Travels: Pink Soup Fest in Vilnius Invites to Celebrate Lithuania’s National Gastro Pride

                

Cold beetroot soup, a beloved staple in every Lithuanian household throughout the summer months and famous for its bright pink color, is getting a grand celebration in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Pink Soup Fest will be sweeping over the city center all day long on June 10th.

The soup, similar to the Spanish gazpacho because it is also served chilled, is the cult-favorite dish of Lithuanian cuisine. Bright in color and refreshing in taste, the dish combines unexpected ingredients like beetroot, cucumber, fresh dill, eggs, and buttermilk with a side of hot potatoes to create an unmatched flavor burst. Since it is cold, the soup is featured heavily on Lithuanian menus during the heat waves and has been seeping into pop culture as well, turning up on clothing items or in various snacks. 

Vilnius’s gastro scene has skyrocketed in the past few years—the entire ecosystem was awarded real stars in the sky that symbolize a Michelin-like award, while renowned chefs offer delicacies from fresh seasonal produce and local farms. Residents and visitors of Vilnius are keen on unearthing new tastes in highly popular food courts or exploring the multicultural fusion cuisine that features Jewish, Polish, and Lithuanian nobles’ dishes and flavors from Lebanon, Japan, India, Nepal, France, and other countries. Since the cold beetroot soup is inseparable from warm season treats in Lithuania and is one of the draws for visiting travelers, the festival will, therefore, start the tradition of celebrating the beginning of the summer.

The occasion will unite the members of Vilnius community—restaurants, cafes, pubs, nightclubs, guides, businesses, performers, automotive communities, and many others. Restaurants and cafes will offer special deals on the soup, inviting festivalgoers to try unique variations of the dish. More than that, festival visitors will have the chance to bring the pink soup home scents back with them and feast their eyes on the soup-themed graffiti. One of the artistic highlights will be a mural of the pink soup by the artist Eglė Žvirblytė near Bernardine Garden in the heart of Vilnius.

Pink craze all over town 

The craziness of the fuchsia-colored dish will also reflect on the event—everyone in attendance will be asked to put on a fancy dress costume that relates to the soup, be it a beetroot, an egg, or a carton of buttermilk, and slide down the Barbakanas Bastion hill—which offers panoramic views of the Užupis, the bohemian district, and the self-proclaimed separate Republic—straight into a specially made artificial soup bowl.  

After the hill slide, the Pink Soup King or Queen will be elected, visitors will be invited to roam around food trucks offering a refreshing bowl of the dish, relax in the local park, and enjoy musical performances, while children will get the chance to try out trampolines. Since the fest aligns with Vilnius’ 700th anniversary year, visitors will have the chance to soak up the festive atmosphere and visit other cultural events.

More information: https://www.govilnius.lt/pink-soup-fest.  

Astronomical Objects, Illuminated Walls, and Cascading Liquid Light—Vilnius Celebrates Annual Light Festival

 

The streets of Vilnius, th e capital of Lithuania, have been lit up with colourful lights for the  Light Festival on August 13-15^th. The event, which attracted 200K spectators last year, this time has created an illuminated route from the New to the Old Town, with almost 20 light installations by Lithuanian and foreign artists along the way.

The colourful light art highlights the allure of city squares, red-roofed buildings, and green spaces. The light installations combine art with technical solutions with elements of science to build an impressive overall effect. The spectators have the opportunity to admire the dancing fountains “Liquid Dance” next to the newest district in the capital, Paupys, and an astronomical spectacle “Nova” by artists from the United Kingdom in the Pond Park. 

Even quantum mechanics has found its audience—an audiovisual installation “The Spin,” inspired by 20th century quantum physics theories, stuns the crowd in the recently-reformed 400-year-old Reformers’ Garden. The route comes to a symbolic ending: the last stop on Tauras Hill, which offers views to both the modern and the old buildings of the capital, is illuminated with an artistic composition “Hope.” 

