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Hello there,
Filippa and I are now in Riga, the "capital" of the baltic countries. We are staying at a hostel, located just above a dancing club, so we feel the beat from our beds. Yes, this is a partycity! Women and girls never leave their high heels and don't seem to wear anything else. Many students come from evreywhere in europe to party. You can find very cheap alchohol at any corner and get very drunk, just as the guys who come out from the club downstairs do and they often feel like singing, the only thing is that you are not allowed to drink in the streets.
Enough of the partying, now I will tell you something quite weird: the latvians are a minority in their capital, as there are just a few procents more russians than the locals, living in Riga. Now that's really something. And most of these russians don't even have latvian citizenship, because the latvian citizenship is even more difficult to get than the danish one.
Today we had a chance of getting inside an orthodox church, which is the one on the picture, and attended to the mass, which actually was really interesting, as we felt like being in a theatre, with preachers coming in and out from doors, behind the altar, saying a few things, while the "audience" responded or repeated what was said, or just looked amazed and made the sign of the cross and bowed as low as they could, when the preacher left again, letting someone else go in and the scene would be the same again. But in the end, it seemed like a complete mixture of a catholic and an islamic mass.
After having experienced that, we went to an open air museum outside Riga and I was amazed by the wooden churches, which were completely inspired by the russian orthodox churches. One in particular was really beautiful and I am afraid that you might wait for a picture as it is not that easy for me to put them on these outdatet computers.
Actually, talking about computers, in Estonia and Latvia, you have free access to the internet (wifi) from around 400 points and Estonia was the first country in Europe to make it possble to vote for the elections on the internet. You wouldn't think that of a country which was behind the iron curtain 18 years ago, right?
Something quite interesting too, which I didn't know either before coming here was that they have so many art nouveau and jugendstiel buildings. I have never seen a town where you have so many jugendstiel facades. It seems like any street you go, you see jugendstiel houses.
So there you go, now you know as much as I do about the city!
Next stop: Lithuania, the curonian split... (Lithuanias desert, right next to the borders of Russia....)
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