Talking to locals while I am here is something that I am hesitant to do at my current level of language comprehension, although Benny the Irish Polyglot would probably tell me to just talk to them already, advice I think I will have to start heeding any day now. I have been speaking to my lovely roommate, and that has been helping, although mostly it is just illustrating the holes in my comprehension right now.

The weather here has been positively Idaho-esque in the past weeks. It starts out sunny and warm, then you don’t pay attention for an hour or two and you are suddenly its frigid and drizzling.

In this strange yet homey weather (for me at least), this incident happened the other night after class.

I decided to take a bus up the hill to the big Rimi because I wanted to pick up a few things. I waited for the bus, standing under the bus stop roof to stay dry.

It took a long time for the bus to come, in hindsight I might have taken this as a warning. Eventually, a 14 trolleybus arrived, and I got on. Everything was good until we started up the hill. We made the turn, then were creeping, creeping, stopped. We stayed in place for a moment or two, then the doors opened and people began filing off the bus.

He looked something like this... I'll get a photo next time.

I was really impressed with the Lithuanians in this instance because they didn’t complain or wait for an announcement from the bus driver, they just recognized that the bus wasn’t going anywhere and got off to start walking.

So, I walked up to Rimi, bought my groceries, used their space bathroom (blue club lights throughout — I think it might be related to germs, but I really have no idea), and was at the checkout when I saw a sight that I could have never imagined in a million years I would see in Lithuania. It was a tall, very pale white, chiseled Eastern European man dressed up in full Native American regalia. He had a feather headdress and warrior patch. He had a bone necklace, fringed jacket, and bell-bottom trousers with chevron decorations. He was wearing cowboy boots. The only thing that differentiated this ensemble from the outfit of someone taking it too far down the cultural appropriation road in Idaho was that it was done in black leather instead of buckskin.

I really wanted to ask him if I could take his picture, but he was Lithuanian basketball tall, and that intimidates me as does many things about living here. It was nighttime, so I couldn’t even sneak a photo without the flash tipping him off. I will look for him again, and I swear, dear readers, I will not make you miss out on a picture the next time, because it was AMAZING.

Ahh, Lithuania. Never a dull moment.

Charissa Brammer is an American student that has been studying at Vilnius University since the fall. Read more of her writing here.

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Views expressed in the opinion section are never those of the Baltic Reports company or the website’s editorial team as a whole, but merely those of the individual writer.