Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Crosstoberfest - HTD/5 Interesting - Liepaja!

1) Basically the coolest place in Latvia.

2) One district, Karosta, is the site of a ruined Tsarist naval fortress falling into the sea, the most haunted building in Latvia (a prison), and a gargantuan Orthodox cathedral entirely ringed in ugly, decaying Soviet apartments. It's basically the coolest place in the coolest place in Latvia.

3) I walked barefoot over a couple of kilometers of broken concrete. Twice. While incredibly painful and incredibly stupid, it did provide an incredibly mystifying Facebook status update.

4) The beach at Karosta is fantastic. The fortress isn't falling into the sea. It has fallen into the sea. All that's left is a jumble of broken concrete across the beach. Exploring the main site of the fortress, you can see identifiable bits of stairs and parts of building among the rubble like the remains of a giant's Lego house after the giant's mom tripped over it and bits went all over the giant family's living room and she didn't care even though the giant spent, like, all day working on that house and he was going to show it to his best giant friend when he came over on Thursday after giant school.

5) Liepaja is the rock and roll capital of Latvia. The 'official' rock cafe wasn't really happenin', so we spent the evening listening to a sloppy-yet-energetic Latvian ska band at the 'other' nightspot. Yeah, not a big town.

Crosstoberfest - HTD/5 Interesting - Vilnius!

1) Hope you like churches.

2) The Soviets turned this giant Orthodox cathedral into their Museum of Atheism. There's being a repressive, intolerant, genocidal occupying foreign power, and then there's being a dick about it.

3) More places should be able to pull off having something called the Gates of Dawn with a straight face.

4) Of the places I visited, I was most excited about eating lunch at a cafe called the Graf Zeppelin, surprising exactly no one.

5) The Lithuanians put their Museum of Occupation in the former KGB building in Vilnius. There's throwing off the shackles of a repressive, intolerant, genocidal occupying foreign power, and then there's being respectful about it.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Introducing Crosstoberfest

October! The month of change! Closely following September, the month of never updating your blog.

In less than a month, the Hollow Tooth Diaries will necessarily come to a close, barring a backblog (like there is now, and boy is it hefty). For this last month of them, I'll be trying to unify its unique brand of overwritten, self-indulgent travel writing with the other regular features of this site - you know, the overwritten self-indulgent RPG writing.

But, as I mentioned, I am pretty behind. So to start with, I'll merge HTD and 5 Interesting, in order to clear some of that. Watch this space!