Summer School (Final Trip)

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My Summer School included cultural program, to be accurate - trip to Latvia and Lithuania.
My road was extremely complicated and stupid!! We moved from Tallinn to Riga and then to Vilnuis. And after Vilnius I needed to come back to Tallinn again, coz' I had my flight to Kyiv from there, but the most interesting thing is that I had to change the flight in Riga!! So I tested the road 3 times: by car, by bus and by plane 😊 Based on this experiance, my conclusion is that car is the best choise!!
Riga considered to be the third biggest city in the former Soviet Union, after Moskow and Kyiv. And now it is also quite spectacular, monumental and trilling. However, it's not alive. There were not my words, but one of my travel buddies - "We are walking around the city and feel ourselves as in the museum". And it's true!! Ideal buildings, sophisticated forms, clean streets and lack of a city atmosphere, some kind of mess or fuss, or turmoil.
Only about 300-400 km from Tallinn, but people are much more pro-russian oriented! Probably, caused by the close relationships with the Federation in the recent past. The city is unexpectedly expencive. Their currency is more expencive than euro. Crisis pushed their economy in the big hole. Rates of unemployment grew in 2 or 3 times, salaries went down, GDP shrinked.
In addition to this unplesant information, Riga is not so safe. I've never felt myself safe in the evening in the city center. Riga has rather complicated traffic with one-way streets. And when you are a foreigner it is easy to astray. We faced with this problem just after the arrival. We were looking for the Stockholm School of Economics and acctualy we found it, but we had no idea how to drive up to it. We went round and round for about an hour..
Riga is also religiously diversed - it has all kinds or directions of churches. I was amused! However, a Chinese guy was even more amused, when we went to one of the protestant churches to listen to the service. China, in general, has no religion. Some buildings are really cute, like they are taken from a fairy-tale.
On one day we went to Yurmala - people say, it has the best beaches around the Baltic Sea. As for Baltic Sea beaches are perfect - wide, long, with yellow sand! Baltic Sea is very shallow, you can literally walk 2 km and it will be only 1 metre of deepness. Sometimes we were joking that it was possible to get from Tallinn to Helsinki on foot 😊 Exactly on that dates, Yurmala hosted famous, in certain circles, music festival - New Wave. The city was crowded! The waiter in the restaurant said that just 5 minutes before us popular russian singer Alsu, was sitting at our table :D Big honor))) Yurmala is really international! We were the evidence of this - our company consisted of 1 Ukrainian, 1 German, 1 Chinese, 1 American, 1 Latvian and 1 Estonian. We had a lot to discuss))
Our stay in Riga finished in the National Restaurant - Lido. It's not an ordinary place to have a meal, it a big complex with different activities for children and adults. Lido is very huge and offers tasty meals (relatively cheap). Oh, and one more thing, at night we left our mentor and went to the open-air cafe in the main square. As far as it was Sunday the square was very noisy and full of people, who enjoyed their lifes) We listened to the live country music and were just happy to be in that place at that moment!
It was th last day of our Chinese friend in Europe. At 00:00 a.m. he had his bus to Tallinn, from there ferry to Helsilki, then flight to Moskow and only from Moskow flight to Beijing :O. Yes, it's complicated to get from China to a small europian country!!
Around 11.30 me American friend and me went home (to the dorm, in the end of the city). We took the wrong tram and had to walk for about an hour on the Riga outskirt!! Never repeat it by yourself!!!
Next morning we moved to Vilnius. This place you definitely should see! Excelent composition of urban structures. We were living in the dorm much worse than in Riga this time the atmosphere of life existed 😊 While our excursion around the city center I discovered unknown facts related to Ukraine: our most famous writer - Taras Shevchenko was studying in Vilnuis on his Master.
We admired ballet dancers that had the rehearsal in the middle of the central square, near the Opera House.
Lithuanian president is the woman that was a contradictory issue for some time. Interesting thing is that in Lithuania, as in Estonia, people don't speak (I mean don't use) russian. They know where they want to belong. I had a feeling that prices were as twice as cheaper there than in Latvia!!
In Vilnius I even began to think that Lithuanian food was better than Italian. It was delicious, but fatty.
Once we went to Trakai Castle. I have very interesting story connected to this place. I had a picture of this castle on my desktop for several months. I put it there even before I decided to go to Baltic states. Hereby I was looking at it every day and I think the mechanism called "visualization" did his job, because now I have exactly the same picture of the castle, but with me in front of it 😊) After this I'm putting on my desktop all the places which I want to visit. Also there we met great lithuanian guys, who showed us the nightlife of the city!! And as well as it was our last night in the country, we finished it approximately at 5 a.m. in our dorm with a big bottle of Rum 😊
The next half of the day we had some free time. And in the afternoon one of my biggest dreams came true. I practiced pottery )) I was looking for this classes even at home long before the trip, but couldn't find it. The pottery studio was located in the "separated" republic in Vilnius - Autonomic Republic of Uzupio. They have their own president, bishop and constitution, which hangs on the wall on the street and is written in several languages (russian, belorussian, english, lithuanian, ect). The area is full of galleries and museaums. The Republic is the symbol of the end of the communism, but at the same time it reflects that it was not always so bad.
Night bus brought me back to Tallinn. And they were sad 6 hours of waiting for my flight!

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