Eastern Europe - summer 2017

I just spent three weeks biking through Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belarus. I flew into tallinn and put my bike together in the airport. As it turns out, the last time I put my bike together when I flew back from Alaska, I didn't put enough grease on the seatpost, so it is now stuck so they had to remove a lot of other stuff to fit the bike in the box and it took me a while to put everything back together.

The first two days were filled with minor heart attacks. When I went to the shop to pick up my bike before my flight, they first told me that it wasn't boxed because the seatpost is stuck, and then the mechanic said he had boxed it. Then there was tons of traffic on the way to jfk so I was later than I had hoped. Then the airline told me they were going to charge me $300 for luggage since I had two bags and the bike, but suggested I just buy a huge bag that fit everything for $40. I carried this huge bag with me the whole time because I figured it would save me money on the return flight, which it did. When I landed and took my bike out, at first I couldn't find a single screw for anything, until I saw they had all been placed back in the holes they were supposed to go in. Then, since they had taken the fork off, part of the headset was stuck on the stem meaning I wouldn't be able to properly attach it. It took me probably 10 minutes with pliers to remove it. Also, they had removed the rear rack and one of the screws was bent so I had to use a spare I had brought. A day later, after riding over cobblestones a lot, a different screw had fallen out, so I had to replace that.

When I finally got to the hostel I had booked in Tallinn, I dropped my gear and walked around old town.

The baltics are in an area where multiple christian sects have been popular and there are churches everywhere. The capitals all have orthodox, lutheran, and catholic churches, sometimes across the street from each other.

In the capitals, everything is in 3-4 languages and almost everyone speaks as many. Outside the capitals the countries are so rural that I didn't see many people, but everyone spoke russian or english.

Every single small town however had a church. Usually built in the 12-1400's. Most were locked but a few were open.

A big thing I noticed is that the baltics are almost entirely devoid of world war monuments. All the other countries I've been to in europe had tons of them, but the baltics mostly have monuments to their war of independence that immediately followed WWI. Also they were robbed of their independence in WWII and horribly oppressed by the soviets so they don't celebrate that, and in fact have museums about it.

In Riga it was essentially more of the same as Tallinn. Lots of churches and museums in the old town. Also near the airport there is a "museum" which is basically a bunch of decommissioned soviet aircraft sitting in a field.

I was also wandering around the bretheren cemetery and a random lady showed me the grave of the second president of latvia and his wife.

From Riga I went east to Daugavpils along the river. Along the way I stopped at Jekabpils where I went into a small church where the woman there gave me essentially a free private tour and it's the only orthodox church I've ever had permission to take photos in.

The larger cities have extensive light rail systems, that weren't separated from traffic, so it was funny to see trains stopping for pedestrians at crosswalks.

Lithuania was similar to the rest of the baltics.

I count close to 10 churches in this photo

Things changed pretty quickly when I got to Belarus.

It was the only country I needed a visa for, and the only one that doesn't use euros. Also a lot less people spoke english, but everyone speaks russian. Churches were still everywhere, and WWII and Lenin monuments started appearing. For as much as the baltics hate their treatment during the war, the Belorussians have celebrated theirs. WWII is in fact called "the great patriotic war" and they have monuments in a lot of towns. I stopped by a place called Stalin's line which had a ton of old soviet military vehicles and weapons.

And Minsk has the standard gigantic square with Lenin.

I spent time in Minsk in churches and museums, and I spent a day riding around looking for a bike shop with a box and packing it up to fly home.

The flight home that I had connected through Moscow, and they wouldn't let me on the plane because I didn't have a transit visa for Russia. I didn't think I needed one since the last time I connected through Novosibirsk I didn't but apparently there are special rules for Belarus. Since my Belorussian visa was going to expire that day I had to buy a ticket to kiev and spend the night there. Not a lot of airlines fly out of Minsk so my options were limited. That is now the second time I've left a country only hours before I would be deported.