Read From Russia with Lunch for Free Online

priest, minister or nun could want. The life-sized crucifixes that form the centrepieces of many church altars lay stacked four deep and seven across against one wall like a modern art installation of questionable taste. Habits hung neatly on racks with a pile of wimples immaculately folded beside them. Stacks of grey business shirts – long- and short-sleeved – were displayed beside an array of bejewelled ceremonial robes in ruby and emerald velvet. Cher’s costume designer would have done his mind. I’m guessing it’s a he.
    Correctly surmising me for a tyre-kicker, the harried shopkeeper watched and waited for my fascination to dim. Which it didn’t, until I had played out several of the conversational scenarios that might have unfolded.
    Harried shopkeeper: Can I help you?
    Monk: Do you sell cassocks?
    Harried shopkeeper: Of course. What were you looking for?
    Monk: I’d like to spend the next decade in a summer-weight wool. Something that can take me from confession to communion. Something that says I’m devoted but still have a sense of fun – so maybe latte as opposed to the traditional chocolate. I mean that’s sooo Reformation!
    Harried shopkeeper: Will you please leave. I am closing.
    Actually, the last sentence was real and addressed to me. Slightly footsore but amped on the novelty of my surroundings, I made my way past the neoclassical presidential palace with its expansive walled garden and on to an institution that rivals even the churches as the Old Town’s most dominant player. Vilnius University was established by Jesuits in 1570. Having had a Gothic childhood, a brief flirtation with Renaissance architecture in its adolescence and maturing into a baroque beauty, it today comprises thirty fine teaching and administrative hubs. Beginning its life as a centre only for theological and philosophical studies, the Jesuits withdrew from the university as the secular sciences challenged their spiritual belief. Subsequent professors expanded the curriculum to the point where it now caters to 22,000 students across twelve faculties from languages to medicine.
    As an inky twilight didn’t so much descend as plummet onto the thirteen courtyards that link the campus, I made my way back to Pilies Street, the lower extremes of which seem almost entirely given over to market stalls flogging the poorly executed kitsch that Eastern Europe seems to specialise in. Among the lowlights was a Harry Potter-themed babushka set in which Voldemort was ensconced in the boy wizard, Harry was housed in Dumbledore, and Harry’s ginger-nut chum got to hide away of a night-time in JK Rowling’s prepubescent sorceress Hermione.
    On the way back to my hotel, I was passed by a group of shaky tourists on a Segway – a motorised walker gadget – excursion through the Old Town. Amid another cluster of holy houses, I came upon the shiny Lithuanian headquarters of global advertising agency McCann-Erickson, above whose lintel was the swishy slogan ‘the truth well told’. In the Old Town consumerism had long replaced communism, and the fire of acquisition was being stoked by foreigners who had perfected the art. Globalisation was coming but before it marched an army of British buck’s nights with money to burn and the mantra that what happens in Vilnius stays in Vilnius.

2
    A night on the Old Town
    It’s birthday time at the old folks’ home and Hymie’s friends pool their money to get him a hooker to celebrate turning eighty. She knocks on Grandpa’s door. When he opens it, she says: ‘I’m here to give you super sex.’
    He thinks for a minute then replies, ‘I’ll have the soup.’
    Mark, a 29-year-old marketing executive from Mackay, was betrayed by his vowels. Seated at a table beside me at breakfast, he and twelve mates had caught a £1 red-eye from London the night before in celebration of the fact that he would be getting