Look Mom, no mittens!

(Long, bloated travel stories ahead. You've been warned)

I just got back from dropping my friend Kelli off at the Klaipeda bus station. I helped her buy the one-way ticket to Vilnius, load her suitcase under the bus, and then stood in the bone-chilling morning air until the bus pulled away, waving at each other like 5-year-olds until it finally left the parking lot.

She has been visiting for the past 10 days, and now I scarcely have the words to express the sense of calm and encouragement that our time together has given me. Today I keep thinking of Paul, at the end of his life, sending requests to his friends to “Do your best to come to me quickly… Get Mark and bring him with you because he is helpful to me in my ministry” (2 Tim 4:9,11). Kel is my John Mark, just like I was a “Mark” for my friend Kristen several years ago. Kristen was working with OM in Spain and simply needed to be encouraged, to take a break, to have a friend come visit. She and I spent a week together traveling around Spain in 2001, praying for each other and reveling in the love that comes to us from God through close friendships. Both Kelli’s visit and a recent email have been evidence of the love and provision of God in my life. My brother Joel’s friend, Olivia, sent me an email last week that was so apt and encouraging, so exactly what I needed to hear, that I almost think God himself was writing me a letter through her. I am so thankful for this reality of the Christian life – we are here for each other. We were created for community, to bear one another’s burdens, to get down on our knees for each other, to refresh and renew each other’s spirits.

And also to have serious amounts of fun! Our time together commenced with several relaxing days in Vilnius and Klaipeda, consuming lots of authentic Lithuanian food (kepta duona by the bushel), sleeping in, freezing on our walk by the windy Baltic, a serendipitous visit to the St. Cazimer’s day market on Saturday in Theater Square, a copious amount of tea and coffee drinking at cute little Klaipedian cafes, making chocolate chip cookies, watching movies (go see Walk the Line!), going to church… just a lot of normal, restful time enjoying this place that I live in and sometimes forget is really enchanting!

Monday we headed off on the 4-day adventure that I’d been greatly looking forward to – an escape to the Western world, to a place where the language actually has a word for “spring”! Okay, so I’m exaggerating. Lithuania is totally western (though it has been too cold too long) and it’s not all that different from most places in Europe, but since I hadn’t left the Klaipeda city limits since the beginning of January, I was excited that Kelli was willing to join me on a jaunt to Ireland. We got cheap flights through Riga, a 5-hr bus ride north of me, and planned to spend 3 nights in Dublin before returning on Thursday. Our plans changed a little bit when we decided we wanted to get some time in the Irish countryside as well and found a great hostel in a village called Glendalough, an hour and a half south of Dublin in Wicklow Mountains National Park. (We had a pretty great, cheap itinerary for the trip that I can fill you in on if you ever find yourself in Ireland for 3 days!)

Before arriving Monday night in Dublin, though, we had an afternoon to kill in Riga, the capital of Latvia. Everything there was covered in the most picturesque, fluffy white “movie-quality” snow that we could hardly stop taking pictures around every beautiful medieval corner – that is, until our un-mittened trigger fingers were frozen solid! The city is a fairy tale, though, and no description of mine can do it justice. We simply walked around for hours, snow settling on our eye lashes and hair. The only bummer of the afternoon was that the one thing I wanted to do – ride the elevator to the top of one of the church spires – happens to not operate on Mondays. The good thing about such a magical place, though, is that just wandering around is entertainment enough, and we managed to enjoy the afternoon without spending more that the 4 Lats I had leftover from my last trip through Lativa at Christmas! Just enough for coffees and a couple postcards.

