Latvia

In August my mother and I travelled to the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Poland for a two week vacation. This is the first in a series of posts chronicling the trip.

We took a direct flight from Ottawa to Frankfurt and thoroughly enjoyed the fact that we didn’t have to go through Pearson. Unfortunately the flight left fairly early in the evening and since it was just over 6.5 hours long we only managed to get 2-2.5 hours of sleep. We arrived in Frankfurt about about 6:30am local time and had a couple of hours to kill before our connecting flight. We both dozed for most of the 2 hour flight to Riga. Someone on our Riga flight had a can of shaving cream explode in their bag and several bags coming off the belt were covered in shaving cream. It was quite the sight. Mom’s bad had a bit on it but we were able to clean it up quickly in the bathroom.

Once we arrived at our hotel and immediately crashed for a 2 hour nap. We stayed at the Hotel Gutenburgs which was very conveniently located right in the Old Town. After our nap we wandered around the Old Town getting our bearings. Eventually we found a tourist information center and exchanged some euros into Latvian currency. We had a nice dinner at an Italian restaurant and then went back to the hotel and went to bed.

Our hotel breakfast included the usual European fare of meat, cheese, bread and eggs with some surprising additions: gum drops and chocolate coated marshmallow cookies. It’s always nice to have a breakfast dessert when you’re on vacation! We started our first full day in Latvia with a a three hour walking tour of Riga. We covered both the New Town with its Art Nouveau buildings and the Old Town with its many churches. We also saw the Latvian Freedom Monument. Our guide was a Russian who has lived in Latvia her whole life but does not have citizenship because she refuses to go through the naturalization process. It was a little difficult to follow her English but we were certainly starting to learn a lot about the interesting national relationships in this part of the world. In the afternoon we visited the Blackheads House museum and then headed back to our air conditioned hotel room to seek retreat from the 30C heat.

On our second day in Latvia we had an excursion out of the city. We first visited Cesis Castle and took a cable car across a river valley on our way to Turaidas Castle. The castles were quite well restored and seemed to have changed hands many times (Russians, Germans, Poles, Swedish) since the 12th century. It was quite windy and rainy in the morning but luckily the weather cleared in the afternoon.

We started our third day in Latvia with a leisurely breakfast and then headed out to the Architecture Museum. This ended up being a one room display on the different paths to industrialization of the Scandinavian and Baltic States. After the museum we walked very quickly (it was pouring rain this morning) to the Riga Cathedral. We attended a 20 minute organ music concert which included pieces by Bach and several Latvian composers. While we were waiting for the concert to start we spent some time working out the topology of a lined sheath dress and which seams had to be left unfinished to turn it inside out. It was the intersection of two of our favourite things: math and sewing!

Next we went to the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia. We spent quite a while here learning about the Soviet and then German and then Soviet again occupation of Latvia in the 20th century. This wasn’t exactly a fun museum (let’s face it the Soviets treated the residents of the Baltic countries pretty inhumanely) but it was very moving and was really a highlight of our trip.

We had a late lunch of salads at “Double Coffee” our favourite local coffee shop chain. We were chilled from the rain so I also had a Mocha and mom had a coffee with a shot of a local balsam liqueur that we had read about. It’s always good to do some liquid sightseeing! That evening we went up to our hotel’s rooftop restaurant for a very nice farewell to Riga dinner. It had rained on and off all day and the weather was so cool and blustery that they had thick wool shawls available to keep the diners warm.  It seemed only fitting to have cheesecake with lingonberries for dessert.

The rest of our Latvia pictures are available here.

Up Next: Lithuania