Riga Rx
I left Vilnius imprisoned in the deepest depression I would experience at any time during the trip. Something was seriously wrong with me, and I didn’t know what it was. I Googled my symptoms and found that kidney stones were the best prognosis I could expect. I didn’t know if my health insurance would cover any treatment I might take at my next stop in Latvia, or if my condition could even be adequately addressed in the two days I would be there. I could have terminated my trip, bought a plane ticket home and found out what was wrong with me, but doing so would have meant forfeiting my original plane ticket and the nine more hotel stays that I had already purchased. While I certainly have no problem spending money, I absolutely hate wasting it. I suppose it is one of my emotional flaws, but wasting money feels like… well, defeat. I didn’t want to go home, but I wasn’t happy about the staying either. I looked out my bus window and decided that I was caught in a flat swampy nowhere. I was tired; tired of the constant moving, of the never ending negotiations involved with these movements, and most of all, tired of feeling tired, but since I didn’t want to admit defeat, there was nothing I could do about my situation except press on and see if my condition and mood worsened.
I arrived in Riga’s shabby bus station and started looking for my hotel. Of course, I immediately hated the city, and it is only now as I look at my pictures and think about my experiences there that I realize Riga could have provided me with some very pleasant moments if I had been willing to appreciate them.
Although Tallinn, Estonia, gained an early head start in developing its tourist industry, Riga seemed to be trying hard to catch up. I stayed in a brand new Courtyard hotel located in what Riga promotes as one of the most spectacular Art Nouveau neighborhoods in the world. Up and down the street near the hotel sit new coffee shops, trendy looking eateries including an excellent sea food restaurant, a brew pub, a few high end shops, and, of course, lots of refurbished Art Nouveau buildings.
I walked around my hotel’s neighborhood and despite my dark mood, had to admit that the buildings were impressive. I now wish I had spent more time photographing the area.
While Riga is the largest city in any of the Baltic countries, its historical center and the spruced up area around it is relatively small. Although I wasn’t feeling well, I thought I could I could easily summarize it in photographs without too much effort. I was wrong. I spent more time than I expected walking around, and yet the resulting photographs barely scratch the surface in describing the sights and ambiance of the area I explored.
After photographing the facades shown above I next entered a large park that runs between the Art Nouveau area where my hotel was located and the historical Old Town. The park was thoughtfully planned out and sported a dead end canal where tourists could ride back and forth on a tour boat. There was a lot more to see in the park than I am able to demonstrate below because I rushed through it in an attempt to get the day’s photography over and done with..
The park contained both the typical sights of other such urban parks, and the unexpected.
I eventually made my way into the historical Old Town itself. Unlike Vilnius, Riga was easily influenced by Western Europeans when it first became a busy trading port and later when it became a member of the Hanseatic League. German merchants called “blackheads” and Swedes dominated the economy for centuries after it joined the League. For this reason, the Old Town retained a Germanic flavor which Vilnius, Lvov, or Krakow did not possess. Riga’s Old Town was relatively small and I was able to cover it all rather quickly.
In 1785 Erich Raspe wrote ” Baron Munchhausen’s Narrative and Campaign in Russia.” In this humorous book Munchhausen was an inveterate bull-shitter who claimed to have ridden into battle on a fired cannon ball and to have visited the moon along with a lot of other ridiculous assertions. Other writers later expanded on Raspe’s tale. Raspe published his book anonymously because the book was based on the life and reputation of an actual Baron Hieronymus Karl Frederich Freiherr Von Munchhausen who was also known as a pathological liar but of the more unimaginative kind. The real life Baron was offended by the book and threatened to sue the author if he ever found out who it was. As a result, Raspe was revealed as the author only after both he and the Baron had died. The picture below includes the barracks that the actual Baron Munchhausen lived in when he was stationed in Riga.
By the end of this first afternoon, I was tired and had had my fill of photography and the Old Town. My condition hadn’t improved and hiking around the city wasn’t likely to help. I gave up on knowing the city better and went back to my hotel where I decided to get a good night’s sleep. Rather than explore and photograph I planned to do nothing the next day except chill out in the Art Nouveau neighborhood near my hotel.