The highlights of the Festival are in the photo gallery down below.  https://we.tl/t-iqWs0MaISM

Travels: Vilnius Turns into City-Wide Open-Air Gallery with International and Local Exhibitions

      

**Baltic Triennial 14. The Endless Frontier. Photo by CAC

Turning into one giant open-air gallery, Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, will be displaying internationally-recognised and local artwork city-wide all throughout the summer. The city invites visitors to discuss the artistic take on geopolitics in Baltic Triennial 14: The Endless Frontier, to hear the tales of indigenous Lithuanian dwellers, and to tour the city, encountering art displays on billboards every step of the way.

 Vilnius continues the tradition of open-air projects. Last year, the city turned into a huge outdoor café to reduce the pandemic isolation of the community during the lockdowns. This summer, the capital of Lithuania has once again opened its streets to art, becoming an open-air gallery. A number of art expositions and last year’s most famous street art event, Art Needs No Roof, will take place throughout the entire city till September, allowing everyone to immerse into the urban artistic movement.

Baltic Triennial 14 unites artists from Central and Eastern Europe

One of the most awaited expositions of the summer, Baltic Triennial 14: The Endless Frontier has attracted art pieces from Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on the geopolitical interactions between the regions. The exposition, organised by the Contemporary Art Centre since 1979, is open all summer till September 5^th, creating a platform to discuss old and new ideas, the aspects of freedom and safety as well as traditional and modern values.

According to the curators of the exhibition, Valentinas Klimašauskas, a Lithuanian writer and curator, and João Laia, chief exhibition curator at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Central and Eastern Europe is an important crossroads for social issues regarding ideology, ecology, and economy. The arising tensions, conveyed through the art, are also ignited by disinformation, man-made industrial disasters, oppression of non-normative identities, and nativist nationalism.  

The exposition displays several artists from some of the European political hotspots, such as Belarus and Ukraine. For instance, Jura Shust, a Belarussian-born artist, presents his art display Neophyte II, which shows a group of young people hiding and performing pagan rituals in the forest where they seek freedom and safety from political realia. Similar escapism theme is navigated by the artists from Ukraine, Yarema Malaschuk and Roman Himey, in their exposition Dedicated to the Youth of the World II. However, instead of a forest, the youth choose to escape the oppressive reality by clubbing throughout the night.

The Baltic Triennial exposition is located throughout the entire Vilnius, not only turning the city into one giant outdoor gallery, but also highlighting some of the areas favoured by locals and city guests. For instance, the displays are held in the Contemporary Art Centre, Rupert, an art incubator near the highly frequented Valakampiai Beach, and a “SODAS 2123,” a cultural hub in the Station District.

Lithuanian folk heritage explored through indigenous artefacts and tales

This summer, Vilnius also will be hosting a range of other expositions and artistic events. The National Gallery of Art presents the exhibition Indigenous Narratives till September 26^th. The exposition showcases the 19-20^th century Lithuanian ethnos through the narratives of  the least modernized country dwellers.

A sound project Indigenous Phonograms by Lithuanian-based artist Marius Juknevičius furnishes the exposition with records of authentic indigenous tales about rural life peculiarities. The records have been selected from a Lithuanian Folk Phonogram Collection, included in the UNESCO World Memory Register.  

A multitude of ethnographic artefacts, photograph collections, and testimonies collected from various Lithuanian museums and galleries, reveal three historical periods—the Czarist Russia, the First Lithuanian Republic, and the Soviet period—that have impacted the Lithuanian cultural memory. Aside from the display, the Gallery also offers other accompanying activities: creative workshops, and a barley field installation.

Artwork outside of confined spaces—a way to inspire passers-by with art

One of the most famous art projects of the past year, Art Needs No Roof, comes back to Vilnius once again to display art pieces in unexpected parts of the capital until August 1^st. Last year the project attracted national attention as a way to aid artists affected by the pandemic. Now, a hundred art pieces will be exhibited in outdoor billboards throughout the city to be admired and, potentially, purchased by the passers-by. The map indicating art pieces and approximately 300 works will be also available on the project website.

Visitors will be able to attend Vilnius’ open-air gallery and see the artwork all throughout the summer

Lithuania, among World’s Leading Destinations for Orthopedics, Is Being Discovered by Brits

 Lithuania, a country in Northern Europe, is known to be 2nd in the world for the lowest number of complications after orthopedic surgeries. It’s Joint Commission International accredited hospitals experience an increasing number of medical tourists coming for orthopedic procedures. The destination lures foreigners with affordable prices and high quality of medical services.

