Kaunas Tourist Traps

There were very few direction signs for drivers in Kaunas centre (it worked better outside) even along main streets. They were often not well seen, so that it was easy to get lost.

Unique Suggestions: Stop and buy a map. They were available in petrol stations, bookstores and kiosks. Buy at least a leaflet Kaunas/Klaipeda from series In your pocket for 8.00 Lt which contained maps of Kaunas. Check your itinerary.

Have a helpful passanger in a car like I had :-).

Fun Alternatives: Buy GPS receiver and map of Lithuania with GPS. Learn how to use it (easy!)

Keep smiling and do NOT skip Kaunas :-).There were many other beautiful and not the most thoughtfully signposted cities in many countries I visited and... I would never skip them.

It was very difficult to take good pictures of... devils displayed in the Museum of Devils. They were put in glass cases and not always well lighted. I had to take pictures through windowpanes and to use built in flash of my camera.

Unique Suggestions: My common mistakes and solutions:

1. with camera flash put in front and exactly or almost perpendicularly to a windowpane of a glass case I received... look at my picture. The solution: put your flash at an angle to a windowpane or use additional flash with light reflected.

2. with camera put too close to an object (a devil) I received over-exposed, white pictures. Solution: better take a picture from a distance and eventually zoom in (hmm... longer exposure needed = a tripod maybe necessary).

3. with a camera put too distant I received dark pictures. Solution: use additional, better flash (hmm... they often cost a fortune) or put your camera closer to an object or use a tripod and longer exposure.

Fun Alternatives: Do not take any pictures there...

Walking around the Old Town of Kaunas my eyes enjoyed looking at beautiful, mostly renovated or at least painted recently, old houses. Unfortunately this ugly building, on my picture, was put among them. Hmm... it suited there like, excuse, a saddle for a pig.

Unique Suggestions: Do not look at it.

Fun Alternatives: Close your eyes or... buy the house and reconstruct it.

I know it's 99% probability that you will bring your mobile phone coming to Kaunas but still sometimes you might need to use public payphone. They work with special cards which you can get in every post-office, grocery shop or press-stands ("spaudos kioskas") which you can find very easy in every street in the center. Usually phone cards have 25, 50, 100, 200 time units and that doesn't mean you have to pay such amount of money !!!

Unique Suggestions: One Belgian international exchange student I was tutoring bought 50 time units card and left to the shopkeeper 50 litas!!! That means he overpaid about 5 times more. I think he just didn't wait for the change, but he thought Lithuanians are big cheaters! So to avoid such misunderstandings read the price first or ask the shopkeeper.

Kaunas has many hotels and the price is almost similar like in other European capitals, so quite expensive. There's a lack of low-budget hotels, like youth hostel (which was opened only this year!). So please be careful when you read on the map "student hostel" which are regular Kaunas university students dorms and not the youth hostels for tourist. You won't get a bed there.

Unique Suggestions: I live in one of such student hostels and one late night coming home I met that Polish guy who was biking across Lithuania and tried to get a room in my hostel. I don't know what happened to him afterwards because when I tried to explain him about some pricey hotels in downtown his eyes became wider and wider...

Near Kaunas you can find a park, called 'Rumsiskes'. It national park, where you can find old houses and buidings of differents parts from Lithuania. This park is in open air, and it will take about 2 hours to walk there.

In case you won't notice it while walking around Kaunas, you'll find it at Laisves avenue 36.
Another one is called "Musu Odiseja" and you'll find it at M.K. Ciurlionio street 15.