From Lithuania with Love - Part 1
I am not usually a travel blogger, but colleagues keep looking at me with surprise and asking me why I took a week of leave from work and a trip to Vilnius just to deliver a five-minutes talk at the local DevOpsDays. While this sounds a bit crazy indeed, there is of course a lot more to Lithuania than just the devops community. This is the first part of an article in which I try to paint the bigger picture. The second part can be found here.
How it all started
I must admit that a year and a half ago, I did not even know which of the three baltic states was which. And I didn’t know anybody from any of them. This changed in April 2024 when I met Evelina at the DevOpsDays Zürich. Evelina Rimkutė is a Lithuanian Test Manager living in Switzerland. Her inspiring ignite talk on the power of one story point can be seen on vimeo or youtube. A few weeks after the event, she published a beautifully designed and crafted book on Lithuanian figures of speech:
Being a language aficionado, this of course caught my interest…
I started reading about Lithuanian and Lithuania. I plan to write a separate article about the language later this year. In these first two posts I want to focus on my first visit to the country.
I had always been more oriented towards the west than the east. I had been a high school exchange student in the United States in 1991/92. While after my return to Switzerland I did have two years of Russian language classes in high school and even participated in a three-week exchange with a school in Barnaul in the West Siberian Altai region in 1995, my interest later turned west again: I first went to Portugal to learn Portuguese and then for an IAESTE internship to Brazil. And when I later got married to my Brazilian wife, family vacations were mainly spent in Switzerland, western Europe, Brazil and the United States.
And now, after 30 years, I suddenly started looking east again.
As I have observed in the meantime that not only me, but many people know only very little about Lithuania, I will start with some simple facts:
It is the southernmost of the three baltic states:
(Map taken from Wikimedia Commons)
It’s sometimes called the southernmost country of Northern Europe. It is further south than Denmark.
Zooming in, we see something which I found very counter-intuitive:
(Map taken from geology.com)
It has no border to Russia in the east, but it has a border to Russia in the west! Kaliningrad Oblast is a Russian exclave. Lithuania’s other neighbours are Latvia in the north, Belarus in the east and Poland in the south.
Wikipedia tells us that the country is not very densely populated:
It is about 1.5 times the size of Switzerland but has only 1/3 of the population. It’s a very flat country: The highest hill is less than 300 meters high.
Lithuania has had a long and diverse history, sometimes great, sometimes tragic:
It was once a Grand Duchy, extending over Poland and Ukraine down to the Black Sea. Later it formed a Union and then a Commonwealth with Poland and adopted Catholicism. After the Partitioning of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Lithuania became part of the Russian Empire. Independence was only reinstated after World War I and ended abruptly with the Soviet occupation in 1940 which lasted (only interrupted by the Nazi-German occupation for three years in 1941 - 1944) until Independence could finally be declared again after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990. Lithuania became a member of NATO and of the European Union in 2004 and of the Schengen Agreement in 2007. The country adopeted the Euro as its currency in 2015.
Reading about Lithuania and its rich history opened my eyes to so many things I had never known or long forgotten or just not been fully aware of. That we were already two years into the Russian invasion of Ukraine gave the topic addional relevance. From my high-school history classes and countless Hollywood movies, my view of World War II had been largely determined by the Nazi atrocities in the west (like France) and east (like Poland) and by the concentration camps and the Holocaust. But now the Soviet terror suddenly gained focus. I was shocked to read stories of Lithuanians rounded up in the middle of the night and loaded into cattle carts where they would spend weeks and months on their way to Siberia where they would die of hunger, cold, sickness or simply the exhaustion of unbearably hard labour, horrors which I had previously only known from Holocaust movies like “Schindler’s List” or slave trade accounts like Alex Haley’s “Roots”. If you are brave enough, read Rūta Šepetys' novel Between Shades of Gray:
A vague travel plan suddenly getting concrete
Luckily, my work contract grants me six weeks of annual leave, and while I naturally spend most of it with my family, my wife and my kids allow me to take one week for a personal project, in the last ten years usually a marathon trip. I also had several races planned for this year, but then I hurt my achilles tendon in February and had to cancel all of them. Suddenly, I had the time and mental space to consider a trip to Lithuania. And then around April I discovered that there are DevOpsDays in Vilnius as well and applied for an ignite talk. I was of course extremely happy when my proposal got accepted on July 1st and I immediately started planning my trip: Booking flights and a hotel room, researching things to see and to do and signing up for some last-minute language classes.
Day 1: Zürich - Vilnius
Monday, September 8th
There is only one direct flight from Zürich to Vilnius with Air Baltic in the middle of the night. At my advanced age, arriving at the hotel at 3 in the morning is not a good idea. It would just be jet lag at its finest! I therefore decided to fly with Austrian Airlines via Vienna. That meant two flights of roughly 1.5 hours each with a two-hour stop in between, leading to a total of 5 hours plus 1 hour time difference. I boarded the plane in Zürich at 9 in the morning and arrived in Vilnius at 3 in the afternoon.
I stayed at the Courtyard by Marriot Vilnius City Center hotel on Rinktinės Street, a clean and quiet business hotel with friendly and very supportive staff. It’s a great location just a ten minutes' walk from the old town, north of the Neris river across Karaliaus Mindaugo Tiltas (King Mindaugas Bridge). Getting there from the airport turned out to be very easy: Bus 3G goes directly to Žaliasis Tiltas (Green Bridge) from where it is just an 800 m walk eastward to the hotel. Tickets can conveniently be paid by card inside the bus.
