Riga

I've been meaning to go to Riga for awhile now, but never got around to it until last weekend. Riga is the capital of Latvia and is about a four hour bus ride from Tallinn. I went with Ruchira, who had been complaining that she hadn't done much traveling since coming to Estonia.

Like Tallinn, Riga has a fairly small and compact old town where most sites of interest are located.

The building in the foreground is the House of the Blackheads, a former merchant guild that also has a building in Tallinn. The original building was destroyed in WWII and the current building wasn't constructed until the 1990's. The church in the background is St. Peter's Church. While the exterior is much different, the interior is very reminiscent of Uppsala Cathedral as it's made out of brick.

This is the occupation museum. Ruchira came across something that said they want to move it because people think it's ugly, but I really like it. It just seems appropriate. The museum is about the Soviet, then Nazi, then Soviet again occupations. WWII was hard on Latvia, as it lost over a quarter of its population due to deaths from war and people fleeing from the Soviets.

Just a mural I thought was nice. I don't know anymore about it.

I found this inside Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church, and I thought it was an interesting little scene. Another thing I found funny was that they have two confessionals, one for Latvian speakers and another for Russian speakers. I guess it's not really confessing if the priest can't understand you.

This is the lawn in front of the presidential palace and history museum. The small white church is Our Lady of Sorrows and the steeple in the background belongs to the Cathedral. Unfortunately, it was covered in scaffolding, so I don't have a better picture of it.

Freedom Monument was built in 1935 to commemorate Latvia's fight for independence. The Soviets considered demolishing it, but never did. It eventually become a rallying point for the renewed independence movement during the 1980's.

That evening we went to a Latvian restaurant. While the food was good, it was cafeteria style, which I don't like, and we ended up seated near a table of very loud English men. Once we got back to the hostel we were staying out, I pretty much collapsed as we had been up since 4:30 that morning.

After a long sleep, we started out the next day by heading to the Latvian History Museum. This ended being kind of disappointing. While they had some interesting items in the museum, I feel like I didn't learn anything about Latvian history. For example, they had a room full of religious artworks, but they only had one sentence about the reformation. Nothing about what happened during the reformation or the people involved. Just that the reformation took place. The only figure they talked about was the last president of pre-WWII Latvia.

Having seen pretty much everything in the old town, we started wandering around the outskirts and came across Nativity Cathedral, the main Orthodox church. It had been bothering me that I hadn't seen one yet as I knew Latvia had a large Orthodox population. There are no Orthodox churches in the old town. It was an incredibly beautiful church, but I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside.

We then headed to the National Art Museum, which turned out to be really great. Most of the artwork was what one would expect in an art museum, lots of portraits of aristocrats and landscapes leading to more modern, abstract works. However, two painters I had never heard of before really stood out. One was Nicholas Roerich, a Russian painter that spent years traveling around Asia. The other was Kārlis Padegs, a controversial artist who juxtaposed images of frivolity with images of WWI. I had already determined I wanted to learn more about him when we learned that they had a special exhibition about him downstairs as it was the 100th anniversary of his birth.

After visiting the museum, it was getting a bit too late to visit anything else, but still a couple of hours before our bus left, so we wasted some time at a frozen yoghurt shop. One thing that stood out about Riga was that since it was a city larger than Tallinn in a country larger than Estonia, it had a few more amenities than Tallinn (i.e. frozen yoghurt). However, that also came with the problem that Riga was a surprisingly expensive city. It wasn't that much more expensive than Tallinn, but it was unexpected as Latvia hasn't been doing as well as Estonia, so I expected prices to be lower.

And that's pretty much it. In some ways the trip was a little disappointing. I would have liked to have learned more about the events and people that shaped Riga and Latvia. Still, it was very nice city, even if it was cold.