"Recently, we received an exceptionally high number of inquiries from British patients, contacting us to help them find the best doctors for their orthopedic surgeries. In Lithuania, they find private treatment of highest standards, which costs significantly less compared to what they would get at home," says Reda Ambrozaite, Communications Manager at Health Tourism Lithuania.

Lipogems, a groundbreaking treatment that helps regenerate body tissues, is one of the most popular procedures amongst Brits. It costs around £5,000 in their country, while in Lithuania the price is €1,800. The surgical process is comprised of three steps: taking fat cells from the patient’s body, separating them from infected ones, and injecting the purified cells into the treated area. The first step, extraction of cells from the patient’s tissue, eliminates the risk of rejection. LL37 protein cells, a natural antibiotic, minimizes the risk of the inflammatory response. Lipogems is used to treat many conditions - from stiffness in a shoulder to joints affected by osteoarthritis.

Medical tourists from the UK also come to Lithuania for more complex orthopedic surgeries such as hip or knee joint replacement, rotator tendon ruptures, meniscus, and ligament surgeries, to name a few. All of them are performed in local private clinics, which operate according to the highest standards of Western medical practices. They offer wards equipped exclusively for orthopedic patients, and use the latest prosthesis of the world’s well-known manufacturers, such as BIOMET, ZIMMER, Johnson&Johnson.

Data shows that Lithuania is the fastest growing medical tourism destination in Northern Europe. It is estimated to have an inflow of about 292,000 medical tourists in 2022, with an annual growth of 15 percent.

  

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Health Tourism Lithuania Aiming to Bring Together Medical and Wellness Tourism as Country Grows in Popularity Amongst Overseas Visitors

Lithuania, the largest of the three Baltic States, has become a popular destination in recent years, with the number of international tourists visiting the country growing by 10.8% in 2018 alone. Similarly, the country’s medical tourism industry is also experiencing a boom, with Lithuania expected to become one of the top-five European medical destinations by 2022.

Since becoming a European Union member state in 2004, Lithuania’s medical tourism industry has flourished. This is largely due to EUR 10 billion in EU funding, which was directed to revamping the country’s healthcare facilities. This financing also included funding universities to provide local and international medical students with world-class higher education, as well as retraining schemes for existing health care professionals.

Subsequently, Lithuanian medical institutions and their highly-qualified professionals are able to offer world-class health care treatments costing up to three-times less than in Western Europe due to lower taxes and labour costs. In-line with Lithuania’s growing tourism industry, so has the demand for ‘wellness tourism’ and ‘medical tourism’.

Medical tourism is when a patient travels abroad to receive more affordable or higher-quality treatments than they would have access to in their home country. Meanwhile, wellness tourists seek out a vacation that will maintain or improve their mental and physical health. The driving factors behind where to visit are usually based on unique, location-based experiences or therapies that are either unavailable or too expensive compared to where the visitor comes from.

Overall, medical tourism provides treatments and aesthetic changes such as surgery or dental work. Wellness tourism offers preventative measures such as mud and water SPA therapies, as well as active leisure.

As Lithuania’s medical tourism sector continues to grow alongside the increasing number of general tourists visiting the Baltic nation year-on-year, Health Tourism Lithuania aims to bring together those seeking wellness and medical treatments via a series of packages to a number of Lithuania’s widely-recognized wellness hotspots. These locations include the coastal resort of Palanga, the pine forests and sand dunes of Nida, as well as local SPA towns, such as Birštonas.

“The number of tourists coming to Lithuania has increased during the last year alone, and if we factor in the predictions made surrounding health tourism by 2022, we have every reason to be optimistic,” said Reda Ambrozaitė, one of the founders of Health Tourism Lithuania. “In addition to the lower costs of healthcare in Lithuania, we also believe that by mixing the trends of medical and wellness tourism, we can open the country to new client groups from across Europe.”

The interest in Lithuania as a popular destination for medical and general tourists is unquestionable. Should medical and labour costs continue to remain low, then there is every possibility that the country’s medical clinics and wellness resorts will also enjoy even greater popularity amongst new demographics.