After hitchhiking around part of inland Lithuania, I headed for the coast with Agne, the Lithuanian girl I'd stayed with in Kaunas.
After a day in Klaipeda we crossed over to the Curonian Spit. We took a ferry and started hitchhiking the moment we stepped off it — one of the cars that had been on the boat picked us up and dropped us in Juodkrante, where we headed into a forest full of wooden sculptures and ravenous mosquitoes, coming out the other side at a quiet beach.
A few hours eating, drinking and taking the odd dip, then back to the road to hitchhike on to Nida. A Russian in a campervan took us all the way there, filling the journey with stories of how in Siberia you must always stop for hitchhikers — because if you don't, they might freeze to death.
In Nida we found the sundial and walked through the dunes, where we came across an abandoned lemonade stall in the middle of the sand. Our phones helpfully switched to Russian networks to remind us of the extortionate roaming rates, thanks to the proximity of Kaliningrad's signal towers.
We eventually made it into the village of Nida, along with a Dutch guy and a German girl we'd met earlier in Klaipeda. We headed straight to the supermarket to stock up — food and drink. Walking out, the question came up: where do we drink? Agne was insistent that drinking in the street was illegal, but I pushed for the square in front of the supermarket.
As expected, the Lithuanian police came to fine us, so I played the language card:
Police: Are you foreigners?
Me: ¡Español!, ¡español!
Police: Do you speak English?
Me: ¡Un poco! (gesturing with my fingers — a little bit)
Police: There is a fine for drinking in public.
Me: No entiendo.
Police: You cannot drink in the street, it's not allowed.
Me: No entiendo.
After a few more attempts they gave up and left once we'd put the bottles into our bags. The Dutch lad immediately pointed out that if he'd said he was Dutch, the same trick wouldn't have worked — they'd have known he spoke English. Sadly, he's right.
After visiting another beach, Agne and I hitched back to Klaipeda. This time we were picked up by a guy who'd just been filling his boot at the Russian border — vodka and cigarettes at a fifth of the Lithuanian price. We rode in a car with a broken speedometer (permanently on zero), going flat out on terrible roads, while he told us about his regular attempts to outrun the police. In Lithuania they call drivers like him Schumachers. Halfway through the journey he got into a race with another one of his kind, overtaking him on a blind bend across a solid white line.
Next day I was back on the road hitching to Latvia. Has anyone else ever talked their way out of a fine by pretending not to speak English?