To Gurm with thanks, for reassuring me that I'm not crazy!
I couldn't stop staring at the sky in Vilnius. The clouds here don't just have personality, they have violent mood swings. At one glance it'd be a heart-(or at least balloon) lifting azure, like this view of artist colony Uzupis ...
... In another glance, it'd be that particular shade of grey that foretells some disaster or tragedy of divine proportions, like at the Archcathedral Basilica below.
I'm not sure if this was originally meant to be some kind of victorious or majestic pose, but the broody Baltic sky here makes this statue of the medieval King (I can't remember his name, apologies) of these parts look like he's about to sleepwalk off a precipice.
These changing tides of light and dark became for me a metaphor of the city's own story. Now better known as a happy-go-lucky party-hardy stag do venue, it wasn't so long ago that Vilnius went through a dark era purging just about all of their Jewish population during the Nazi campaign in World War II, then lost another good chunk of its inhabitants to Soviet progroms in the post-war years.
Below is another combination of images that reminded me of the dark history just below the city's light-hearted skin: On the left, newlyweds engrave their names and wedding date on locks and attach it to Uzupis Bridge for good matrimonial luck. On the right, on the outside walls of the Museum of Genocide Victims housed in the ex-local KGB HQ (2a Auku St), are the names and lifespans of those who are believed to have been executed by the KGB inside the building. The walls cover keep going over a heartbreaking amount of space, a good number of the individuals would have been only teenagers at the time.
