Steffi’s Blog

Even though it is already quite a while since I wrote the last entry…this time I have a good excuse: I was on holidays ! Well, okay, I’ve already been back for some days but it is really difficult to write something about these days away from home. Why? Because we had such a great time over there and I want to put everything we did and experienced into suitable words so that you can really feel what it was like for me! I’m not at all sure that I will succeed in this task but I will certainly try !

The journey to the German airport was already quite adventurous… I flew from an airport in Berlin and the flight set off at 8am which meant that I had to be there at about 6am…! I took my leave from home shortly after midnight just to make sure that I wouldn’t be late. So, without any sleep I arrived in Berlin at 4am and I had to wait for two very long hours, tired as hell and already quite excited !

However, everything went well enough and I arrived in Riga at 10.40am (Riga time is one hour ahead of German time and two hours ahead of Irish time )! The best thing about arriving there was that Felix’s plane landed at exactly the same time and he came through passport control just at the very minute I got my luggage! I was so happy to see him again… though I wasn’t sure at all beforehand…! I know that’s so typical me: Will everything work out fine? Will I be able to speak in English all the time? What will it be like after 13 weeks where we hadn’t seen each other…? I was very excited and a bit nervous as well, yes ! However, there was no need for all that…we had a simply great time almost from the very first second onwards (at least I had a great time with him over there )!
The only thing that was left to do at the airport was to change some money…jaja, Latvia doesn’t have the Euro yet…to get to our B&B which was a bit outside of the City Centre at the opposite part from the airport! And just one more thing: never ever change your money at the airport/train station if you can avoid it somehow !

When we arrived at our Bed and Breakfast I was almost overwhelmed - the place was really very, very cool! A gorgeous house, many pets, nice hosts, most of the time an awesome breakfast and a great room, with the biggest bed I had ever seen ! However, since both of us were lacking in sleep we only had a coffee with one of our hosts before we headed off to bed for a nap. By the time we woke up our stomachs told us that we were also quite hungry. So, we had one of our ‘greatest’ ideas…we went for a walk (in fact, it was a marathon ) to search for a Take Away!!! The only problem was that Riga doesn’t have many of them if they have one at all - tourists ! Anyway, we strolled around and finally found a pizzeria, yeah! Unfortunately, our first day was already almost over by the time we arrived back home and the only thing we did - though having arrived reasonably early - was to sleep, to eat, to walk around and to sleep again, pffft, what a waste of time, huh ?! Anyway, I didn’t have a guilty conscience since I already enjoyed the time with Felix in this foreign (very foreign, indeed) country ! The next morning our host told us that we shouldn’t have been afraid of the restaurant close to our homestay place (in fact, we passed it five minutes away from home…) - well, unlucky !
However, so far the holidays were certainly more relaxing than adventurous (though it was a kind of adventure to walk through Riga by night and desperately trying to find a place to eat)!

The following two days we kept ourselves busy with exploring the Old Town of Riga and its outskirts. What we saw there made a huge impression on me…! The Old Town itself was really very beautiful: many churches, beautiful buildings, gorgeous parks, nice squares…but as soon as we went a bit outside of that it still looks very much like the former Eastern part of Germany. Though quite surprisingly I’d never seen so many huge cars…it would be kind of difficult to find so many expensive cars in Germany! Well anyway, since we didn’t have much of a plan we just strolled around, stopped wherever it might have been worth it. On the first day in the Old Town we visited the Occupation Museum of Riga. Both of us were a bit ‘angry’ with ourselves since we were so unprepared in many things and we saw ourselves confronted with exactly this problem when it came to our knowledge of Latvian history. Well, ja, I do admit that Felix knew so much more in that respect than I did but even his knowledge had considerable gaps ! However, we went to this museum (which was free) and informed ourselves very eagerly about the country’s history! It didn’t take us very long to find out that we did know quite a lot about Latvia’s history since it is more or less completely interwoven with either German or Russian history. Latvia’s history is mainly, until quite recently, a history of occupation! So I was a bit relieved that I didn’t end up as a complete fool but it was still very interesting and the museum is certainly worth a visit!

