The charms of Riga

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After much toing and froing and some travelling and a short plan flight we managed to get ourselves from Bratislava in Slovakia to Riga in Latvia.

Riga has some good and bad reputation the good is that it is an awesome place to visit with a great old town full of old buildings and is realy small so you can see it all just by wandering around for a few hours. The bad is that with the advent of cheap airlines it has become a major port of call for Bucks/stag nights and hen night from all over Europe who are only interested in getting drunk and making a mess of what otherwise would be one of the best cities to visit in Europe.

We arrived and quickly headed out to discover what surely has to be one of the quantest places you will ever visit. The old town where we stayed is awesome and is full of beautiful buildings and even has a moat that divides it from the rest of the city. The small size of the Riga meant that within a very short amount of time we were able to sit on a park bench and watch the general going ons in the city. The old town is home to some cool monuments and some really nice churches. One place that interested us was the freedom monument that celebrated the unification of Latvia after WW1. However during the soviet era placing flowers at the base was a crime, this was punished by sending people to the Gulag in Siberia. This was slightly worrying after our accomodation in Bratislava so we were glad to hear that this is no longer the case.

Whilst sitting in the cities park we also witnessed a strange tradition in this part of the world. When people get married the head to one of the bridges over the moat with a padlock. The padlock is engraved with thier names and they lock it to the bridge and then throw the key in the moat. This is done to signify that they are locked together and with no key there is no getting out of it. With the amount of locks on one of the bridges we wondered if anyone was still single in Latvia or if there was just alot of locksmiths who get rich on repeat business.

Gladly we managed to avoid any pre-marital parties but couldnt avoid the charms of Riga.

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Photos

St Peters Church and the house of Blackheads
House of Blackheads was built to house unmarried foreign merchants

Latvian Freedom monument
The cheapest travel agent to siberia

Bridge of locks
It is a tradition in Latvia (and surrounding countries) for people to attach a lock over a bridge and throw the key into the water (so that the lock can never be opened again). As we were in Riga on a Saturday we watched this happen first hand, the whole thing brought a tear to Trionas eye- much to Peters amusement.