I left Melbourne on Friday 20 July 2012 at 9.30 pm via Emirates and 36 hours later arrived at the Domus Maria Guest House in Vilnius with a breaking cold, blocked ears from 3 painful descents, a tight left hamstring and a broken bike box (although nothing escaped from it).
Today, Sunday, I put Merlin together again and headed to breakfast to meet the new gang and my room buddy John Waterhousae from last year's trip. They have had plenty of rain the last 2 weeks but no incidents of note other than our cook Miles being savaged by a German Shepherd on Saturday at the campground while intervening to protect his son... Not sure what we'll be eating the next 5 days as Miles is taking time out until Warsaw. Don't bite the hand that feeds you springs to mind...
Vilnius had a thriving Jewish population and its most famous inhabitant was the Gaon of Vilna. So I decided to have a Gaon day. More about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilna_Gaon
I took the bus out to the old Jewish cemetery and finally found the gravesite and has a chat with various people in the cemetery including Yossi who lives in Israel but comes to Vilnius for 3 weeks each year and wanders around - he now knows where the Gaon is!!
It is quite an interesting cemetery with lots of old stones including some influenced by the Russians.
I headed back into old Vilnius and continued the tour of Jewish sites including the old synagogue and holocaust memorials. I skipped the Holocaust museum in this town in favour tracking down a statue of the Gaon which proved very difficult to locate.
After fruitless searching for the statue of the Gaon I came back to the hotel to google for some clues and finally located him nearby the hotel on the site of a school which once was the Great Synagogue. I think the Gaon is actually a forebear of Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky from The Simpsons.. A reasonable likeness I believe :)
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