Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
We slept in, and had plenty of time to make our way to the
bus to the airport. We caught our flight from Milan with plenty of time and flew trusty airBaltic to Lativa. We were seated one row behind ‘business class’ which was three times the price ….for the same seats, and barely enough leg room for the child sitting across for us. Poor Dermot had to have the best posture of his life, without choice….
After a fairly uneventful flight (minus the landing…. Definitely a rookie pilot, Nina would have lost it…), we caught the 22 bus into town. Dermot navigated us fairly painlessly to Central hostel. We checked into our double room, #5, and then made our way out on the town. Dermot was craving some good ol’ Irish food, but we passed a sushi restaurant, and our decision was made. It wasn’t any sushi to write home about, but we were pleased to find out that AMEX card holders got 12% off the bill! Yeehaw!
Our next stop was to watch some European football (aka: soccer) at Paddy Whelan’s, where we ordered French fries with our drinks, with ‘ketchup’ that was not only NOT ketchup, but it costs more then the fries… oye.
We made our way back to the hostel to rest up for the next few days in the Baltics!
On Thursday, Katie wasn’t feeling very well, so she decided to sleep, while Dermot was productive. Dermot went to get our laundry done, researched flights and transport for our next adventure after Riga. After resting, we decided to head out to Lido, the amusement park/buffet about 15 minutes outside of town. We caught the 17 tram, which is confusing because they have the trolleybus, which is an electric bus….and a tram which is a trolley…
After enjoying the buffet of any/all meats, veggies, desserts you could imagine, we enjoyed the live music in the pub downstairs. Katie also enjoyed the local artisan shop and supported the economy with a new sassy red purse. We ended the evening with live ‘jazz’ which was really Latvians singing old rock/country songs.
Friday was Fun Day…as the 5 year olds in Dermot and Katie got to play in the suburbs of Riga (about a 45 minute bus ride…) at GoPlanet. We enjoyed ‘guessing’ on lunch/dinner order (we ended up getting chicken, not too bad!), playing many video game and the highlight was racing indoor go carts. Luckily, we only rode for about 8 minutes, considering there was no ventilation and the fumes were starting to get to us. Car 36 beat car 38… and if you want to know who was who… you’ll have to ask Dermot …. we ended our evening with cocktails on the 11th floor overlooking Riga with 14 year old champagne drinkers next to us that looked like ballet dancers.
Our final day in Riga was absolutely the highlight of our 5 days here…our experience with the Lativan Olympic Bobsled Team. Dermot and I enjoyed took the train from Riga to Sigulda to enjoy 43 seconds of 100 km/h on a true bobsled path, and Katie has the whiplash to prove it. It was incredibly exciting, and much like most activities outside the US, provided very little instruction and/or safety requirements.
We celebrated our Gold medal day with a highly recommended International Dinner at Melnie Mula, followed with unexpected fireworks! We love the Baltics!
After dinner, we headed back to the hostel and watched the movie “Closer” with Inga, the 20 year old Estonian college student from the hostel. She worked the ‘graveyard’ shift, so she talked us into keeping her company until 2am and watching the movie with her.
We got up pretty groggy from our late night movie watching. We had a bit of time before catching our flight, so we went into town to enjoy tea at the cute teahouse we passed several times during the week. Riga is a pretty small town, and we actually recognized some of the kids from our bus yesterday at the teahouse!
We caught the bus to the airport- and we were on our way to our second and Baltic state, Estonia.