I had a bus ride that was around seven and a half hours from Sovetsk, Russia, to Riga, Latvia. I don't know why the bus ride was so long, because I talked to a guy who came from Vilnius and he said his bus ride was only about four hours, and it looks to be roughly the same distance on the map. But we did stop at the Russian border for about an hour and a half, and then we stopped in Šiauliai, Lithuania for a little over a half hour, so that accounted for some of it.
I got to Riga around eight at night, but daylight lasts pretty long in this part of the world, so I still had some time. The hostel was just a few blocks away from the bus station, so it was a quick walk of less than ten minutes to get there. The first thing I set out to do was to find a place to eat dinner since I hadn't eaten all day. I had mistakenly left my pocket bag of nuts, seeds and dried fruits in my backpack, which was in the luggage storage below the bus. I found a noodle place close to the hostel called Wok to Walk, where they made noodle bowls to order. I satiated my hunger, and then went out to explore the city some. It started raining, so I had to get out my umbrella. But I only walked around for about an hour, and got back to the hostel around ten thirty and it was still fairly light outside though the sun had gone down.
The next day, I went out to check out the city again. A guy at my hostel who had lived in Tallinn for a while and frequently had come to Riga recommended a little cafe called Innocent, so I went to check it out. I went there to get some lunch (I got out a little late), and while I was eating, it started savagely pouring rain. I reached in my fanny pack for my umbrella and realized I had left it at the hostel; I had put it next to the bed to dry and forgot to get it the next day. So I waited for a while until it died down a bit, though it didn't subside much. I finally decided to take the plunge, and headed out back to the hostel to get my umbrella. I was running a couple blocks at a time and then stopping to take refuge from the rain in doorways, and repeating that process until I got back to the hostel, slightly soaked. I decided to rest a bit, dry off, and charge my phone.
For some reason I wasn't feeling Riga much the first few days I was there. I think some of it was due to slight travel burnout; since I'm constantly traveling, every once in a while, I get a little more tired and need to rest. Riga was very nice, though. It's the biggest city in the Baltics, with a little under a million people. Each of the Baltic nations has a capital that is the largest city, and then all of the rest of their cities don't even come close in population, with the exception of Kaunas in Lithuania, which is pretty big.
Riga has a lot of beautifully sculpted parks in the city, and most of them have these weird caricature cutouts of a cartoonish couple with cocked heads, repeated over and over again dressed in different outfits. I never did find out what the deal was with that.
I did a lot of my exploring in the Old Town, which is probably the biggest tourist area of town. It's pretty easy to walk around there, and there are a lot of good restaurants in the area. That is where a lot of the parks are, and many are centered around the area surrounding the National Opera House, though there are some in other areas of town as well. The old city wall is mostly gone, but a few parts of it remain, and the only original gate from the wall is the Swedish Gate, built after the Swedes conquered the area that is now Latvia. One interesting old building is the House of the Blackheads, which was reconstructed after Riga was blown to shreds in WWII. Another interesting sight in the Old Town is the Freedom Monument, built to commemorate soldiers who died during Latvia's War of Independence right after WWI. Rozena Iela is also in the Old Town, and it is the narrowest street in Riga. Supposedly some people can touch both walls in either side at the same time, but I couldn't when I tried. Maybe I wasn't at the narrowest part.
I also explored the New Town some, and took one long walk out to the island of Ķīpsala, which was a quiet little island in the middle of the Daugava River, though there is a commercial area with a mall on the side of it farthest from the center. Some of the houses there looked like they had been frozen in time. I also checked out the neighborhood farther out from Ķīpsala, which was Āgenskalns. There was a street market in Āgenskalns, but it wasn't open while I was there. There is also an interesting Art Nouveau District with some fascinating architecture, though Riga in general is famous for its Art Nouveau buildings scattered around the city.
I went to Miera Iela, or Peace Street, in Riga. An old saying claims Rigans start their lives at one end of the street and end their lives at the other side, because the street has a hospital on one end of it and a cemetery at the other end. There were a lot of interesting small restaurants and clubs there, though it wasn't really a clubbing district; most of them were pretty understated. And I heard a lot of bands jamming in some of the apartment buildings there. It seemed like a place where artists and musicians would hang out.
On the day before I left, I was walking through a tunnel near the rail station, heading back to the hostel from my day's wanderings, when I saw this guy walking in my direction suddenly start to walk erratically. He quickly looked like he was taking a dramatic turn for the worse, as he started staggering sideways back and forth, looking like he was completely losing his sense of balance. He then lurched sideways in one direction spasmodically, looking like he was trying to make one last desperate and unsuccessful attempt to regain his footing, when he suddenly just fell backwards limply, with his eyes rolled up into the back of his head. I mean, he fell in the worst way, straight backwards. I watched in horror from a distance too far away to do anything, as he dropped like a rag doll and smashed the back of his head on the concrete base of a tunnel column with the full force of his weight, and the base of the back of his head splattered with blood against the column. I was frozen in disbelief for a second, and then I remembered that there had been some policemen near the entrance to the tunnel talking to some people, so I ran back to where they were. But when I got there, I realized that I didn't have the language skills to explain what had happened, so I tried with a sense of urgency to describe what happened in pantomime, pointing frantically into the tunnel. They looked at me quizzically, but luckily, a Latvian guy came up at that moment to tell them what had happened. We all went into the tunnel, and the guy was laying there against the column with his eyes open and unfocused, and his mouth gaping. The police put rubber gloves on, and started to lift the guy up. While they were lifting him, he regained some consciousness, and tried to get up on his own, but the police apparently told him not to, and he didn't seem very successful at it, though he kept trying. It looked like he had a pretty bad head injury and was bleeding profusely from the back of the head. I watched the whole thing helplessly for a while, and eventually left the scene, as I had nothing further to contribute, but this whole spectacle disturbed me greatly, particularly since I had had a robbery incident a couple months before in which I ended up with a concussion, facial and head contusions, and no memory of what happened. And it took me quite a while to recover, but hopefully I've recovered by now. If an apparently healthy looking person could suddenly falter so badly that he just drops like a stone seconds later and smashes his skull open, is there really any sense of security about our bodily integrity? But people have sudden drastic medical issues all the time. All we can do is hope that it doesn't happen to us, and if it does, that it doesn't turn out too badly. I don't know what eventually happened to that guy, but I hope for the best, though it looked absolutely dreadful.
I stayed at: Riga Hostel, Merķeļa iela 1, Centra rajons, Riga, LV-1050, Latvia. The hostel seemed OK, but my room was very crowded and cramped, with very little room to put down my stuff. There were lockers outside the room, but they were very small, maybe only big enough to hold my fanny pack, and I didn't use a locker. Apparently in the last couple days I was there, there was a bedbug infestation in the room next door to mine that the hostel didn't seem to be doing anything to remedy, so I was glad to get out of there and move on before it spread. The building the hostel was in had a different hostel on each floor, run by different companies, and the one I stayed in was on the fourth floor.
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