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This morning we headed off to the Riga Outdoor Ethonological Museum. This was about 30 minutes out of town on the bus and was actually really worthwhile. However the weather was absolutely freezing!!!! Apparently there is due to be about 3 days of north winds which are not the warmest things in the world. In fact they are down right freezing. So there we were, out in the forest walking all around for 2.5 hours in the ice cold north artic winds. The musuem itself is really interesting. What they have done is gather together all the old buildings from the 18th and 19th century and have located them in an outdoor museum. The museum represents the 4 different regions of Latvia and the different building and living style that they used to have. My favourite part of the museum was when our guide (who was fantastic) opened up an dowry chest from 1846 and showed us the types of things that the maidens of yesteryear would have had to make before they got married.
After we finished walking around the outdoor museum we all piled into the cafe where we proceeded to give the guy behind the counter the
fright of his life as we all ordered the hot soup. He must have thought that it was national soup day or something similar.
Coming back into town after the musuem did not improve the weather at all as it started to rain. So MK and I spent the rest of our day darting between cafes and shops. MK took us off to the Art Noveaux shop where she bought the most lovely scarf (I'm actually quite jealous as I think that it would be a great scarf to wear with some of my blue/purple sweaters). We then proceeded to spend a bit of time looking around the amber stores for necklaces. I found one that I rather liked in one of the stores (the only one that I have seen that I liked) but we decided to look around some more before buying. Apparently Lithuania has a lot of amber as well and since the price of amber went down quite considerably from Tallinn to Riga we are wondering if it will do the same again.
All this shopping and walking got us quite hungry so we headed into a cafe for a nice warming cup of
tea and food. Which we then followed up with a little more shopping (got myself a xmas tree decoration), and a visit to the Occupation Museum. This museum was fabulous, if a little bit too big, but is free. It details the occupation of Latvia by first the Russians, then the Germans and then the Russians again and what happened to the Latvians during this time. My favourite thing was the letter that the Americans sent to the Latvian Ambassador to the US when Latvia finally got its independence again in the 1980s. It said that they were so pleased about what had happened and that they had never officially recognised the Russian occupation of Latvia and that they had stood beside the Latvians for the past 51 years and that they are strongly in favour of democracy. Of course never once in that 51 years did the americans actually do one little thing to help the Latvians get their independence.
After the museum we were so tired that we decided that we needed another cafe break and went off to the another coffee house where we had a fabulous pot of tea and waffles with chocolate sauce and
icecream! We rationalised this by calling it dessert (it was just a little bit before dinner). Suitably revived we continued walking around the old town area and did a little bit more shopping ( a couple of warm, long sleeve t-shirts) and then headed into a restaurant for dinner. The best part of the dinner was the black balsam that we had before the food. The one that I had was a hot one with blackcurrant juice and cloves and was actually really quite yummy. MK and I both certainly had a bit of a glow on after drinking them.
Tomorrow we are off to Lithuania. Here's hoping that the weather improves.
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