It has been a couple of days since my last post, because we’ve been traveling…I am writing this from the bar in our hotel in Vilnius, Lithuania–the Shakespeare, a hotel I enthusiastically recommend. Vilnius is a wonderful city, alive with cultural actvities, buzzing with commerce, and very walkable, at least in the old city. There is even an artists’ area they call the Montmarte of Vilnius.
We flew to Chicago, then Heathrow, then Copenhagen, where we discovered our direct flight to Vilnius had been cancelled and we had to fly through Riga. All in all a very long travel time–we calculate about 36 hours in all.
Some observations:
people are much thinner in Europe.
customer service has been uniformly excellent–everywhere we’ve been, airline personnel and waiters, etc., have been helpful and courteous and multi-lingual.
it is hard to miss the degree to which the world has truly globalized.
To the naked eye, everyone looks American–we dress alike, shop at the same stores, express common mannerisms….True, we’ve lost a great deal of the charm of indigenous cultures, but it is impossible not to recognize how rapidly globalization is homogenizing the world–at least, the western world.
blogging will be sporadic, as we will be traveling pretty consistently for the next month.
Have you found the keyboards different in other countries? Your flight sounds like a nightmare. Waiting for pictures.