Hungry?

We forgot to post about one of the most interesting things from Riga. Just behind the bus station, the city holds its gigantic central market in and around a number of fomer blimp/dirrigible hangers. Inside they have permanent booths set up and then merchants come in and set up their wares. There's one entirely for fish (very reminiscent of Pike Street Market), one for fruits/veggies, a couple for meat, and then a 3-4 that seemed to be mixed. Then all around outside there are stands selling fruits and veggies and clothing and CDs, etc. It's pretty overwhelming.

We came away with a couple of overall impressions.

1) We were astounded at the redunancy of the things being offered. Instead of 20 meat stands selling different cuts, they were all selling the same things, including a couple of parts of pigs that we don't normally see and your choice of organs. Same thing with the 15 fish places and the more than 50 produce places. We had 50 choices of where to buy blueberries, or tomatoes..

2) So that made us think a couple of things: a) it was clear what the local and available produce and products were and what had to be imported from farther (we only found grapes in one stand). Also, despite the fact that there were huge crowds, we had to wonder about the turn rate of the food. If I can buy liver at 14 different spots, how old do you think the liver gets before someone buys it? And how cool is it really kept in these cases? (I wasn't quick enough to catch the picture of someone wheeling a half a pig (comeplete with head, etc) in a wheelbarrel across the floor....I felt like I had my Mom on one shoulder and my neighbor John on the other both counseling me that maybe we would be vegitarians for this market trip....

3) It was a great view into everyday life of these eastern europeans. People brought containers from home to buy amounts of jam, and there was a long line for what must have been the best dairy place to buy milk that was ladled into whatever people brought for containers, including plastic bags! Plus there were little cafes, or places selling amazing looking cakes for not very much money (Brian needed to drag me away from those) or other prepared foods. We ended up buying some delicious meat-filled and cheese-filled blintzes for our picnic lunch.

4) Since I have no idea what I want to do when I get back, I might consider a second (or is it third by now?) career as a spy. I didn't want to be obnoxious taking all these pictures of the food, so I got very good at having the camera on, then casually holding it down along my leg, walking by the display case, and taking the shot while looking the other way. Spy vs. Spy has nothing on me!

Mostly, we really enjoyed this slice of Latvian life, though it was a little overwhelming at times (and we had to get good at dodging and weaving or we would be run over by the crowd).

Becca

Latvia's Switzerland

No, not tasty cheese, huge mountains and dubious financial accounts...

After leaving Riga, we took the "bus" (more like a converted minivan with about 10 more people on it than seats) to Sigulda, Latvia. It was nice to visit the "Switzerland of Latvia" and get away from the so-so location of Riga. For me especially certain parts of Riga were nice but there was just way too many strip clubs and gambling establishments and general unsavoryness hovering just on the perimeter of Old Town to get real excited about the overall quality of the town. (Becca's take: Surprisingly, I actually liked Riga better than Tallin despite the strip clubs, etc. Though the old town is no where near as preserved or complete as Tallin's it just seemed to have more energy and vitality.)

Anywho, back to Sigulda. It was a nice getaway location for two and a half days as we spent the time out hiking the various hills (including one that included a stairwell that was 456 steps high!) and exploring the various historical locations along the paths (more on that shortly). Both days included hikes of at least 20k and left us hungry for the tasty pizzeria we found in town. (thanks for the recommendation, D&R!)

Sightseeing highlights included visting the Gutmanis Cave, the largest cave in the Baltics and home of quite a few pieces of folklore. The particularily impressive part was seeing all the family shields and initials carved into the cave from as far back as the early 1700's (though then seeing the JD loves RT on the same wall lost some of the effect). The spring water is also known for curing wrinkles. Becca decided to splash some on both of us; we'll let you know if it works in about 20 years; now only if there was some magical tonic to get rid of gray hairs...

The other two highlights were two very different set of castle ruins, both across the Gauja River Valley from one another. The first we visited was the Sigulda Castle Ruins. Built by German Crusaders in the early 1200's, these stood as a barrier against the Teutonic invaders until it was destroyed during the Great Northern War. It was amazing to see ruins that had been untouched (save for some basic preservation work) for over three hundred years. Quite impressive to see also what parts of the castle had survived and what had not over the 800 plus years of existence.