That day we even tried the restaurant (’Gustav Adolf’) close to our homestay place. It was really a quite nice place, they had English menus (don’t laugh, it is almost impossible to read/understand Latvian if you don’t have a clue about it ), the food was very good and the prices weren’t more expensive than the average food prices in Riga. In fact, after I ordered a Greek salad I was quite jealous of Felix’s tasty looking spaghetti (and he didn’t even like it…) !

One thing I should have mentioned a bit earlier is the tram. The rides with the tram were very adventurous for me and believe me these things looked hilarious. It was quite surprising that they were still able to manage the distance between Mezaparks (where we lived) and the City Centre but apparently they did work very well. I was again reminded of the former GDR or of the post-war trams in Germany ! However, one really good thing about it was that there were no ticket machines in the trams but they had a conductor where you could buy your ticket (20 Santimis/ride = ~35 Cents). Another thing that became very obvious, especially on the tram, was that the people of Latvia were rather strange! I can’t really describe it but I know that I had a bit of a problem with that because I always felt very unwelcome in their country though I’m almost sure that this impression of mine was wrong but still…I couldn’t help it! Anyway, the people didn’t behave strange only towards foreigners but towards each other as well. The best example for this was when I watched somebody buying a tram ticket from the conductor: they got on the tram, went to the conductor, handed them 20 Santimis without even looking at the conductor, without saying only one word they took the ticket and went away! I’m sorry but in my opinion this is a bit strange or at least very unfamiliar!

Another quite funny thing we experienced in Riga was that apparently it is normal to stare at other people. One day we went into town, I wore a skirt and boots but the skirt was rather long so you couldn’t really see much of the boots but nevertheless the people, and the young girls in particular, stared at these boots as if their eyes would drop out of their heads ! Well, we couldn’t really figure out what it was about us, at what the people stared. The boot day was the most extreme example but it happened to us almost every day. However, we were joking about it and had some good laughs!

For Wednesday (4th day) we planned to go to Sigulda, a small town 1.5 hours away from Riga (by train). Some of you may know this place because it is quite famous for its bob-sleigh track. We arrived there in the greatest sunshine and set off to explore the town and its sights. Very shortly after our arrival we realised how hungry we were so we had a look in the guide book to find out about restaurants! We decided for one which should have been close to the New Castle. You can’t imagine how long it took us to find this bloody thing…The map in the book was just horrible and after a while we did find the Castle but not a trace of a restaurant ! I’m not sure but I’d guess that it took us at least one hour to find out that the restaurant was in the Castle ! However, that wasn’t all of it. We tried to find an entrance, this may sound very funny now and you may think that we are big fools but there was really no entrance to this damn thing, at least none which was open. We decided to take a seat on the terrace and just wait for somebody to come and show any interest in us…the only thing we didn’t consider was that there was nobody to come. Well, very close to this castle was a ruin, so we strolled off to have a look around this. This was really very interesting but by that time both of us were already very very hungry and not in the best mood anymore! When we returned to the castle we saw that other people were sitting on the terrace as well so we gave it another try and…voila…we got something to eat! I’m not sure if we could have found a more expensive place but the food was really nice and we even allowed ourselves some ice cream afterwards, yummie ! Hm, to be honest, that’s about all we did in Sigulda - find a restaurant - because after that we had to take a train back to Riga since we wanted to watch the Champion’s League games in a pub ! Some days before we found a nice Irish pub and we saw that they show the footie games so after we fell asleep at home on Tuesday we decided to watch the Wednesday games. It was really interesting, the pub had six or seven TVs/screens and they showed a different game on each one. Unfortunately we couldn’t stay till the end of the matches, we had to get on the last tram, but my team lost anyway (Hamburg v Arsenal 0-2) .

