Visiting Palanga

We went to Palanga today. This little Baltic Sea coast town is enough of a tourist attraction that it has international flights (mostly from Germany and Denmark) arrive at its tiny airport. (This is where we landed.)

We thought we would do a day trip there. 4 litas (a little more than a dollar and half) to ride the minibus from Klaipeda. Dropped in the center of town, right across the street from the memorial to the Palanga men (and some others?—we couldn’t tell) killed in WWII. This Soviet era memorial was written in Russian, and maintained the requisite hammer and sickle material. It was a nice memorial, completely lacking in the excessive celebration of over-muscled lumpen typical of a lot such memorials (okay, like the one I saw in Almaty).

Then across the square to a brick church built in 1907, and on our way to various street vendors selling amber.

We visited the amber museum—an old mansion, on the grounds of a botanical garden.

This statue, called the Blessing Christ, is a replica of the original, which the Soviet government destroyed.

I think Sandy is writing about the museum, so I won’t say much, except that I’ll try to post my photos of the amber works commemorating Lenin, and to figure out whose house it was. All I can get so far is that it was built in the 1890s. (That is Lenin set in a piece of amber, and on the right is the Lenin Biography, the cover of which is amber pieces.)




The museum is about 100 yards from the Baltic Sea, so we walked to the beach. It was rainy and windy—like February in Tacoma, so the pounding surf wasn’t a pull to distract us from the real business of the day…buying gifts and souvenirs.