After a fairly average sleep in our crowded room, we were ready to get out of the hostel and into the city. We had heard about a nearby market, so we thought it might be a decent place to get some breakfast. Well, turns out we thought right. This was definitely one of the nicest markets I had been to in a long time. The range of food was seriously impressive, including lots of local stuff we'd never heard of and even an Uzbek bread shop. We went around trying little bits of different things until we were full, but spent hardly any money in the process. Later on Mari and I agreed that this was the best market we'd seen on the whole trip.

We moved on from the market and headed to Riga's old town. Mari had recently discovered an old friend of hers, Clarissa, was backpacking in the area with her boyfriend more or less in the same fashion as we were. They were in Riga as well, so we organised to meet up, although they were leaving later in the afternoon/evening. We met them by the Latvian Freedom Monument, and explored the old town a bit together. It would be Mari's last opportunity to speak Portuguese for a little while (well, seriously at least) so I gave them my blessing to 'a gente' and 'nossa!' to their heart's content (nice guy I am, really).

The four of us eventually ended up at the Latvian Occupation Museum. Like Estonia and Lithuania, Latvia had been the meat in many different imperial sandwiches over the centuries, most notably occupied by the Russians, Nazi Germany and twice by the Soviet Union. The museum noted this history in a lot of detail, and it was clear to see there have been many dark incidents take place in Latvia's recent history - Jewish massacres by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, mass deportations to Siberia in the Soviet times and so on. Mari and I went slowly through the museum, reading everything, while the other two sped ahead due to lack of time. Eventually they left to get their bags and they came back to meet us again one last time before heading for the bus.

By this time it was approaching the early evening, and we had to organise to meet Artjoms, our Couchsurfing host. Fortunately he made it easy for us and picked us up in his car and took us to his apartment in the neighbourhood of Ziepnikkalns. However rather than put our bags down and relax, we headed out again straight away - Artjoms had already planned an interesting activity...

Our destination was actually outside if Riga, in the south of Latvia, pretty close to the Lithuanian border - Tērvete National Park. Fortunately Latvia is pretty small, so we were able to get down there in just over an hour, even stopping in the town of Jelgava to see a palace there. Tērvete is a small but quite pretty park, where interestingly people have made many different sculptures out of the forest wood such as dwarves, witches and spiders, giving the place a bit of a 'Hansel & Gretel' kind of feel. We spent a couple of hours exploring the park and found a nice spot ti watch the sunset. There was also a small wooden castle replica based on the constructions of tribal Latvians who lived in the area around 1000 years ago, not to mention a family of drunk Russians seemingly following us around wherever we went.

It was already quite late by the time we left Tērvete, but we still had one more place to go: the Central Latvian town of Dobele. Fortunately summer in Latvia involves a very late sunset and it was still fairly light when we got there around 10pm. Dobele is a small place of no specific touristic value, bar a ruined castle that we visited quickly. We were actually here to take care of something - feeding Artjoms' family cat. Dobele was Artjoms' hometown, and his parents still lived there in a pretty countryside house with an awesome fruit and vegetable garden. What was really nice was that he gave us free rein to take whatever fruit we wanted while he took care of a couple of household matters. We picked a bunch of raspberries and blackcurrants to take back to Riga, and Artjoms brought a big bottle of homemade cream cheese as well. It had definitely been a good beginning to our Couchsurfing experience!