Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are known as the Baltics, with their Baltic Sea to their west and Russia to their east. There are only 2 million people in Latvia. A third of them live in Riga.
Why would we go to Riga? Are we running out of travel destinations? Hardly. The answer has three parts: 1. Because it's there, 2. Because it was cheap, really cheap, and 3. There's still a thrill in visiting the former Soviet Union. What we found was a big and beautiful old town, surrounded a ring of buildings that were once just as lovely but now are crumbling, surrounded by a ring of gritty neighborhoods from the Soviet era.
Riga is also known as the top bachelor party destination for Brits. Since Ryan Air started to fly there a decade ago, hordes of drunken Englishmen have mobbed the old town streets on summer weekends. Even though Latvia joined the Euro in 2014, Riga is still a place where you can easily stumble from bar to bar and live it up like a... bachelor? On a weekday in February, though, souvenir shops were empty and there wasn't a crowd of guys in matching t-shirts stumbling around anywhere.
We made our own Riga hop-on, hop-off tour, by getting a day pass for the city bus. The shining center of town gave way to apartment blocks and industrial suburbs, until we were riding along a highway in the middle of a field. These are the moments when I wonder about the choices I have made with my life... and which ones, exactly, led to me getting on a Latvian bus with no idea where it would go. So Brian and I made the choice to get off, and catch a bus back into town.
That bus ride led to one of the best decisions I made all week. We headed into the Riga Central Market, which is a complex of three or four warehouse-like buildings and a bunch of outdoor stands. Even in February you could by vegetables and socks and faux fur coats outside. Inside, each building had its own wares, and their smells. The seafood building was particularly pungent. In the meat building (picture an old woman hacking pork parts) we found the pelmeni stand. Pelmeni is a dumpling that Brian and I discovered at Moscow on the Hill restaurant in Saint Paul. These ones were filled with meat and spices and made right behind the counter. Since I couldn't read anything on the menu, I just asked for pelmeni for 2. We topped them with vinegar, sour cream and chives and dug in... it was the most delicious decision to make on a cold, hungry afternoon. We bought another helping.
In Riga, I was again wowed by how Eastern European women can walk on high heels over cobblestones as if they've done it since birth. Maybe they have.While the buildings may have seen better days, the people were all style. And whatever decisions led me to be among them, riding the bus or eating pelmeni, I was glad to be there.
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