Seeing the Sights: Riga

Yesterday, I went to Riga.

    Tobi and I went to the bus station at 2am for the 4 hour journey to the Latvian capital city, where we would meet up with Agnese, since she's from Riga and was home for the last week of break. The only sleep I had gotten that night was an hour on the bus; wasn't sure how that would affect my 21 hour day, but it wouldn't make it less interesting, that was for sure.
Because we arrived at 6am, the city hadn't yet woken and the sun hadn't risen. After we ditched Tobi's suitcase, we walked around. We looked through an open-air exhibit on the history of Riga's central train station. It had a coating of ice and snow that made all the photographs glitter. While it started really snowing later in the day, the early morning snow was so light it just looked as though there was glitter floating through the air.

Found in one of the underground
walkways

     We picked a direction and walked down a long street. We went through a park. Picking another direction, we walked down another street. Our morning hours were entirely driven by which streets looked interesting, which had lights and buildings that drew us down the street. We unintentionally found ourselves at the Monument of Freedom. Fog still clouded the top and it was nearly too dark to get a photo of it (Tobi tried, I didn't) so this one is from later in the day. Everybody, meet Milda. I learned a bit about the monument in my Latvian Cultural History class, and my favourite story doesn't appear in the monument's wikipedia article. It does mention that the monument was saved from destruction, and this was done by changing the interpretation of the monument to fit Soviet propaganda. Instead of the three stars Milda holds representing the three historic districts of Lativa, they represented Mother Russia holding the three Baltic states. While this was never the public belief, the SSR government believed that this "change" was suitable enough to save the monument.

Tobi and I ended up in front of a random restaurant when we decided it was high time we stopped for breakfast. The restaurant was "K|I|D*  *not related to children". We still had a couple hours until we needed to meet Agnese for a city tour, so we stuck around after we'd finished breakfast drinking tea. Once we received a text from Agnese, we then had to start figuring out where we were in the city. The response she got from us that we were "in a restaurant somewhere in Riga" wasn't particularly helpful. We gave her what little directions we could, and stood on a corner outside the restaurant as soon as we'd paid. Then our own search began for a blonde Latvian girl. While our search was supposed to be a joke, Agnese was the only blonde Latvian girl on the street at the time. 

     She took us to a mall and we headed straight for the roof, to get a view of Riga. Reason #48 it pays to tour a city with someone who lives there. We never would have thought to just pick a building and hope we could get on the roof. I was a bit concerned when she said a few years ago there had been an ice rink on the roof. That doesn't seem like the smartest plan...

     Afterward, Agnese lead us to where we would meet our tour guide. Usually, when we visit cities, we do "Tours with [insert name of somewhere who's been there before, usually Tobi]", but Tours with Agnese are fancy, since she finds actual tour guides.
     We met our guide, Tom, at St. Peter's Church at the heart of Old Riga. While we met at the front, I'm still finding the back end of churches more interesting, so... St. Peter's is current on it's 6th spire.

Forgot to rotate this picture before I uploaded it, but then
I kinda liked the mental image of people having to cock their
heads to look at this photo. It made me laugh. You're welcome.

While this wasn't our next stop, it's the next picture I have. Here's a cool looking old merchant union-ish building. The difference in profit between producing and selling product is seen in the size of the building next door. The guys that sell apparently made much more money. Personally, this building is way more architecturally interesting.

 Another stop was at the Three Brothers, three buildings, side by side, that show the evolution of architecture and home construction from the 15th, 16th, and 17th century (right to left). The 15th century home would have had living space on the first floor and warehouses on all others; the 16th century home had living space on the first two floors, and then warehouses. The 17th century home shows the change and laws requiring houses to be narrower, Amsterdam-esque. I won a candy rooster (like the kind that adorn the tops of churches) for noticing that the middle building was built in 1646, but the doorway was built in 1746. Our guide did not explain why... which still bothers me. But it's definitely cool to see this progression, side by side. Also shoes a bit of the growing wealth of the city.
     The Three Brothers are situated just past a church whose bell is outside its tower. Because the church was constructed outside the town walls, it needed to be heard further away, so to avoid the sound being dampened by the tower, the bell is on the outside. Apparently, the bell also rings when unfaithful wives walk past it. Watch out, Riga, the bell knows!
   

It's windy!

    Many stops later, we ended our tour at this square, created in the 30s so that the authoritarian "president" of Latvia would have a square at which people could gather to hear him speak. Stones in the square show where medieval buildings were torn down to create the square.
    The Dome Church that the square is named after took quite a while to build, and as a result is a combination of late Romanesque, early Gothic, and Baroque architectural styles. The large time-span during the construction of the building is most evident in the road level, which rises (as the town grew the roads were raised) significantly from the oldest portion of the church to the newest additions (under the spire).

     After our tour, we did more wandering. We found ourselves a statue to pose with. Clearly, Agnese needs to work on it. :)








We walked into the Nativity of Christ Cathedral, the biggest Russian Orthodox church in Riga, which served as a planetarium and restaurant during the Soviet period. That sounds pretty epic. They were preparing for services when we visited, so there were vacuums and scaffolding used to clean all the gold around the interior.
     We had chocolate cheesecake and cactus-mint tea before heading to drop Tobi off at the bus station. Agnese and I continued walking around the city and I finally found the souvenir shop I needed to get my brother's birthday present. Didn't leave with quite what I'd planned but that's life. We had linner/dunch before meeting up with Jordan, who had come to Riga to take an exam. Had to walk all the way to the US Embassy, which is about an hour from the bus station. We've noticed that US Embassies are never in the interesting parts of town and are always in modern buildings with fences and armed guards out front. What up with that, US? That is not at all welcoming. While the embassy in Tallinn seems pretty nice online, the reputation of other embassies around the world makes me hope I don't need to go there.

Deutschland embassy 

Speaking of embassies, this seems like a good place to introduce my new game. I've started embassy spotting (I'm thinking there should be Embassy Bingo, but whatever). So when I travel, I'm going to stick the embassies I saw at the bottom. This trip, while we passed several more (Old Riga is covered in embassies... but not the US embassy, because it's not cool enough), I snapped photos of...

Norwegian Embassy