Europe Trip, Part 2 - Riga

So, I didn't get smacked in the head by the angry Latvian. I managed to survive the flight unscathed and as we landed in Riga, I started to get genuinely excited to be there. I like going to the last outpost-type places that everyone says "Where the fuck is that and why are you going there?" when you tell them about it. On my original Europe trip, it was Montenegro. This time, Russia-lite. And as soon as I stepped outside, I had my first taste of Russified Europe. The airport had a huge sign above the door in cyrillic, which I obviously couldn't read. And it was about -13. I wasn't at home anymore, that's for damn sure.

I took the airport shuttle into town and got off at the designated stop, a hotel. Even though I had directions AND A compass, I still got hopelessly lost trying to find my own hotel. I just wandered around in the snow with my bags, going in circles and getting completely disoriented, until I finally just went into the hotel where I got dropped off and asked where my hotel was. The guy walked me outside...and pointed up the street. Oh. There it was. Dammit. I fucking hate my broken sense of direction.

The hotel I asked for directions in was right on the very edge of the old town, and my hotel was inside it. After a few steps, the concrete road turned into what was to become my new nemesis: cobblestone. People, if you've never had the opportunity to walk on cobblestone, be happy. It's fucking shit, and I hope whomever designed it was forced to spend eternity endlessly walking around on cobblestone in the snow until he broke both his legs and died of thirst. Yes, I hate it that much. It's insanely slippery when it's wet or covered in snow, and Riga's old town had a whole lot of wet snow.

I made it exactly 11 paces before I slipped and fell.

The first time. Not even close to the last.

I managed to make it to my hotel by pretending I was walking on ice, and just skidded my way there. It was worth it though - my hotel was pretty fuckin nice. I had a HUGE hotel room with a big flatscreen TV, gigantic bed, and stocked minibar. For the princely sum of 48 dollars Canadian. I like. After dropping my stuff off and having a shower, I was hyped to go exploring. First thing's first though...I had to put 3 socks on one foot because of the hole in the bottom of my shoe. It was kinda wet outside.

The old town is really nice, despite the cobblestone. All the streets are really narrow, with tons of small businesses and hotels covering the majority of the place. There were sidewalks, but they were usually covered with a foot of snow so everyone walked on the street, and just stepped to the side when a car went by. The snowblowers were constantly keeping the streets snow-free, but it was totally at the expense of the people that lived along these roads. Everyone's door had like 2 feet of snow in front of it. It was pretty amusing to see people open their door and flip out, even though I was told that it happens every day. They still flip out every day, like they're gonna wake up and it's magically gonna be different that morning. It's the Soviet way.

For those that keep wondering about the Russian/Soviet comparisons, I'll take a short couple of paragraphs to explain some history. Latvia was a part of the Soviet Union until it broke up in the early 90's, and is still very Russian. The 3 Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) were the most progressive remnants of the broken empire and created ties with the West almost immediately. So much so that they're all members of the EU less than 20 years later.

Once you go there though, you realize that it takes more than a democracy and a Westernized economy to truly adapt into a Western society. They're stuck with a Western/Russian hybrid culture, which is bewildering and amusing at the same time. It has all the modern feel of a first world country, but it's completely lacking in the finer points of first world culture. Like customer service. And happiness. And sobriety. The entire place seems like a gigantic contradiction. But it sure made things interesting.

Anyway, I spent a few hours just walking/sliding around. The old town is small, but it's like a huge maze, with small streets and alleys going in every which direction. And there would invariably be some cool church or building down a dead-end street to check out, so you'd have to backtrack to continue on your way. I loved it, because it was unlike any place I had ever been before. I've been in a few different old walled cities like this in other parts of Europe, but none felt like that. It was awesome.

The funniest moment was some chick dressed to the nines in fur walking by me and not even trying to hide how revolting she thought my taste in clothing was. She gave me the full head-to-toe stare and offered up her best look of disgust as she walked by. Which made me laugh. I know I'm hardly a fashion model, but the fact that she did nothing to hide her distaste was so typical of everything I've heard about Russian women, I couldn't help myself. My laughter made her even more disgusted, which made me laugh even more. I could take a dump on your living room carpet and you wouldn't be able to match the hatred in this chick's eyes. She wanted me, I know it.

Anyway, after a while my biggest problem was that all the snow was getting wedged in the hole in my shoe and made walking pretty uncomfortable. So I decided to grab some lunch and chill in my killer hotel room for a bit. And watch some strange TV. There were only 7 channels in Riga. Eurosport, CNN, and 5 that were either Latvian or Russian (I can't tell the difference). The best one, by far, was the music channel.

I was mesmerized by some Russian girl group...the music was horrible, but the girls were fucking gorgeous. Unfortunately, I couldn't write down the name of the group...because all the descriptions were in cyrillic. Other than a brief experience with it in Montenegro, I had never dealt with another alphabet before. So I spent the next hour watching some crazy, and I do mean CRAZY, Russian/Latvian music videos, and not knowing who any of them were. Except one. DJ Smash.

For some reason, his name was written in the Roman alphabet. And I'm glad it was, because this music video might have been the weirdest/funniest/awesomest/saddest thing I've ever seen. Here, see for yourself. It's nutso. It looks normal until he runs into the ocean about 30 seconds in. Then shit goes sideways. Keep a lookout for the guy in the cat suit singing. And playing the drums. Yeah.

