Riga

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I have been in Latvia for one full week, which was considerably longer than I had planned. But it has been great, and there are many places I didn’t get to that I had hoped to see.
My bus arrived in Riga, the capital of Latvia, last Monday. The bus stop is right in the center of town, adjacent to the open-air market, a market much like any other massive and overwhelming market in Europe or elsewhere; I am told that the Riga market is the biggest one in Eastern Europe. I was loaded down with all of my bags—somehow I still had too much stuff even though I left much of my belongings in Kaunas.
I was lost, both physically and mentally, for about thirty minutes while I wandered around the market looking for a store that sold SIM cards for my phone so that I could call Julija (a friend of a friend in the US), whom at this point I had not met. It amazes me how disorienting it can be, experiencing a new place for the first time; it is like being on another planet. All of the social cues that you know from life experience are either not there or you interpret them completely wrong. For instance walking into a shop thinking it is a convenience store and all it is selling is flowers, or watches, or some other specialty item, or it is actually a travel agency…..when from the outside you could have sworn it was a convenience store. Or walking into another store, and as the store clerk is exiting, she says something to you that you interpret as ‘welcome to my store, come on in,’ and so you enter, and at that moment realize that what she is really saying is ‘what are you doing……my store is closed now, can’t you read the sign? Please leave.’ (this I inferred by her second series of orders to me, which were not as friendly as the first).

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Photos

Riga
The hangar-like buildings below is the central market.

Riga
A view of the old town from atop St. Peter's Church