Thursday 12th June

Off to the bus station at 9.00 to catch the 10 o'clock bus to Riga. The weather looked threatening & about 2 hours out the rain poured down. Luckily for us by the time we had reached Riga it had all cleared up & we had a short ride from the bus station to our hotel. The countryside was mainly grain growing areas intersperse with forests & the occasional farm complex. We were surprised how few towns & villages were passed through & it all seemed relatively sparsely populated. After checking in we went for a 5 minute walk into the old town, passing through a large market & crossing under the main rail access. We had a very pleasant coffee break in the old town & then moved on to a somewhat decrepit looking church which doubled as a gallery for an exhibition of Art Nouveau works from the start of the 20th century. The centre is very quaint with its narrow, cobbled streets & its baroque & rebuilt later buildings. Riga is about 15km from the sea on the river Daugauva & was an important port for the Hanseatic League in the late middle ages. One of the surprises for us was how many wooden buildings there are near our hotel, most in a very rundown state & another feature is the elderly trams which look somewhat worn even though they are very smartly painted.
We returned to the hotel & had an excellent light dinner in the basement bar & restaurant before retiring for the night.

Friday 13th June

We wandered around the block this morning & were surprised to find that the church opposite was made of wood which had been painted in a flat stone colour. I literally touched it to prove to myself it wasn’t stone.
Our guide met us at the hotel at 10am & off we set into the old town. Apparently the hotel is situated in the Russian quarter which also used to be the Jewish area before the war. Many of the local buildings are wooden & the owners are unable to demolish them but appear to have abandoned them. She told us later that in the days of the city walls all buildings outside them had to be wooden so that they could be burnt in the event of an invader attacking the city. The last case was in 1812 when after a false alarm that Napoleon’s troops were approaching, en route to Russia, 10,000 people were made homeless as their buildings were burnt.
Old Riga, luckily for us, is flat although the cobbled streets are a pain to walk on & is also quite compact. It was founded in the 1200s by a German Bishop & was the largest city on the Baltic for many years. The streets are quite picturesque & there are many churches including St John’s which she took us to first. It is a Lutheran church founded in the early 1200s & became the church of the Livonian Knights from Germany. The historic German presence is very clear in Riga as it was part of the Hanseatic League & Latvia has always been subject to pressures from Germany, Russia & Sweden each of which have been in control at some stage of its history. We had quite a long walk in & out of various squares & buildings & had to call for a coffee break when we heard about her family & the difficulties of life under the Russians & the problems of expat Russians who settled in Riga during the period from the war until 1991. Apparently she felt that many of them hanker for the 'Good Old Soviet Days’ when things were guaranteed in so many ways & they don’t want Latvian citizenship, preferring their Russian nationality instead.
After 3 hours of wandering we farewelled our guide & had lunch. We wanted to go & see the monument to the Jews at Silaspil so bought a couple of rail tickets only to find that the next train didn’t go for 90 mins. Disappointed, we cut our losses & returned to the hotel via a nearby, very elaborate Russian Orthodox Church.