Fulfilling our promise to Eloïse, the first thing we did today after breakfast was go to Aqva Park, where we had the greatest of fun. Both children loved it and frolicked for several hours in the warm water. Everything’s indoors, too, so there’s no need for sunscreen lotion.
For Mama and Papa, there were the Srautas and Bermudai water slides, the latter a 212 metre chute through (mostly) pitch darkness. Those were great.
We had so much fun that we’ll probably go back tomorrow morning before we leave for our next destination. Entrance to the park is included in our hotel rate, which is a fantastic deal, because the park alone is quite expensive.
The hotel itself is a relic from Soviet times. The breakfast didn’t appeal to any of us very much, but the mostly Lithuanian and Polish clientele seemed to lap it up. Cheese curd and jam was what I eventually opted for, the ‘milkiness sausages’ failing to stir my appetite.
After lunch, we drove a few kilometres up the road to Grūtas for Grūto Parkas, a sculpture park containing Soviet-era sculptures of the former USSR’s dubious icons.
These concrete obelisks used to (dis)grace the squares and parks of Lithuania, until the country regained its independence and decided that it’d really rather not have the forebears of the oppression leering at them from prominent urban positions. Unsurprisingly, they tore them down and many of them ended up in this petrified graveyard monument.
The park makes a big hubbub about being the only one of its kind, but that’s testing the elasticity of the truth, if you ask me. Grūto Parkas has some unique aspects, but the notion of a Soviet-era sculpture park isn’t a new one. Indeed, we visited the original Memento Park (a.k.a. Szobor Park) in Budapest back in 2006.
Grūto Parkas was fun, but also hugely overpriced at 20 Lt. It was also swarming with mosquitoes in a couple of areas. The bastards savaged me without mercy.
Still, they also have a Soviet-era children’s playground, called Lunapark, which Eloïse enjoyed. It’s a strange collection, invoking feelings of being Lilliputian, such was the size of the various bits of apparatus.
Tomorrow, we break with the southerly pattern of the last ten or so days and head north to Lithuania’s second city, Kaunas, for a couple of nights.