The first thing I noticed about Ireland (other than that beautiful walk across the tarmac WITHOUT A JACKET!) is the utter civility, politeness and jolly-ness that seem to be everywhere – and we were in the city. I could come up with lots of explanations for why Lithuanian life (and that of other post-Soviet countries I’ve spent time in) does not exude these same qualities, and granted, the British Isles can be a tad excessive in their formality, but there is just a vast difference in (external) friendliness levels from a place like Ireland and a place like Lithuania. This is not to say that Lithuanians aren’t friendly – my upstairs neighbors hosted a friend and I one evening that wonderfully stretched on and on, through moose jerky and pigs ears and many cups of tea – but they are, (by vast generalization) a more introverted people. I tend to like this because I like anonymity and simply being able to sit back and observe without having to talk to anybody. These kinds of cultural differences are what make travel wonderful – they’re ways to encounter different personalities. Being in Ireland, though, I encountered something really nice – the ability to joke and talk with strangers, to be loud in public places, to say “excuse me” when you bump into someone on the street or in the grocery store.

Some examples of this societal politeness include the following: A sign in the bathroom of the Thai (yay spicy food!) restaurant we ate at on Tuesday read: “The towel dispenser is out of order. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused.” A sign on a building undergoing renovation: “Could you please go around to the side door entrance? We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.” Now, I have a hard time imagining exactly what level of inconvenience might be caused by an empty towel dispenser, but it was SO refreshing to be apologized to! People got out of our way when we lumbered down the street with our backpacks. A well-dressed business man tapped Kelli to kindly tell her, “your pack is open.” When we accidentally left our umbrella on the bus from Dublin to Glendalough, the lady checking us in at the hostel said, “oh, no problem. I’ll just ring the bus company.” Which she did, and asked them to hold it for us to pick up the following morning. Over the course of the trip we kept experiencing incidents in which it seemed people were going out of their way to help us out. This is not something to take for granted, and it was refreshing for my spirit to make eye contact with people, and to smile a lot more than I normally do on Klaipeda streets.

We had some typical Irish experiences – including sudden drenching rainstorms, sneaking around the gorgeous campus of Trinity College, the lights of Dublin smearing color into the waters of the Liffey, drinking ciders at a pub while the other patrons watched football and listened to old men sing ballads with their middle-aged neighbors, dodging uniformed school-children near the fountains in St. Stephen’s Green, observing fluffy sheep on rolling green hills marked by stone hedgerows, wandering around the 12^th century ruins of an early Celtic Christian monastery, and snapping pictures from the upper level of a double-decker bus on our way back to the airport.

We also made time for some atypical excursions – for Thai food, Starbucks coffees, to (yes, I’m sorry to admit it) McDonalds for late night burgers, to every single English bookstore I could find! Most unexpected and fun was our time at the hostel in Glendalough (a 5-star hostel, if you can imagine such a thing!) where we connected with two other individual travelers, Sarah, from Madison, WI, and Dominic, of Irish-Italian parents, from northern Italy. Kel and I hiked with them Wednesday afternoon, ate dinner all together at the lone Glendalough tavern, played card games in the hostel kitchen, and talked about everything under the sun! It was yet another in a long line of serendipitous encounters that God blessed us with through the entire trip.

Thursday afternoon we caught our plane back to Riga, which felt a little like going back to a prison of arctic air and darkness after the blooming trees and green grass of Ireland! But we were still blessed with transportation kismet (my phrase of the week) in that our plane arrived at Riga airport at 7:20 exactly. We landed on the tarmac, Kel and I grabbed our backpacks, were the third and fourth individuals out of the plane’s back door (in this situation an unexpected blessing of Ryan Air’s non-issuance of seat assignments), ran through customs, and made it to the curb to catch the LAST bus to Klaipeda by 7:35. Had we missed it, we’d have been stuck in arctic Riga until 8:20 the next morning. I was astonished by the smoothness of all our travel connections and happenstances, which are just further evidence of God’s presence and blessing on us these past couple weeks.

Today, Kelli is on her way back to Colorado, and both of us are sad but thankful. I’m wistful and full of all the poignancy of life’s temporality, the preciousness of the times that we are together, the knowing that all our yearnings for each other are yearnings for home, that final eternal home that all our travels are bending toward.

I think Simon and Garfunkle say it well in an old song that’s recently become a favorite of mine:

“Hello, hello, hel-lo, hel-lo,

Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye

That’s all there is.

And the leaves that are green, turn to brown.”

And hopefully here in Klaipeda, soon, the leaves that are brown will turn green!