As the weather was rather cloudy on that first evening and as I still had to polish the slides for my talk once more (yes, call me a perfectionist …), I just went for a quick dinner at some burger place and then back to the hotel to work.
Day 2: Old Town Walk and Balloon Flight
Tuesday, September 9th
In the morning of the my first full day, I did a free (i.e. tip-based or “you pay what you want”) Old Town Walking Tour which I had booked a few days earlier from home with vilniusfreetour.lt. Our guide Ugnė did a fantastic job showing us around the old town with its churches, university district, courtyards and the presidential palace as well as the city hall. This historic city center is one of the largest in Europe which has survived the wars still more or less in its original shape. To give you just a few impressions:
King Mindaugas Monument in front of the Lithuanian National Museum and Gediminas Tower:
Courtyard of the Presidential Palace:
St. Anne’s Church:
St. John’s Church Bell Tower in the University District:
And finally the townhall square with the Portal, a sculpture which allows a kind of videoconferencing with other squares in other cities around the world:
In the afternoon I did a balloon flight. Hot air ballooning is very popular in Vilnius and other parts of Lithuania. As I had never done a ballon flight before, I did not want to miss this adventure! As the weather forecast was not good for the second half of the week, I had already booked it for Tuesday a few days earlier from home. There are many providers. After some quick research, I had decided for balloon.lt which certainly was a good choice. Our pilot Saulius was very friendly and very competent!
Flights take place around sunrise or sunset. The whole adventure takes about four hours: The crew pick all the passengers up at their hotel or apartment and take them to the launch site where the whole group (in our case six passengers, the pilot and two members of the ground crew) help unfolding and inflating the balloon. As soon as the nearby airport’s flight security allows for take-off, the balloons (on that day a group of six from various providers) take off. The flight takes about one hour, and after landing the balloon needs to be deflated, folded and put back into the trailer before the flight can be celebrated with a glass of prosecco and the the passengers are all brought back to their hotel.
Was I scared? I must admit that at the beginning I was. I did not expect to be but I was. Initially the balloon had to rise high very quickly. That scared me, even more so as I am rather tall and was suddenly (unnecessarily) afraid of toppling over and falling out of the basket. I bent my knees a bit to be lower, and I did not look straight down but only towards the horizon. But after some time I got used to it, and once we had flown over the TV Tower and out of the city, the pilot could go lower over the woods and I was able to enjoy it even more.
It’s a very beautiful, unique experience! No sound except for the occasional burning of the gas for rising further or just to prevent descending, no wind (as the balloon moves with the wind), just quiet peace in the beautful sunset. To share some of my impressions:
Ready for take-off at Vingis Park, 3 km west of the old town:
In the air over the forest at Vingis Park:
Flying over the TV tower, 326.5 m (1,071 ft) tall:
Flying out of the city, westward:
Outside the city, over the woods:
Already quite relaxed and enjoying it:
Only source of energy for vertical movement:
4 of the 5 other ballons in view:
Close to sunset and approaching the landing site:
The ground crews with vans and trailers already waiting at the landing site:
Days 3 and 4: DevOpsDays
Wednesday, September 10th, and Thursday, September 11th
On Wednesday and Thursday, I attended the DevOpsDays Vilnius 2025. It was a fantastic event, full of interesting and thought-provoking talks, networking, fun, games and good food in a very welcoming atmosphere. As I have already shared some impressions together with a transcript and the slides of my own talk in a separate article, I will only add a few more things:
The event took place at Cyber City, a modern office space for tech start-ups (and unicorns) at the site of former textile factory Sparta:
I like how they preserved the old chimney in the midst of the new shiny glass buildings. It reminds me a bit of Sihlcity, a mall at the site of a former paper factory, close to the Avaloq headquarters in Zürich.
The following four pictures have been taken by the DevOpsDays Vilnius organization and made available on flickr while all the other pictures in this article (including the one above) are my own.
More than 200 attendees listening intently in the main auditorium, here to Ricardo Miguel Magalhães’s talk on DevSecOps:
Chill-out zone in the lobby:
Time for networking and playing games:
And finally the after-event at Sparta Bar:
There were two more participants from Switzerland: The picture above shows me on the right with keynote speaker Nadine Broghammer and speaker Jan Moser, in their middle Lithuanian ignite speaker Albertas Grinkevičius.
To chill down a bit after the second day of this exciting event, I walked the three kilometers back to the hotel. Approaching the river from the south side offered me a perfect view of the Šnipiškės district skyline across Baltasis Tiltas (White Bridge):
Zooming in to the Vilnius City Municipality Building on the right, you can see one of the many examples of the clear stand taken by the brave citizens and authorities in Vilnius and Lithuania:
I still had three more days for sightseeing which I used for another guided walking tour, this time through the more modern Stotis District with its mix of old and new buildings and its great international street art, for a visit to the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights, for a train trip to Lithuania’s second-largest city Kaunas and for attending Sunday service at an American gospel church right in the center of Vilnius. If you want to know more, check out the second part of this article here.