Luck has really been on our side during this trip when it comes to beer festivals; three times now we’ve arrived somewhere to find one taking place. The pleasant surprise this time was Lotny Festiwal Piwa (“Flying Beer Festival”) at the Polish National Stadium in Warsaw. Apparently the festival travels around Poland, mainly the smaller …
After three weeks travelling around Lithuania we arrived in our final city, Kaunas. It’s the country’s second largest city after Vilnius and there’s a healthy rivalry between the two. Last week in the capital we’d heard how Kaunas was just like Vilnius, but worse. Of course, once we arrived in Kaunas the locals there told …
Before our trip, Vilnius was one of the cities we were both most looking forward to visiting. Admittedly, our reasons weren’t exactly the same; I was excited to try out some of Lithuania’s best-rated craft beer bars, while Poppy was more eager for the WW2 and Soviet history. Lithuanian beer had been a bit hit-and-miss …
No beer tour around the Baltics would be complete without a stop-off in Biržai in northern Lithuania. The town has a long and distinguished brewing history, and the traditional styles from the region are still popular today. They take their beer pretty seriously around here; apparently, after the Swedish destroyed Biržai in 1704, the locals …
Panevėžys, Lithuania’s fifth largest city by population, is not a place you’ll find in most guide books. I don’t think they get many British tourists out this way; even the local tourist information office only offered maps of the city in Lithuanian, Latvian and Russian. Nevertheless, we booked a couple of nights in town and …
We arrived in Šiauliai from Klaipėda on a very comfortable Lithuanian Railways train – UK train operators could definitely learn a thing or two from them! Šiauliai is a university town but is best known for the Hill of Crosses a few kilometres away. Most people just visit for the day apparently, but we decided …
