Riga, Latvia

The Riflemen Monument (I was corrected. Not for the first time)
I love the soviet style of sculpture.

Long time no blog - partly because I spent the weekend in Riga, Latvia with Martha and Pete visiting another friend who's working over there. A nice place, more european than I expected. Flew with Ryanair for about €130 each, not too bad price wise but comfort on their 737-800 on a 3 hour flight is a little less than ideal and next time I fly more than 2 hours or so I'll have to think about paying a little more for Aer Lingus or another airline.

The Train. This is similar to the one we took to Sigulde.
But anyway, Riga is a nice town. Not huge, you could certainly see most of the town in a couple of days. As I said above, our friend is working over there, which means you don't go to the dodgy restaurants and so on by accident. Some of the fun is lost that way, not figuring the place out for yourself so much, but hey, who's complainin!

So he's got this huge fully furnished apartment with all mod cons, lovely decoration, 10 mins walk from the centre etc which is about 2000 sq. ft. for the same monthly rent as a 600 sq. ft. shoebox might fetch in Dublin. That said, salaries aren't quite the same over there either, so I'm not really comparing like with like. But just as an indication, we were getting decent lunches and dinners for 4 including maybe 2 beers and some coffees for roughly 25 - 30 euros!

They have yummy hot chocolate (see left), which isn't at all like the hot chocolate we drink here in Ireland. Imagine getting a bar of some really nice chocolate, (like Lindt milk chocolate or similar approved) then melting it down and drinking it. That's what it's like. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. It's so thick they give you a glass of water with it!

Some of the sights we saw were the war museum (Yawn - some good model airplanes and boats etc, but little else of interest) the museum of the occupation (an eye-opening history of Latvia's difficult and heartbreaking occupations by the USSR and Nazi Germany), the markets in the old Zeppelin hangars and a frozen river that must be 1km wide at the very least (see piccy of me and martha right in (on?) the middle of the river!):

As you can see in the photos the city still has some patches of snow, and I don't think that the temperature rose above about 0 Celsius much whilst we were there. We did take a train journey about 1 hour east of Riga to a town called Sigulde (no doubt I'll be corrected......!) where it promply blizzarded on us. We managed to get into a restaurant for lunch just before it stopped, typically, but all the same it was nice being out in "real snow" for us foreigners.


Snow. I have pictures of us in snow, but I feel uneasy about publishing pictures or mentioning too many details of other people on here without their permission. Yet. (you know who you are. If permission is forthcoming, please advise!)


Riga then. A nice town, with some nice eats and drinks. I'm not entirely sure I'd go back again for the city's sake. I'd like to see it in summer maybe, with some more bustly outdoor café-society happening - that's always good for a place. I'm sure the countryside is fairly nice also, with some proper animals (elk, and the occasional bear - and some ticks I'm reliably informed) which would be interesting to try and spot.

If you're going, bring some warm clothes. It's Baltic over there. But it's good value for us Euro-pushers, and it is an interesting city.