We flew to Riga on Ryanair for 1p. In addition we had to pay £10 each for baggage and some esoteric fee that I never did get to the bottom of. Maybe it was underpants tax. In total though, we paid £18 each. Get in!!
We stayed in Riga for just one night, in a chilled out little place called the Argonaut hostel. We ordered pizza and drank beer and chatted to a couple of people we met in the hostel. One was a Kiwi guy, the other was a Swedish girl doing a round trip of the Baltics. The Kiwi was interesting as he was working for a NGO (he was being a bit aloof about which one exactly) investigating corruption in Russian society. When the Soviet Union collapsed, capitalism poured through the cracks of a rotten and decaying republic like cleansing water, however it carried with it a new kind of pathogen: gluttony; Good luck with that one. We eventually sloped off to bed leaving them chatting upstairs on the sofas. I think they got it on.
The next morning we checked out and went briefly exploring the city. We spent a couple of hours in the museum of oppression, learning about the occupations of the last century and what the Latvians had to put up with. The museum itself was something to behold. It was a huge rectangular building constructed and raised on concrete poles. It was made entirely out of bevelled iron blocks, protuding from its exterior like bits of lego. It looked like something out of a 1970's Dr Who episode.
Latvia, and all of the Baltic states did not fare to well in the last century. Stuck between a rock (Russia) and a hard place (Germany) they were contested, invaded, occupied, and decimated from the 1930s right up until the fall of the Soviet Union. Ironically the Bolshevik uprising in 1917 first granted them independence from the Russian Empire. However, 20 years later they were occupied by Stalin's Red Army, who suppressed murdered, terrorised and deported thousands of people to Siberia. They were then unshackled by Nazi Germany, but there liberation was short-lived as they realised the new rule was even more brutal than the last. This regime was toppled yet again by Russia after Germany was defeated and Latvia was consumed by the Red Army until their freedom was finally realised in the 1990s.
We had to cut short the rest of the visit to the museum as we needed to stock up on supplies for the first leg of our journey: From Riga to Moscow. 16 hours and 841km and the first leg of our journey across one of the most extensive rail networks on the planet. No sweat. We just needed to buy plenty of vodka...
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