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After yesterday's emotional visit to the Museum of Latvian Occupation, I soothe my post-Cold War angst with some spectacularly delicious traditional Latvian food at Bistro LIDO "Alus sēta" - a cafeteria-style chain restaurant, this one located in the Old Town. ("Alus sēta", I just learned, translates literally as "Beer Yard".) Apparently LIDO is the Disneyland of Latvian cuisine, with a flagship restaurant/entertainment center located just outside the city. I do, in fact, notice the similarity between this LIDO in Rīga and Рэстаран-бістро ЛIДО ("Restaurant-Bistro LIDO") in Minsk, where I dined the night before. If they aren't the same chain, then perhaps copyright enforcement here is even more lax than I thought.

In any case, cafeteria dining is perfect for we who are language-challenged. Even at staffed serving stations, as long as I'm not too picky about what I eat (which everyone knows I am not), it's pretty safe to just point at something and take a plateful of it. Also, I'm not giving the staff enough credit here - they all seem to speak English perfectly well, but I'm too embarrassed/stubborn to use it any more than I have to!

Overlooking the central square on Kaļķu iela, and just down Skārņu iela from my hotel, is a T.G.I. Friday's restaurant. It's rather vulgar, and unfortunate to have so central in the old town, but in a sense it does capture the touristiness of the place. The best and worst thing about it is the way it's described in the tourist pamphlets: "unbelievably gigantic American-size portions!!" So sad, yet so true.

In Prague in 2005 ("Smooth sailing, so far") I broke down and ate at a T.G.I. Friday's halfway through my monthlong trip, because I was homesick and exhausted from trying to understand and navigate local restaurants. I had ribs. On this trip, I'm grateful for LIDO, as silly as it is, for giving me the strength to resist the temptation of the vulgar American eatery!

Returning to my charming hotel, a painstakingly authentically restored former convent nestled on a square between two historic churches, I discover an unexpected downside: my charming room on the second floor is located directly, and I do mean directly, above the entrance to a ground-floor "Tea Room"/café which turns out to be more like a club or disco in the evening. Loud music shakes my room and, even though the signs on the Tea Room suggest that the club will close for the night at 22:00, it continues well past 01:00. In addition, noisy drunken stag parties in a Babel of languages pass through the church square throughout the night and dark-thirty hours of the morning. I'd heard that airBaltic's cheap flights to its hub in Rīga were drawing a crowd of touristic, well, losers, to the city, which at this moment seems to me indeed to be the case. (Lack of sleep makes me uncharitable, but it doesn't necessarily make me wrong.)

Next morning, my hotel, ostensibly a B&B but lacking a kitchen, provides a handy breakfast coupon to use at the fancy restaurant next door. My first hot breakfast of the trip: a delicious (Euro-style) bacon & (Euro-style) cheese omelette! Regular European B&B breakfasts are great and all (müsli mit jogurt is easy, or bread with sliced cold meats and cheese and cucumber and tomato are standard nearly everywhere), but it's nice to have something really substantial for a change. One reason I try to stay at hotels serving breakfasts is that I can have a hearty meal with very little effort and no language barrier, which carries me through the day until a late dinner or even just a late convenience-store snack.

After breakfast, I return to my room to find that the Tea Room has started up again. I've noticed that one thing cafés do in Rīga to advertise their extreme hipness to the touristic-loser crowd passing by is, they blare pop music onto the street through loudspeakers mounted above their front doors. (It's the opposite of that McDonalds in Dallas that plays classical music on its sidewalk to keep gangbangers away. In Seattle, a drugstore in the U District used to use country-western to achieve the same.) It's cute and atmospheric when walking around; much less so when it's under my pillow. I march down the painstakingly authentically restored staircase, looking sleepless and pitiful which I accomplish with very little effort, and ask the receptionist as nicely as I can whether there might perhaps be a vacant room on the back of the hotel that might be quieter that I could move to? Yet another benefit of traveling during the off-season: there is. She whisks me there and we swap keys and although this room's TV is broken, there hadn't been anything on anyway and it's a larger room and I can only kinda hear the Tea Room's pop stylings in the distance. Awesome!

Fortified with success and breakfast, I head out to see the must-sees in Rīga that lie outside the old town core. First up - as mentioned before, Rīga did a thorough job of purging itself of Soviet and Stalinist architecture with two exceptions: the Soviet-style former Latvian Red Riflemen's Museum which now ironically houses the Occupation Museum, and the neo-classically Stalinist Zinātņu akadēmija (Academy of Sciences). On the way to the Academy building, I pass along the edge of the Centrāltirgus (Central Market), which is a lot like the West Seattle Farmers' Market and the Puyallup Fair vendor halls, if you mixed them together and added steroids. The fresh fruits and veggies smell yummy.

