Vilnaius gatvė is a pedestrian-only, café-lined cobblestone street that links Kaunas’ Old Town square, Rotušės aikštė, with Laisvės alėja, another long pedestrian street that runs much of the length of the city (26 July 2018).

From my perch right here, along the two-block liveliest stretch of Viniaus gatvė, I enjoyed the best people-watching in Kaunas — which upholds high European people-watching standards, I’m happy to report — for two hours. I enjoyed a repeat performance the following night (27 July 2018).

I’m down to the final two-week stretch of my trip. I’m zipping through the three Baltic states before heading home.

I enjoyed Poznań’s nearly empty executive lounge for an hour and a half or so. If I absolutely must be conscious at 8 a.m., I prefer to caffeinate with a double rum and Coke (25 July 2018).

Some fun public art at Vilnius railway station. This giant dude standing in a café looking toward the tracks (25 July 2018).

I splurged and bought the first first-class train ticket of my life for the two-hour ride from Vilnius to Kaunas. It was only €1 ($1.17) more, so why not? First class turned out to look and feel a lot like second class, except first class is on the upper deck of the train, so the boring Lithuanian countryside flies by from a slightly better angle (25 July 2018).

Every city in Europe, seemingly, has an Old Town centered on a central square. Kaunas is no exception. Rotušės aikštė is pretty. But it’s underwhelming compared to its peers (26 July 2018).

Naturally, I had to sample the cuisine from one of the restaurants on the fringes of the square. The food was good, but the people-watching was so-so. Rotušės aikštė is more of a family dinner location. I prefer the more youthful, singles-oriented vibe of Vilniaus gatvė (28 July 2018).

Another view of the square (26 July 2018).

The landmark buildings of Rotušės aikštė are the Town Hall at its center… (26 July 2018)

…and St Francis Xavier Church on the south side of the square (26 July 2018).

The area around the square is a very popular Saturday wedding venue (28 July 2018).

I didn’t realize until I came to Kaunas how few historic brick buildings there are in the rest of Europe. Kaunas has several cool examples of brickwork, such as this building near Rotušės aikštė called the “House of Perkūnas.” It’s a mystery exactly who built this structure and when, but during 19th-century restoration work, workers found a niche with a figurine of Perkūnas, the pagan Lithuanian god of thunder. Hence the building’s current name. That highlights a peculiar feature of Lithuanian history — the Lithuanians were the last people in Europe to convert to Christianity, in the 1300s and 1400s, a thousand years after the Roman Empire did so and hundreds of years after the rest of northern Europe. Medieval knights from England and Germany went on crusades here. Those crusades proved just as militarily unsuccessful as the crusades in the Holy Land (28 July 2018).

Let’s just say Kaunas Castle doesn’t present very serious competition for Prague Castle, or even Ljubljana Castle (26 July 2018).

But it does have a cool statue of a knight (26 July 2018).

Pros: Laisvės Alėja, besides being pedestrian- (and bicycle-) only, is attractively tree-lined and is home to the best restaurants in the city (25 July 2018).

I know this killer milkshake place (28 July 2018).

St. Michael the Archangel Church sits near the eastern end of Laisvės Alėja. It’s breathtaking, even if it could really use a new coat of paint. Having spent eight weeks in the orbit of the former Austrian Empire and one in greater Germany, I was curious what cities in the historical Russian sphere of influence would look like. Russia gobbled up Lithuania around the same time — the 1790s — as the final Partition of Poland. And like Poland, Lithuania enjoyed 20 years of independence between the wars before being overrun by the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, then the Soviet Union again in World War II and the Cold War. And here we have a classic Russian Orthodox-style onion-domed church. These days, St. Michael’s is a Catholic Church, but it began its life as an Orthodox church catering to Russians (27 July 2018).

Cons: Much of the boulevard was being dug up and re-paved by noisy backhoes and so forth during my visit. That’d be a pro in my three-year-old nephew Eli’s eyes, but it really detracted from the ambience for me. Also, there really wasn’t that much foot traffic along this street while I was in town, making it a boring area for people-watching. And most irritatingly, I couldn’t stop and take a photo or read some historic plaque without someone — a friendly local wino in one case, a young scruffy backpacker in the other — coming up to me and asking for money. Ugh. Get lost! (27 July 2018)

Although Vilnius is the historic capital of Lithuania, Kaunas was the capital of interwar (1920-1940) Lithuania. (The Poles annexed Vilnius in 1920; the Soviet Union gave it back to Poland when it conquered the eastern half of Poland in 1939, shortly before incorporating Lithuania into the USSR). This period was Kaunas’ golden age, and all sorts of new government buildings went up all over town, including this one, which served as the Japanese Consulate (27 July 2018).

After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Lithuania took in thousands of Jewish refugees. The other European countries didn’t want them, and the Soviet Union was shipping Jews from its half of Poland to Siberian gulags, so the refugees in Lithuania were desperate to get out, particularly as it became clear in 1939-40 that Stalin intended to gobble up Lithuania too. Enter Japanese Vice-Consul Chiune Sugihara. In collusion with the Dutch Consul, he issued 2,000 transit visas for Jews and their families in the summer of 1940 just before the Soviets shut down all consulates in Lithuania, allowing them to travel east through Russia on the trans-Siberian Railway and then by ship to Japan. Afterward, most of the refugees scattered to safe havens in Palestine, the United States, and Australia. In all, Sugihara helped over 6,000 Jews escape from Europe just in the knick of time. Also, you know you’re in a small museum in a small country when the executive director of the museum comes up to you, shakes your hand, and hands you his business card (27 July 2018).

The buildings and houses in the vicinity of Sugihara House were all constructed during the interwar years and were very desirable places to live at the time. Now they’re mostly, as I said at the beginning, run-down (27 July 2018).