This day out of town was so nice but the next one was probably the best we had in Latvia. We bought for a very ridiculous price a train ticket to Darzina where we wanted to see a KZ built by the Nazi’s in World War II. Again the weather was gorgeous, so we set off in the best mood ! Unfortunately there are no signs or just ‘provisional’ ones at the various train stations in the middle of nowhere. So, we missed our station but the conductor was nice enough to tell us to get off at the next station. Well, we got off and found ourselves somewhere in the wilderness. Felix told me to take some pictures so that other people will believe us that there (at Dole) was really nothing, nothing except the railways ! We were so lucky when after a while two young girls came along and they even understood some English and also spoke it surprisingly well! We told them of our ‘problem’ and they wanted to take us with them to the road from where it was possible to walk to the memorial! I really felt as if we were back in the Middle Ages or something similar. The girls walked bare footed and the whole atmosphere reminded me of a village/people who hadn’t seen something like a car before - it was just great ! So we followed them through some fields until we reached the ‘road’. In fact, this road was nothing more than a field path and I was more than surprised when the girls showed us the way and I believed all the time that we still have to find the road ! Another very surprising thing is that Felix told me, and indeed showed me, that this ‘road’ is clearly marked on a map in the internet !
Anyway, after a 30 minutes’ walk we reached our destination quite easily thanks to the very good description we got. What we got to see there was really very impressive and I think the right words to describe this place don’t exist you will just have to look at the pictures, I hope they can show it a bit better! I would like to write many things about my feelings, the place itself but I will do that when I tell you about our trip to Auschwitz (see next part - Cracow/Poland) because my feelings for that place were very similar to the ones I had at the KZ memorial Salaspils, though even stronger. So we had a very good and impressive day there in the wilderness and the place was almost deserted, we could have a look around without having been pushed along the way. After a while we tried to find our way back to the train station (Darzina this time ) but that was easier said than done because signs were rare and the memorial was somewhere deep in the forests. However, after a while we managed to find the station and went back to Riga. We went home after some rounds of pool where I proved again that I’m a complete cretin at pool especially when I have to play against somebody like Felix who does this more or less regularly and quite successfully… but it was still great fun!

So, what to tell about the last day, there isn’t really much to tell since the only thing we did was wait… Our bus to Warsaw would leave from Riga at 10pm. We could leave our luggage at the homestay place for a while but we didn’t want to go to town. There was quite a lot to see and to do in our neighbourhood anyway, very close to our place was a big lake and it was possible to rent a boat there. And there was a zoo and some other entertainment stuff but unfortunately we ran a bit out of money and so it became a rather long day! We decided in the afternoon to take our stuff, go to town anyway and spend the rest of our money. So we went to a quite cheap restaurant with mainly Latvian food and afterwards went to the bus station and waited - again !

So, what is there to tell about Riga and Latvia? It was certainly a very very nice trip, we had a lot of fun, learned a quite a lot about Latvia and experienced many other things! Nevertheless, I was a bit disappointed of Riga or to be precise of the Latvian people. Latvia and Riga in particular were not at all as cheap as one might expect. I did read that Latvia is the most expensive one of the three Baltic countries but still, I guess all of them managed quite well to adapt themselves to the Western/Central European standard! However, I can only recommend Latvian beer and it is still cheaper than German or Irish beer! One thing that was very irritating for me was the language. I was so useless and indeed would have been more than helpless without Felix. The Latvian language isn’t close to any other language I knew so far and they didn’t speak German and only poor English! Fortunately, they did speak Russian since they still have a huge Russian population - and thank God, Felix speaks Russian! So, thank you, my dear, for not having let me starve !

However, I really don’t want to complain at all because I had such a great time there: great country, best company, gorgeous weather… ach well, everything just great !

So my dears I hope that I’ll have some time to write the second part very soon so that you can enjoy all of my holidays! I hope that you like this entry and the pictures in particular!
Take care everybody! I hope to speak to many of you very soon and that I will see even more of you even sooner !

Big hug from your Steffi

PS: I’ll be back in Freiburg from 04/10/2006 though with a short break from 11/10 to 20/10 when I’ll be in Dublin!

PPS: Just in case that anybody is interested in holidays in Riga here the link of our homestay place, really recommended: www.homestay.lv
and the hosts are Diga from Latvia and Ric from New Zealand!