Places I've Been: Riga

I had such a good time in Riga! The weather was great, warm and sunny and dry every day, so I could walk around the city and sit outside for lunch and dinner. The food was good, hearty northern European fare, plenty of meat and fish and sauces, and they had lots of different flavors of cider, pear and strawberry among them.

With a friend I made on a walking tour, we spent a couple of evenings at a bar called The Key, where one lat (about 200 yen) in the football table got us 35 balls! One evening we got playing with a couple of locals, one of whom was the national champion, and holy crap was he good.

The city is very beautiful and relaxed. I stayed mostly in and around the old town, full of narrow streets of pastel buildings, venerable churches and public buildings, and home also to the Occupation Museum, with its moving exhibitions on how Latvia suffered under the Nazis and Soviets.

Nearby is the art-deco district, with its extraordinarily decorative buildings, competing to outdo each other with their fanciness. Then to the east of the centre there's "Stalin's Birthday Cake", a striking Soviet-era monolith of a building which now provides a great view across the city.

Three years on I still tell people about how great Riga is!

The hostel I stayed at was on this street!

A typical scene from Riga's old town

The main square in the middle of the old town

Stalin's Birthday Cake

A view from the top of the cake

Dessert, and I think that's cider behind it

One of the art-deco buildings

Two guys who wanted to become saints bricked themselves into this church, with only this opening to the outside world

The Soviets wanted to pull this down after they invaded, but a sympathetic architect reinterpreted it to fit Soviet ideology to spare it from demolition