Six weeks of planes, trains and boatmobiles on the Iceland/Scandinavian/Baltic merry-go-round brought us to our full stop in the region, the little surprise packet of Riga. With Latvia's history sharing a raft of parallels with Estonia and geographically separated solely by that thin man made line we call a border, I'd imagined Latvia's capital Riga would be a carbon copy of sister Tallinn up north. Not so. For a start the language is completely different, not that I can tell. It's also not as dollied up. No period costumes in the streets here and the old town is a lick of paint short of Tallinn's slick veneer and clean lines. The facade also throws up more visions of its Soviet byways. The heart and soul of the younger populace is, however, Western European to the core
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