On my stopover in Vilnius, I decided to visit the “Museum of Genocide Victims” (a.k.a the KGB museum). Housed in the old KGB headquarters in downtown Vilnius, the half-office half-prison was once the cerebral hub of Soviet oppression during the occupation of Lithuania. From here the KGB (and the NKVD and MGB before them) maintained Soviet control over the Lithuanian masses through the usual methods: spying, blackmail, imprisonment, torture, deportation and execution.

VILNIUS—It’s 6:20 a.m. and you haven’t slept yet. Your “luxury” bus, carrying with it 15 drunk Spanish dude-bro-equivalents, has spent the past 10 hours careening through the rain-soaked Polish countryside with the primary objective of passing every car in sight (and a secondary objective, presumably, of arriving safely in Vilnius). Hand over your baggage-claim ticket and kiss the soggy ground, you’re in Lithuania.