Latvia: The obvious choice

As promised, here’s a fuller description of my fabulous trip to Latvia. On Friday Leila and I left the Student Village at 7 in the morning (ugh!) to catch the bus to the train station where we met up with Kristen, who also came with us. One of the annoying things about my time in Finland so far has been this endless cycle of paying fees and getting receipts and so on. One of the fees I had to pay was for the student union, which gives me the right to buy a student card, which lets me get 50% off long-distance trains around Finland. Unfortunately, most of these bureaucratic things tend to take a long time, and I still haven’t received my student card. For another train discount card, one can get a letter of enrollment from the University and bring a picture to the train station and get another discount card (for 6 euros). Since the trains are fairly expensive, it was worth it for me to buy this other discount card. Luckily, I was able to get my picture printed from the kiosk and get the discount card in time to catch the 8 AM train to Helsinki. Once we arrived in Helsinki we caught the bus to the airport and spent some time wandering around the little shops in the airport (including the Moomin shop!) before our flight. As you can see in my last post, our plane wasn’t very fancy, but the flight wasn’t too bad overall. AirBaltic makes you pay for coffee or tea though, which is pretty lame. The bus from the Riga airport to the city center was only 80 American cents, which was amazing since all the buses in Finland are at least $3.25 (the airport bus is more) for a two-hour period. Here in Finland I’ve been trying to ride my bike or walk to save money, but when it’s extra cold outside, or I have to go across town it’s not really possible. Before I came here I expected that bus travel would be more inexpensive, especially for students, so the cheap bus price in Latvia was very refreshing.


Leaving Helsinki

Latvia has a pretty unique ticket buying system on buses. Instead of giving the driver money, you just get on the bus and a conductor walks up and down the bus selling tickets. It seems slightly inefficient, but most of the buses are two or three cars long (kind of like the buses in San Francisco), so I guess it’s the only way to prevent people from getting on the bus without paying. On the way to the city center the bus drove by lots of poor-looking neighborhoods with old, crumbling buildings, which is something I haven’t seen in Finland, but it wasn’t that different from any urban area in California. Think K Street and Downtown Sacramento about 5 years ago. There were also a lot of beautiful buildings that looked like they were undergoing restoration, and the Old Town part of Riga is absolutely gorgeous.


On the way to the flea market

Once we checked into the hostel we went to Stockmann’s to buy some food, since we mainly cooked food at the hostel to save money. Stockmann’s is a Finnish department store, which is also in Latvia, apparently. A big thing here in Northern Europe is hiding the grocery stores within the city center inside department stores, especially in the basement of department stores. Don’t ask me why. In Finland, however, you would never get a free sample of whisky at the grocery store. In Latvia, it’s a different story. They also had free samples of vermouth. That was probably our first “we’re not in Finland anymore” moment. Later that evening we went out for dinner at an Ayearvedic Vegetarian restaurant. The food was decent, but the inside of the restaurant was beautiful. I didn’t know what kind of prices to expect in Riga, just that they would be lower than Finland. Looking back I think prices are probably similar to the United States. In Finland, going out to eat is incredibly expensive, and fairly uncommon among people that live here, whereas restaurant prices in Riga were reasonable, and when you've been in Finland for over a month reasonable becomes very exciting.

The next morning we decided to try out some of the markets that were recommended on Wikitravel. The Central Market next to the train station was great. There were tons of stands selling handicrafts, vegetables, flowers, and clothes. One stand, in particular, had beautiful Russian dolls (look up name!!), scarves, and wool socks. After we had spent a fair amount of time wandering around the market we went to a flea market that was recommended online. The walk to the flea market was interesting because we got to see a bit of Riga that’s outside of the Old Town, along with a beautiful Russian Orthodox Church (there’s a picture in my last post) and the Latvian Holocaust Memorial. The flea market was really just a crowd of people standing around a building selling random things, from bootleg software to tools and computer parts. There was also an older man selling pins from the Soviet occupation. Leila was really keen on buying something Soviet, so we spent a while looking at the pins. Some of them were quite nice, and they were only about 40 cents each, so I ended up buying two as well. The funniest part about our experience at the flea market, though, was that the man selling the pins spoke to us in German, and I didn’t realize he was speaking German until he said “Danke schön.”


The Central Market

Latvian Holocaust Memorial

After our shopping extravaganza we went to the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, which is a really well put together museum about the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Latvia, and then we walked around Riga more and enjoyed the sunshine. Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t very nice on Sunday, but we still managed to visit more cathedrals and see the “Three Brothers,” which are the oldest houses in Riga. It’s incredibly easy to get lost in Old Town Riga, especially when you base your location off of cathedrals. For example, we were staying at the Doma Hostel, which is next to the Doma Cathedral, so every time we got lost we would go to the nearest cathedral, which always ended up being the wrong cathedral.


The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia


The Three Brothers


Doma Cathedral

I feel like I’m starting to run out of things to say...uh oh... I felt like we spent a little too much time shopping on this trip (yes, Grandma, I know you’ll find that hard to believe), and we didn’t get to see as many museums as I had wanted to, but we also had to contend with winter museum hours and weather. Another thing that was amazing about Riga is that shops are not only open on Sundays, which is practically unheard of in Finland, but also, they’re open until 9 or 10 PM. The pace of life in Riga felt much faster than in Finland, which is something that I miss. The hostel we stayed in was pleasantly relaxed though. We met some other exchange students that are studying in a different Finnish student, along with an exchange student studying in Estonia. Well, I need to get to sleep soon, but I wanted to update before I forget everything (I also wanted to give Grandma something to read at work : ) If I get around to it, I’ll write more later, but I also have to save some of it for the post cards I bought!


Kristen and I


Leila and I
(descending into a medieval-themed establishment)

note: looking through my pictures I've realized that I will have to make another post because there are so many that I want to share. Bare with me.