Blogs from Latvia, Europe - page 26

October 22 I headed from Estonia back to Latvia and one more couchsurfing adventure. It was only about a three hour trip to Riga, a big city, where I was to meet Ligita at her office that was right downtown. For a change of pace I arrived on time and even found a place to park for a few minutes, which was very difficult there. Once again I had that now familiar combination of excitement and nervousness that goes with meeting new people and finding myself in another unfamiliar situation. Ligita is a beauty consultant or something like that and I think she is quite well known in Riga. Meeting her for the first time was a bit overwhelming. Ligita is probably about six feet tall, she had purple highlights in her hair, fishnet stockings and ... read more

well, this mornings was a pretty big waste of an entry, so i shall make up for that with this beast. and beast is most definitely the word to describe the majesty that is about to unravel on this here piece of networky canvas. i suppose i will start off by saying what i know, what everyone knows, and what is generally becoming more and more hard fact as time goes on. i love being here. it's not as if this is the most thrilling place on the planet, far from it. but it's just nice, and i'm a fan of nice. after another boring flight that wasnt even saved by the view (it was a cloudy morning), i arrived at riga airport and was just generally excited. ok, there are other reasons for that, but ... read more

A quick visit to Riga This morning I woke up at 5:30 and headed out, in pitch darkness, to the bus station (I'm amazing with directions when I'm alone!). I bought a ticket for the 6:30 bus to Riga, and I was a little concerned that I felt a bit "crook" (as David would say), but there was a bathroom on the bus, which I didn't end up using but it put my mind at ease. The ride took about 4 hours and I slept a good chunk of it. I arrived in Riga at 10:30 and decided to catch the 12:30 bus out of town, so I could at least say I spent 2 hours in Latvia. I think Riga gets a bit of a bad rap: it wasn't much to look at, but it ... read more

So Lelde and I have just got back from spending two weeks at her grandparents' farm, deep in the Latvian countryside. 32 per cent of Latvians live in rural areas#. I think that Latvians have strong and thriving traditions related to the land. Whilst there, we went mushroom picking, which Lelde's mum describes as nearly being a national sport in Latvia- you can often see people coming from the forest with a basket full of senes(mushrooms) after an early morning hunt. It makes me think how in Britain most people wouldn't know what they were looking at when it comes to fungus- perhaps we're more removed from the source of our food- harvesting it in the supermarkets. So we got back to nature and experienced farm labour and farm life- mostly- and I like this, the ... read more

Riga is Fantastic! We arrived here on Wednesday morning feeling rather dehydrated and tired after our impromptu drinking session in Leipaja the night before, however we were met with smiling faces at our hotel and a lovely breakfast in a nearby cafe, enough to set us up for a days sightseeing. Riga (we were told by our drinking buddy the night before) is one of the "greats" and despite this rather dramatic build up we were not dissapointed, the architecture grand but equally precise, the cafe culture something more like Barcelona or Paris than the former soviet union and the range of restaurants reminding us of London. We visited the museum of the occupation of Latvia, which gives a detailed explanation of the history of the country from 1939 to 1991, chilling, intriguiging, we learnt things ... read more