Liepaja – Fontaine Royal

The border between Lithuania and Latvia is like the rotting set of a movie that failed to impress 20 years ago. A fairytalehouse, a crater in the road, not a person in sight. After that introduction the roads get better and Liepaja is within an hour’s drive. There we find our hotel ‘Fontaine Royal’ without too much trouble. Just driving through a one way street against traffic. The hotel proofs you don’t need to be rich to catch the zeitgeist. The gold paint was applied with vigour and humour. The girl that checks us in speaks English with the now familiar Baltic slur and slowness.

In the evening we go to the adjacent bar/restaurant/cafe. Open 24 hours. I repeat: open 24 hours. In a city with 80’000 inhabitants; a bar that never sleeps. With soviet greyness all around. With empty spaces and crumbling buildings. The hippest bar in town is open 24 hours a day.

At 23:00 our students enter the bar. They’ve arrived here two days before us and have met their Latvian counterparts already. Their senses are at a 100% sensitivity. After sleeping in ‘Adams Family’ houses and seeing decent people root through garbage bags, the term paradigm shift is more than appropriate. “I’ve learned more in these few days than I have in a year”. “Now I know how rich and spoiled i am”. Sounds too cheesy to be true, but if it’s literally true, you’re beyond that. Put differently: I had my neck hair standing up and goosebumps all over. Till 4 o clock in the morning. Cause realising you’re alive deserves to be celebrated.

Warschau > Liepaja

Yesterday morning our car was decorated in Warschau with a very personal message. Women in lingerie and a handwritten name and number.

 

They either think our italian is handsome or we are into hookers. We’ll take it as a compliment. An hour late from schedule we left Warsaw. A metropolis only reachable by secondary roads. It’s hard to imagine how all those millions of people get in and out of town? Is it really busy at the airport?

In 1o hours we’ve covered an impressive 600 kilometers of b-roads through Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. And either the reviews of dutch visitors to Poland about road conditions are all way off, or Jeter, our Fiat Croma is significantly more comfortable than other cars.
After crossing the border to Lithuania the roads got even better than they were east of Warsaw. They seemed to have found a big stash of forms for European subsidies.. Fantastic roads, a lot of highways under construction and nice signs saying “Financed by the EU” everywhere.

- Now off to breakfast with the students en brief the Latvians, more to come -

 

Me and the italians

I have had a few encounters with Italians. There was the carabinieri that pointed his machinegun at me and shouted out the bandname on my t-shirt: “BLURRRRRRRRR”. There was the painter in Florence that advised us not to get to close to the railwaystation. Gays would attack us, he figured. And there is my favourite italian of all time: Giampaolo. Used to be my pizzaiola when I was living in Groningen, now conveniently moved to the village I found my new home. Best pizza’s ever, although he mixes up his Inter Milan and AC Milan pizzas. Which will get him killed some day.
The quick and slick italians I met were an Alfa 156 and a 166. The latter bathed me in luxury, the first one underwhelmed by being beige to the core. Then I met a couple of Fiats.

A Panda, the 80′s Mini minus the handling. And the Bravo HGT 5 cylinder a friend bought. Con pepperoni that automobile! It would sling you forward in the blink of an eye. It looked good, was cheap enough and made you feel you had something special under the bonnet, without being too GTI-like and obvious.
Tonight I’ll meet a grown up italian. Into hi-tech and supposedly stylish and refined. We’ll see how it copes with Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian roads.

Bets are on!

Groningen – Warschau is a 1118 kilometer ride. With two drivers and a deluxe 150bhp Italian stallion, how long will we take? Hit us up in the comments!

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