After all that insanity, I headed back out to grab some food. I walked out of my hotel, turned left, and saw a Guinness sign. Sweet. The pub was precisely 21 paces from my hotel door. I sat down in a booth, and was promptly ignored for 10 minutes, despite being right next to the bar and the waitress station. I got up and stood at the bar...and still got ignored. I said "excuse me" to the bartender girl, and she sighed like I had done her the biggest injustice in the world by talking to her. And yelled DA? (yes?) at me. Uh, okay. I asked for a pint, and waited. And waited. Finally, she got around to pulling me a pint, and made it very apparent that I was horribly inconveniencing her by having the gall to ask her to do her job. She wasn't even hot, which made it worse. Obviously this was a one-pint-and-go pub. Eff this bitch.

Luckily, my fortunes changed a few minutes later. A really short but really cute chick walked in and went straight to the waitress station. Then straight to me. This was my new waitress, who's shift had just started, and she was super nice. Spoke really good English, chatted with me about a few different things, and actually acted like she enjoyed her job. I changed my mind quickly, and one-pint-and-go turned into most of an afternoon and an undisclosed number of pints (because I forget the number). I do know that fish n chips and many pints worked out to about 18 bucks Canadian. And the waitress girl said this was probably the most expensive pub in the Old Town. She told me about a bar a few minutes away that was less than half the price of this one. God damn, Latvia's cheap!

My inebriation was telling me that it was a perfect time to go sightseeing. Logic was telling me that it was 6pm and pretty close to dark, but inebriation always trumps logic, so I went looking around some more. I took a bunch of pictures and stuff (in the dark - ???), and just enjoyed sliding around, until I made my way back towards my hotel...and the pub. I had burned off most of my buzz and didn't really have anything else to do since it was dark now, so...I had a few more pints and watched a soccer game. Hey, at least I'm predictable. At around 8:30pm, I was completely done. It had been a long day, so I headed back to the hotel for the night. If it were only that easy.

I had managed to slide around town all day without falling, other than that one time when I first got there. But now it was dark, with no streetlights, and my coordination completely failed me. I walked out, took 3 steps, and slipped and fell on my ass. That wasn't pleasant, because my ass was now soaking wet. I got up, brushed myself off, and skidded another 3 steps or so...then BLAM. Slid right into a stone sticking up, fell straight forward, and sprawled out on the street. I wasn't even past the front window of the pub yet, and I had fallen twice. So now the front of me was all muddy and wet too. I got up again, and looked in the pub window...at the cute waitress, who was staring right back at me with a big look of pity and amusement. Greeeeat. Stupid cobblestone.

I managed to make it back to the hotel unscathed after that, despite one more slip where I almost went down but didn't. Once again, I'd like to point out that than my pub-to-hotel journey was short. It would take you longer to walk to the bathroom and back from where you're sitting and reading this right now. And if you fell down twice on your little trip, you'd get some odd looks. Probably like the one I got from the concierge when I walked into the hotel, dirty and wet. No one said I was elegant or classy, okay?

After all that excitement, I had another shower and laid down in my huge bed to watch some more crazy Russian TV. And the next thing I knew, it was 5am. I must have fallen asleep like 11 seconds after I laid down, and slept for a full 8 hours. That was nuts. I tried to go back to sleep, so I could wake up at a normal time, but noooo...I was wide awake. The music video station wasn't on, so I watched CNN and played on the internet for a while.

Once it started to get light out again, I went for another long ass walk, out of the old town to get some perspective on the city. I walked across a bridge that went over a huge, completely frozen river. There was a walking path the whole 400m or so across the thing. Right beside a bridge. Why the fuck would you walk across a river when there's a BRIDGE right beside you? Weird. The further I ventured out of the Old Town, the more bleak the surroundings became. They certainly weren't stick huts or anything, but there were a lot of places in a pretty bad state of disrepair. It was actually kind of depressing, but it's a fact of life in the post-Soviet Russian states everywhere I guess.

After heading back, I had plenty of time to gather up my stuff and walk up to where the shuttle left for the airport, but it wasn't that much more expensive to take a cab, so I decided to do that. The concierge called one for me, and I waited for about 5 minutes before a car showed up...that didn't look like a taxi. But, a ride's a ride, so I got in. As soon as we started to move, I regretted my decision immediately. The driver, who spoke no English, had a big, open bottle of vodka sitting in his lap. Greeeeat. Could anything be more stereotypically Russian than that? He took a few swigs during the trip, and drove really fucking fast, but we managed to make it there alive. Crisis averted. After security, I headed directly to the bar to get a nerve-calming beer, then headed off to a place I wasn't actually all that excited about seeing (at the time) - Berlin.

Overall, Riga was pretty awesome. Like I said, the culture is so fractured that it's tough to explain with a keyboard. I came across some really hardened, angry people, yet I met just as many who were kind and compassionate. Latvia was the fastest-developing country in Europe until last year, but the adjustment period has been so short that some people just can't keep up. The old guard is fiercely Russian, while the younger generations want to leave that all behind and fully embrace western society. In 10 or 20 years it will be a completely different place, so I'm glad I got to go now, because Latvia's position is truly unique in the world right now. And the women were hot. Angry, but hot.