I reach the Academy building and spend a good 10-15 minutes circling it trying to spot the hammers-and-sickles which I've read are subtle but still visible in the exterior decoration on the building. They are subtle indeed, but I finally spot them near the top of the tower and feel victorious!

Next, to my great annoyance I discover that I've brought along 3-4 nearly-identical maps of the city but not the one that shows me the location of my next destination, a memorial to Rīga's Jewish Holocaust victims and a tribute to the handful of Latvians who acted to hide and smuggle Jews during Nazi occupation. (Another historiographical detail from the Occupation Museum: it makes a point of describing that some, but not very many, Latvians acted to save Jews, while other Latvians joined the Nazis in persecuting and murdering Jews. Again, I appreciate the honesty.) I know the monument is around here somewhere, but I can't find it. After some fruitless wandering in the neighborhood, I'm forced to admit that it's probably time to give up and head to my next stop, the train station post office. I decide to take a slightly longer route by way of a main street where I might be able to find signage or ask someone about the memorial. Eureka! I arrive at an intersection across from a small park, where I can see the memorial sculpture next to the foundation wall of a destroyed (in 1941) synagogue. The monument just as inspiring as I had hoped, and the synagogue's footprint is very interestingly presented. I feel so lucky to have found them.

After a quick shopping stop at the train station, I decide that the Art Nouveau district on "the other side of town" is close enough to walk since I'm setting my own pace today. It really makes me mad that I have gone from the quick, confident stride I had when I was younger, to some kind of slow elderly shuffling bullshit. Worst of all is when I have to keep up with some CouchSurfer kid - then, I get to be both embarrassingly slow and painfully sore afterwards. Grrr. I want my regular old walk back.

At least I have plenty of time to enjoy the leafy-greenness of the riverfront park on my way there.

Also on the way, a wonderful stop at Latvia's Freedom Monument, towering over the entrance to the old town. I learned yesterday that during Soviet times, the government narrowly decided against destroying the nationalistic monument, whose three stars represent three of Latvia's four founding tribes and modern-day regions; instead, Soviet propaganda attempted to re-cast the stars as the three Baltic Soviet Socialist Republics (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia), somehow symbolizing their glorious something-or-another after annexation to the USSR. Yeah, it didn't really go over with the locals either. This is the place where Latvians rallied in 1991 to celebrate their independence. Also, the guidebooks say that the statue is nicknamed "Milda", but they don't mention that Milda is a goddess of love in the ancient Baltic pagan pantheon. The Baltic region was relatively late to convert to Christianity, and pagan spirituality persists here even alongside their Christian traditions. I don't know whether this is intentionally an example of that, or just a coincidence, since the name "Milda" is in general use as well, as, you know, a name.

After Milda, I explore a smallish section of Rīga's Art Nouveau district, and since it's the off-season I have all of Alberta iela (street) pretty much to myself. As with most building-fronts in Europe, I can see that professional photographers must have to do all manner of clever tricks to get useful images of these decorations. The streets are narrow, so there are no opportunities to stand back and get a front-view of any one building. I imagine getting permission from the neighbors across the street to take photos of bits directly out each window, then stitching the images together to make one picture of something that simply cannot be seen that way in real life...

After another leisurely stroll (sigh) through more verdant riverfront park, past other lovely buildings and museums, I determinedly make my way back to... LIDO "Alus sēta". I didn't get to try everything last night, so I'm gonna go find more rich Latvian food to point at. Totally good decision, of course. And walking back through the old town at dusk is lovely afterwards.

Now, normally, as astute readers have observed, though I am a terribly whiny traveler, at the end of the travel day I really do try to roll with whatever the trip has handed me. My ability to do this in Rīga completely broke down, and I'm not sure whether it was a lack of sleep, lack of CouchSurfers, or (I learned later) the sinus infection I was coming down with. At least one of those things must be why, in the evening, in my new, quieter hotel room, when two cellists set up shop in the alley directly beneath my new window at 21:30 and started playing very lovely duets on one (OK, two) of my favorite instruments, well, let's just say I didn't feel the same joyous appreciation I might have under better circumstances. That, plus the fact that I heard "Air" from J.S. Bach's Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068, a.k.a. Air on the G String, OMG FIVE TIMES IN TWO HOURS. Really beautifully. FIVE TIMES. That other Bach cello thing, you know the one, more than once, too. I'm sad that I was so grateful when they finally packed up at 23:30.

Tomorrow! Early! Lithuania! CouchSurfers! Rīga is a beautiful place and I've learned a lot, but I sure hope I can improve my attitude in Vilnius!

See all my pictures from Rīga on Flickr: Rīga 2010 Set

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