Wednesday, April 26, 2006
In the Ghetto - RigaWell no offence to the Latvians, but Riga's really really old and dilapidated. We were all a little worried when we first crossed the border over from Lithuania into Latvia. The problem was that for a good half hour of the journey in Latvia towards Riga, it was just housing sheds after housing sheds!
Riga, admittedly, was slightly better. We ended up in this hotel called Albert's Hotel. Yeah the whole hotel was designed to the famous Albert Einstein. Not bad huh? Except that it was the most posh looking building in the vicinity. Good thing we were meant to be there for 2 days only!
We basically did a nice city tour of the place, following a map which stated all the places of interest. And for once, don't ask me why, I decided that Yanxuan would be our nice little navigator. Of course when things go wrong, I can only blame myself of being lazy right? So she managed to convincingly confuse the poor taxi driver by saying that we wanted to go to the Parliament house, and pointed to the Bank on the map. He eventually gave up, and we all thought that it was just a communication breakdown, UNTIL we realised that our navigator had been leading us the wrong way!!
I must say that the places of interest were a little dogdy. We were desperately looking for this Cat Museum, which was meant to be really famous for something - well at least CATS or something to do with CATS right? Haha!! That was it!! We couldn't go in!! And we never knew what it was all about!
This was probably the best part of the city tour. The Arsenal Musuem was fairly interesting. It featured weapons used during the world wars, kept very old uniforms worn by the generals and planes and ships that fought during those times. Quite an experience actually!
We stopped for coffee after, and here it is, presenting to you the best coffee house in the world - DOUBLE COFFEE!!!! The cool part about this place is that it has fantastic finger food, great meals, a wide selection of coffees and alcohol! All combined in one place. The only problem: The music sucks big time. Seriously, for someone who's pretty open to all sorts, Double Coffee really needs some help with their selection.
We stopped by a Freemason church which was kinda strange. Well thanks to Jon who explained the history behind the cult, it made it a little easier to appreciate the internal architecture. We paid some money to go to the top where we had a nice view of Riga. Yeah I guess the highlight was the frozen lake!
So we were terribly exhausted after a whole day of walking around, headed back to the hotel and lounged around at the bar. It's really pretty with nice drinks. Think we were getting bored lahh, whilst waiting to leave the next day, we got some coffee and chilled there as well. Of course, us being us, we found ways to entertain ourselves - The Mud Tour by our very own Jonny boy ....
Posted by Musicshen at 7:45 PM
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