Kaunas was a Ryanair decision. Bristol to Kaunas, cheap enough to feel slightly implausible, booked on the basis that we’d never been to Lithuania, that Sarah’s birthday needed marking properly, and that somewhere in the back of both our minds a question had been forming for a while: could we do this idea of ours anywhere?
Not just Italy. Anywhere. Could we pick up and move to a city we’d never considered, learn its rhythms, call it home? We’d been asking this in the abstract for long enough. Lithuania felt like the right place to ask it out loud.
We flew in via Vilnius first — a couple of days in the capital before the train south — and then Kaunas, where the hotel and the spa were booked, and where the birthday would actually happen.
Station to hotel
We arrived at Kaunas station on the afternoon of the 28th and walked. The route took us along the Nemunas river — wide, slow, the colour of pewter in late October — and the path was almost entirely ours. A jogger. A couple with a dog. The trees along the bank were still holding their autumn colour, the kind of display that would have been remarkable if the sky hadn’t been doing the flat grey thing that northern Europe does in late October as a statement of intent about the next four months.
The Nemunas river path. Cobbled bank, autumn trees, bridge. Almost entirely ours.
It was clean. Noticeably, almost aggressively clean. Compact in the way that immediately tells you a city is manageable on foot. And every interaction we had over the whole trip — every person we asked anything of — was warm and genuinely helpful in a way that felt unperformed.
Old Town
The castle came first — red brick, conical tower, the Lithuanian flag moving in a grey wind above it. In front of it, a large installation announces the city in hashtag format. It should be annoying. Somehow it isn’t. The castle just gets on with being there behind it.
Kaunas Castle. Fourteenth century. Flag, moat, and the very modern letters in front of it.
#KAUNAS. The castle does not appear to mind.
Then the streets behind — a Gothic brick church under a sky that had decided to commit to grey, a little shop with ceramic panels framing every window and the door, a bronze boy on a bicycle with his dog chasing the back wheel, frozen mid-pedal on a cobbled corner. The kind of small civic sculpture that tells you a city still has a sense of humour about itself.
Red brick, Gothic arches, a sky that meant business. One of several churches in the Old Town.
The ceramic shopfront on a quiet Old Town street. Every panel different.
The boy and the bicycle. Bronze, cobbles, dusk coming in. Laisvės Alėja.
The walls
Kaunas was European Capital of Culture in 2022 and the walls still carry it. Around every corner, something large and considered and very good.
A figure hugging their knees on a yellow gable end on Pilies Street — monochrome, enormous, the scale catching you before the subject does.
Pilies Street. The crouching figure has been sitting there since 2022. It is in no rush.
A child held in oversized hands on a grey wall — rendered in a fine engraving style, black on grey, the kind of image that stops you mid-step.
Monochrome hands and face, near the city centre. No explanation on the wall. None needed.
And then the conductor. Four storeys of hands, batons, brushwork and abstraction — a mural commissioned for the Kaunas Symphony Orchestra’s anniversary, filling an entire building end in warm ochres and cream. We stood in front of it for longer than we’d planned.
The conductor mural. Full building. The baton is above the roofline.
And in a car park, found only because we went looking for it: Leja Goldberg. A poet. Her portrait filling a full building end, her words printed beside her in Lithuanian on the left, Hebrew on the right. Both languages, full verses, a car park wall in a mid-sized Lithuanian city.
Leja Goldberg. Car park wall. Both languages. Find it.
The best burger we have ever eaten
This is not a line we deploy lightly. We have eaten a lot of burgers in a lot of cities. But somewhere on the evening of the 28th — we had done enough research to know exactly where we were going — we sat down in a basement bar, ordered, and what arrived was so substantially, confidently, almost offensively good that we ate in near silence.
Baking Mad hidden lab. The Breaking Bad-themed door should have prepared us. It did not.
The interior. Walter White on the wall, watching.
The table. Two burgers, loaded fries, drinks. Note the portions.
We could not finish it. We asked for a box. We walked back to the hotel carrying a doggy bag of what remained of the best burger we have ever eaten, and ate the rest later standing in a hotel room in Lithuania, and it was still excellent. This is the review.
Sarah. Still going. The cocktail, the neon, the expression — this is someone who has found her evening.
Birthday morning
Sarah’s birthday. We walked nearly five miles before the spa, which is either very on-brand or slightly mad depending on your perspective.
Sarah. Birthday morning. Hotel breakfast, a look that says she knows something good is coming.
Laisvės Alėja is long and properly wide, the kind of avenue that makes walking feel like an activity rather than transit. We stopped for a Kalnapilis — a local amber lager — outside a café on the boulevard, because it was her birthday and the sun had appeared briefly and it would have been rude not to.
Kalnapilis. Local, cold, earned. Outdoor table in October.
Sarah, Laisvės Alėja, birthday morning. The grey fleece is doing a lot of work.
Then the spa. Which was the point. The walking was the frame around it.
What else the city does
On the way through on the morning walk we found an outdoor sculpture — a large flat disc covered entirely in small white ceramic fish, all pointing outward from the centre. Hundreds of them. No label. We stood and looked at it for a while. Kaunas kept doing things like this.
The fish. Outside the cultural centre. Hundreds of ceramic pieces, one disc, no explanation.
In the Music Theatre square, the pale white building opens onto a wide paved forecourt — a handsome early twentieth-century structure that clearly has no interest in competing with what surrounds it.
Kaunas Music Theatre. White, wide, golden hour behind it.
And somewhere in the new town, a battered cardboard sign taped to a bar doorway:
“Kaunas got addicted. Sorry.” Fair warning, and too late.
The question
The next morning, in a small bar on a side street, with VERY comfortable sofas — two large panels — covered entirely in pinned banknotes from every country its guests had ever come from. A quietly extraordinary piece of accumulated geography. We looked at it while we waited.
A Kaunas Side Bar with very comfy sofas at the end of a long few days. Banknotes from everywhere. A world, pinned to a wall.
Had Kaunas or Lithuania answered the question?
Not quite. We’d loved it — the scale, the cleanliness, the warmth of people, the murals, the burger, the way the city kept surprising us around corners. But there was something we couldn’t locate. Something about the October light and what it implied about January. A particular northern European grey that was beautiful and also, if we were being honest with ourselves, a little final.
We’d asked the question genuinely and Lithuania had answered it honestly. We could do this somewhere. Kaunas had proved the question wasn’t naive. It just wasn’t Kaunas.
We got on the plane. We were still looking.
Kaunas, Lithuania – 13.25 miles combined – 4hr 42m – 191ft – 25,274 steps