The next day I slept in until 10:30, and then spent the rest of the morning in a trendy coffee shop nursing a cappuccino and reading a day old New York Times. I then had lunch at the nearby seafood restaurant. This all improved my mood somewhat even if it didn’t improve my health. Since babying myself was proving to cheer me up, I decided to get a hair cut. My hair was becoming a bit shaggy, and even if I didn’t end up feeling good at least I would look good 🙂
I walked into a barbershop, (they still have rotating barber poles outside barbershops in Riga), and asked for a haircut in English. The owner studied me for a few seconds and then said in perfectly good English, “No one speaks English here right now. Come back in two hours and I will have someone who can speak English cut your hair”. Alllllriiiight. I had nothing else planned for the afternoon, so I agreed to return in two hours. When I returned a very attractive blond girl who introduced herself as Svetlana led me to a barber chair. While she possessed a kind of cover girl beauty, she didn’t carry herself like a model but more like she was proud to be the smartest girl in her high school class. The other cosmetologists didn’t seem to like her much. She was standing by herself when I came in, and they never said a word to her while I was there. She, like the receptionist in Lviv spoke English without the slightest hint of a foreign accent. I complemented her on her English and thinking that she was a foreign language student who was temporarily working part time as a cosmetologist, I asked her what other languages she spoke. She said the only other languages she spoke were Latvian and Russian. I had read somewhere that Russians outnumbered Latvians in the city of Riga though not in the country as a whole. During the Soviet era Russians had moved wholesale into Latvia, and many remained after Latvian independence, particularly in Riga. In contrast, Estonia never accepted the Russians either before or after independence, and Lithuania divided up its country to leave the heavily Russian pocket of Kaliningrad as part of Russian territory. She gave me a very good haircut, spending 45 minutes using only a comb and scissors on my seriously balding noodle. She was also an excellent conversationalist. She asked me where my trip had taken me, what I saw, what I thought of Riga, and of Lviv, and where I was going in Latvia.
She wondered what I did for a living, and what I thought about President Trump. I answered as vaguely though as honestly as possible and said that I was retired, and that I did as little thinking about our president as I could manage. She continued to grill me. I then decided to turn the tables and asked where she learned to speak English so well, how old she was when she started studying it, and what her parents did for a living. She said she learned English in public school just like most other young Latvians did. Her father worked for the local newspaper and her mother was a housewife. My final question was whether any friction currently existed between Latvians and the Russians living in Riga. She predictably replied that everyone got along just fine. I looked in the mirror in front of me and watched the expressions of the owner and other cosmetologists cloud over while she was answering the question. I think they understood more English than they let on. After she finished cutting my hair, she held up a mirror to the back of my head and asked me how I liked it. I said it looked great, (it did). As I got out of the chair I said “Spasiba Tovarich” and gave her a tip. She laughed. I laughed. Everyone else in the room seemed to relax a bit as I put on my coat to leave. I really enjoyed that haircut and the competing interrogations!
I got another good night’s sleep and felt surprisingly energized the next morning as I got ready to leave for Tallinn, Estonia. I still had all my previous symptoms, but a little blood never killed anyone, and I felt that I could easily deal with whatever troubles my body threw my way. I was not only going to continue my trip, but I was going to have fun doing so!
As I looked out the bus window while passing from Riga’s center to its outskirts, I realized that maybe I hadn’t been overly critical of Riga on my arrival after all. Unlike the area around my hotel these neighborhoods were grey, grim, and shambolic. Old unpainted houses shared streets with Soviet style apartment blocks. Yes, I rushed through or ignored the best parts of Riga due to illness, but it didn’t look like I missed much of anything beyond the areas I briefly touched.
On the other hand, I recognized that I had been unfairly rewarded despite my poor effort to photograph or acquire a clear sense of Riga’s character, because the city had, in return, provided me with the time and space I needed to feel back in control of myself. I was excited to see what would happen to me next!
