into a tree—all the work of Jonas Bugailiakis, a Lithuanian folk artist whose atelier features a sort of hodgepodge museum that pays homage to his father and grandfather, who were also wood-carvers. It’s hard not to be charmed by a city where you can find a Madonna in a tree. That night we bumped into the singing Irish visitors at another bar and told them we thought they’d been in fine voice the night before.
Walking down the street with Virginija on our last day, we passed a crowd of people. A small girl at the head of it pointed at us and then waved. Soon they were all waving. It was the parade of the famille de Trop, back from seeing the monk and now touring the city, like us. One by one they recognized us, and turned and waved, and we turned and waved too.
“You see!” said Virginija happily, thinking the locals were being picturesque. “This is why they call us the Italians of the Baltic! We’re so friendly!”
We almost hated to tell her.
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