Riga

The Tallin bus station was an easy 1 mile walk from my apartment.  I purchased my bus ticket in advance for $5.50, this was a good deal since tickets purchased the day of travel are $20.  The bus was fairly new with comfortable seats plus a seat back video screen with a good selection of music, movies & tv shows.  The 4.5 hour bus trip was good with just one short stop in Estonia.

The city of Riga has a population of 850,000 & Latvia overall has about 2 million people.  The outskirts of Riga looked a little rough, however the downtown area was nice & is famous for all of it's art nouveau architecture.  I picked up a 3 day pass for the public transportation system for $11.50 & the guy who sold it to me was extremely nice.  He said he liked Americans & even walked outside to show me how to get to my tram stop.  Riga does not have a subway system, just buses & trams.  I found my stop & got on the correct tram which was supposed to take 15 minutes to get to the apartment I was renting for 3 nights.  Unfortunately a car wreck happened about a mile from the apartment, so after seeing the car wasn't going to be moved, I walked the last mile to get there.

The white car is sitting right in the middle of the tram tracks

The 1 bedroom apartment I rented was on the 8th floor of a new building with great views of the town. It was good deal at just over $40/night.

There were forecasts of cloudy & rainy weather all weekend, so I tried to get out on Friday night to take some photos while it was still nice.  There are several large churches in the old town section of the city along with a lot of restaurants.  I opted just to grab a quick dinner at the kebab place to save time.  Here are a few photos of old town.

House of Blackheads, the most famous building in Riga.

As the sun began to set, I was able to get some nice shots of the bridges along the river.

These photos are from the opposite side of the river facing town.

On my second day in Riga, I went on a 2.5 hour walking tour of the city. The tour guide was good & had a nice sense of humor.  Almost everyone stuck around for the whole tour even though it rained about an hour into it.

Tour guide named Kristaps

City market

Freedom monument 

A "stalinscrapper" similar to ones in Moscow.

After the tour, I went to a pub called Folkklubs Ala to get lunch & have some drinks.  They had a large selection of local beers for $2-3 & good meals for $6-8.  It is a really popular place & was fairly crowded for a Saturday afternoon & even more crowded when I went back on Sunday night.  Here is a link to the reviews on tripadvisor.

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g274967-d2178722-Reviews-Folkklubs_Ala_Pagrabs-Riga_Riga_Region.html

I didn't realize that the Riga marathon on Sunday until I arrived in town, so I went down to the race & took some photos of the event.  I am doing a separate post on the race & also on the art nouveau buildings in town.