From there we moved on to the Turaida Museum Reserve, which included the Turaida Castle (built as a fortification for the Gauja River Valley) and a variety of other historical buildings. This was quite a contrast to the Sigulda Castle Ruins as the Turaida Castle has been rebuilt (or in many cases just built upon the old ruins) which loses quite a bit of his historical impressiveness. Much like Riga's Old Town, it's hard to get as excited about places that have historical importance when much of the historical presence there has now either disappeared or has been built over. As the link above describes, it is much more impressive from a distance than up close.

We even found some time during the trip to Sigulda to have an actual "nice" dinner. Upon arriving and hiking about a mile (thank goodness for reasonable sized bags!) to our hotel (Hotel Aparjods), Becca and I both crashed out (it had been pretty hot) and found ourselves spending the latter part of the afternoon watching the german feed of the Tour de France after which point it was dinner time and neither of us felt particularily inspired to head to town. So we cleaned ourselves up, put on our Sunday Best (which is the same as every other day) and went to the nice restaurant at the hotel where we split a bottle of wine and I had a tasty Elk dish that was a local delicacy. (Becca had decided it had been about a month since she had had a 'real' sit-down meal and wanted to feel like a grown up again. The hotel was nice, but smaller than you expected and in a random location behind a strip mall. Since it was 1.5 km to the town (with groceries and pizzeria) and about 3 km to the trail heads, we got lots of extra exercise.

We're off via bus to Klaipeda, Lithuania and then via ferry and bus to five days here.

Jealousy may commence in three, two, one...

Brian

Riga!

(Pictures to come)

We've had a nice overnight stay in Riga, Latvia. The capital of Latvia, it is an interesting mix of the Old Town (most of which is 800 years old) and the new town, which is straight out of the urban development playbook of some US suburb. We spent the evening wandering the Old Town admiring the Art Noveau architecture prevalient throughout the old city. We were quite impressed with the town hall and Riga's 14th century House of the Blackheads.

Impressed of course until we found out that both had been competely rebuild about 4 years ago and were far enough away from the previous plans that UNESCO threatened to pull their World Heritage Site designation. Evidently the citizens of Riga weren't to happy with the "inspired" redesign as well. Seems to be an appropriate metaphor for the town though. Somewhere where hundreds of years of history is butting heads with the explosion of modern commerce. And unlike a lot of countries, it seems that Latvia is torn between the two and it will be interesting to see in the future what direction the city goes.

Not much else to say other than Becca put the kibosh on us spending the afternoon at this to head out to Segulda. For those of you rusty with your Latvian, it says that the European World's Strongest Man Competition is on in Riga this weekend. Oh well, I guess we'll be too busy storming the castles of Segulda ;-)

We stayed at Elizabeth's Youth Hostel, right by the train station. It ended up being significantly cleaner and nicer inside than the walk to the building and through the building to the hostel door led us to expect. They didn't have any doubles left, so we got beds in a room with eight. Happily, this hostel had coed dorm rooms so we at least got to be in bunk beds in the same room. Staying here reminded us of all the things we like and don't like about hostels. It was really nice to have people to talk to again. Most of the places we've been at have been hotels or other situations where there are no common rooms or opportunity to interact with others. Here we got to talk to four guys from the Basque country in France and then got all kinds of trip advice from two guys from England who were making our trip in reverse. We miss interaction with others, so we really need to keep finding places like this. However, it is nice having a room to yourself and not having to worry about the security of your stuff or what time the others will go to bed or get up or how much noise they will make. It actually wasn't too bad here, though our roomates came back after 3 am...they were pretty quiet. So I think our preference will be hostels with doubles. That gives us something less expensive, often with a common room to talk to others and a kitchen to make food in (something else we're coming to really value), but we still have our privacy and often a toilet and shower in our room.

That's pretty much heaven for us at this point. Interesting how things change on the road...