A gesture for all occasions
The expectant faces are all around me, jostling for position, keenly staring at the doorway ahead. Many are holding flowers; bunches, bouquets and the occasional red rose. People in this part
of the world seem to be obsessed with flowers, in Riga old town you can buy them from street vendors 24 hours a day, just in case you meet someone special in a drunken stupur at 4am. Here at Vilnius airport, the stand in the arrivals hall is doing a roaring trade as we await the passengers on flight BA2886 from London. In fact I’m half certain that some of the folks around me are trying to outdo each other by having the biggest most lavish bouquet for whoever it is that’s been away.
Before you ask, the idea of buying flowers for my arrival hasn’t even crossed my mind. I try and engage with local customs when I can, but handing Tak a bunch of flowers is in a similar league to eating cockroaches in Cambodia; sometimes you just have to draw the line, and I’m sure he’d agree. Tak, for those of you that don’t know, is short for Takayesu and the name of my Japanese friend and former
neighbour in London. He’s going to be joining me for the ride via Warsaw to Berlin.
I left Riga on half-deserted Latvian train number 357, bound via Vilnius for somewhere in Belarus. My old university friend, Gena, came to see me off at the station at 7.40am. Another perfunctory EU check of my passport at the border an hour later was followed by the green fields and forests of Northern Lithuania. It was here that ballsy Lithuanian resistance fighters hid during their little-known war of attrition against the Soviet government during the 1950s. Five hours down the line
and I was back in Vilnius, the capital, where unarmed ordinary people stood in front of Soviet tanks to defend the TV Tower and Parliament building on January 13th 1991, an event that turned out to be a turning point for Baltic independence.
Having seen the monuments at the parliament building 2 years ago, this time I resolved myself to visit the TV tower. It’s a mighty 1970s monstrosity, taller than the Eiffel tower, that comes complete with brightly coloured revolving restaurant on the viewing level and moving memorials down below for the 14 civilians that died here under the tanks that night just 15 years ago. These monuments, like the freedom monument back in Riga, are adorned with piles of fresh flowers laid by ordinary people.
The Riga monument dates from independence in 1915, and they say there that the punishment for leaving flowers at it during the communist years was deportation to the Siberian gulags.
As people start to emerge from the flight, and necks crane eagerly with flowers at the ready, I’m reminded how much this place must have changed in fifteen short years. The cobbled streets and beautiful old buildings have never been better looked after; with more renovations currently underway. People can take cheap flights to London where they can earn a small fortune by local standards, and anyone can leave flowers where they want without fear of deportation to a concentration camp. I think I understand why the flower sellers are doing as well as the airlines and the builders.
![Back in Riga [2006] Paul 2006](http://jaymes.net/paul2006.jpg)