Futher adventures in Riga (Sept. 2003)

[nibot]

In Riga I met a a Latvian/Russian friend who I'd met originally a year or so before in Sweden, Tanja. She met me at train station, by the clock tower.

The hostel is actually right in the center marketplace (remember those gigantic hangars?). The walk from the hostel to the old town is right through the bustling marketplace.

Along all the roads in Lithuania I saw people of all sorts (young and old..) with huge baskets of mushrooms they'd collected in the woods. Bicycling through the forests of the Curonian spit, I met many people collecting the mushrooms. In Latvia the train would stop at what seeemed like random spots in the woods, and people would leave the train with empty baskets, and others would climb back on with huge buckets overflowing with mushrooms. Here's a mushroom seller at the marketplace:

daily street scene:

Riga has lots of options for simple, yummy food. Tanja took me to one place that had a huge assortment of raviolli/potsticker/dumpling-type things with all different fillings, in hot soup. Yummy and cheap. Then there was this other place that sold all sorts of "fried buns". When I went there the first time, I was by myself, and totally baffled since everything looked the same. Then Tanja took me there and deciphered everything for me: some are sweet, some have meat, etc.

My breakfast (the pastry on the top left is filled with meat.. the others are sweet (cheese/fruit), I think):

We took the train to see a castle. Before the castle there was a cable car.

The view from the cablecar:

The castle, and an amazing sky: (that's me in the foreground)

Not everyone thought that joining the EU was a good idea. Here's a truck with a message protesting the proposed EU accession. Just a day or two after I left the country, Latvians voted overwhelmingly in favor of joining the European Union.

me:

Tanja:

me again:

Tanja again:

And then it was time to leave Latvia, on the good-old Eurolines bus to Tartu, Estonia. I left Riga on September 19, 2003 on the evening Eurolines bus.

Comments

[erinmack.livejournal.com]

All these pictures make me want to chill in the Baltic States. Now that I have a Polish pal (okay, not exactly former Russia, but close enough), maybe it'll happen!

food in Riga

[lelia-br.livejournal.com]

I used to live there when I was a kid...
I really hope you had a chance to taste fancy cakes - they are officially (at least in my opinion) are the second best after Viennese pastry. And smoked fish and meat, and hunters sausages, ahhh...