Sometime in Lithuania looong loong time ago

I am going to back track for one post to talk about a crazy day in Lithuania. This was in the last week of May. Chelsey Granger, one of the girls from Messiah had her camera broke one day. She needed to buy a new one and wanted to go by herself. Since that was a dumb idea, haha, I went with her. We had to sprint to the bus stop so we didn't miss it. Panting we got on the bus and took the front seats. Chelsey thought it would be cool to talk to a local, turned around and started chatting with this young man. When she told him we were staying at LCC, a local Christian university, he responded, "I know." Chelsey and I just looked at each other almost scared wondering how he knew. It ended up he knew of the University and that students grabbed the bus from that stop all the time. Finally understanding that he wasn't a creeper, we pulled up in front of the mall. We got into the store just in time and spent a good 20 minutes trying to understand this chick tell us about the cameras. After finally deciding on one, we went to the front to pay - but Chelsea's card didn't work. Frustrated, she used her fathers card.. which hadn't worked at the grocery store an hour before. Finally free of that hassle we stepped oustide of the store only to realize it was 10:10 - the buses stop running at 10 pm. Could this day get any worse? We figured we might as well just stop and grab a snack at a restaurant to just relax. While there we asked our waitress about a taxi. She tried her best to explain in broken English, so we decided it would be best if she just called the taxi for us. We finished our meal and then headed up to pay. We talked to her a bit and then asked her to call. She put out her hand and asked for a cellphone. Really lady? American tourists at a  mall way to late a night obviously with no idea how to get back home and you expect us to have a cellphone? So, they just wrote down a message in lithuanian to give to a taxi cab drive for us. We stepped outside and found some rinky dink green cab just sitting there. We headed up to the window tapped on it, the guy inside smiled and let us in...

He didn't speak English. I now began to realize we were on our own. We gave him the message and he told us it would cost 25 Latas...  and then he pulled out of the parking lot going the wrong way.

If any of you know me, I am good with directions. I had taken the bus twice before so I knew the general direction back the the university. This guy definitely went left instead of right. It was eleven at night and there was no one really on the road but us. We just watched the meter keep ticking up and up. A u-turn that was pointless cost us 1.70 litas. This would happen to us. I had no idea where we were. The next thing I knew we pulled onto the main road through the old city and I saw that he had just taken us around a large circle and added a good 10 litas onto our bill. When we got close to the University we just yelled at him to stop and got out of there really ticked off at him. We walked the rest of the day home finally realizing what had just happened that evening.

Crazy times the first week.. who knows what is to come?