Spending all day in Kaunas, Lithuania

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(the article below accompanies this video)

Sometimes when you’re traveling you need a break. Masayo and I have been moving around pretty frequently so far on this trip, and this morning she was feeling worn out and wanted to lay around all day to recuperate. We decided to put off our planned bus trip to Poland tomorrow, and hang around an extra day here in Kaunas, Lithuania. It turned out to be a day of good and varied food, and while my blood sugars were high at times they were better than they have been.

The thing about traveling with someone is that being alone can be pretty strange. I found this out when I went to get some breakfast to eat in the room and Masayo stayed behind. I wanted a BG check for t1dwanderer.com, and sat on a bench in the great Old Town Kaunas plaza in front of the majestic churches that tower over our quaint corner guesthouse.

My BG was excellent – 103 – but I felt pretty self-conscious, holding up a BG machine and smiling at the web visitors that live in my camera. Nobody seemed to really notice or care, but it was still strange.

At a cafe called Stop N Go I got coffee (in half-filled cups, sigh), muffins, and an organic orange juice for Masayo – hopefully the vitamin C will aid her recovery.

So for a while she slept while I messed around on my laptop. (The wifi in the room was good — for me anyway; Masayo couldn’t get a good signal on her phone.) I enjoyed resting too and hoped the muffin wouldn’t make me high.

For lunch Masayo felt good enough to go out, and we found a French restaurant on the main road in Old Town called Le Rouge. It was stylish and not the kind of place we usually find ourselves, but it fit in with the day’s theme of relaxing and better health. I had a piece of salmon with mashed potatoes and carrots in a sauce – it was truly excellent, and the Perrier went great with it.

Before the meal, though, I was 238. The muffin had got the best of me. Oops.

Back in the room I did something I did last night that hadn’t worked out: took some post-meal Humalog so I could eat mushroom-shaped ginger cookies. Hey, I was hungry! And testing the realities and limits of your diabetes is always a good thing. Sated with a full stomach and a hopeful feeling about my blood sugar, I watched videos online while Masayo alternately slept and studied maps of Kaunas.

The girl at the Kauno Arkivyskupijos guesthouse desk said that while we’d booked our current room through booking.com, if we wanted to stay another night tomorrow night we’d have to move to a bigger and more expensive room. It’s still cheap so that was fine; it even has its own private bathroom.

At 5:00 pm I checked to see how I’d done with the French lunch plus ginger cookies dessert. Pretty good – 140! Two days in a row with only a couple of high readings, both understandable. Things are looking up.

Dinner was at an old-timey traditional Lithuanian place called Berneliu Užeiga. The inside was dark and small, and everything was made of sturdy, old-looking wood. It seemed welcoming but also a place that certain locals liked to return to frequently.

I got mushroom soup served in a bread bowl, and as a main course some potatoes with minced meat in a heavy, oily sauce — one of the most popular traditional Lithuanian dishes. Masayo and I split a big bottle of Perrier. The food was great and very filling – I didn’t eat much of the bread bowl, and couldn’t finish my last potato. This was all tough to guess the carbs of, but I did my best and shot up through my pants leg under the table.

The rest of the evening was of course spent in the room, where Masayo was feeling better and it was getting dark anyway. At 9:30 pm I was 226. A little high – but a lot better than the 350 I might have been a week ago. I’m getting smarter with my Humalog doses when it comes to this unfamiliar northern European cuisine.

Tomorrow we’ll see some more of Kaunas; we’ve really only seen the Old Town section so there is a lot more out there. We feel good, my diabetes is behaving much better, and we’re in a great town!

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