Czech Hockey Adventure: Riga, Latvia

Part three of my trip was to head back to Riga for about a day of touring around. We caught the bus back to Riga and arrived there around 1ish that Saturday. From the bus station there was just a short walk to our hostel which was located in the Old Town of Riga. It's a beautiful area of old buildings, church, cafes and cobble stone streets everywhere!

You know you've picked the party hostel when you arrive at 1:30pm and people are still fast asleep. Oops...wasn't expecting that and wished we would have picked a different place, but I guess for the $10 a night price we paid it was to be expected.

After dropping our stuff off, we went to find some food and explore Riga. The first place of destination was the central market which consisted of five huge hangers and is one of the largest markets in Europe (according to my travel book). Interesting would be the best word to describe the market. It was pretty huge selling everything from fruits, vegetables, cheeses, meats, breads, candy and a ton of sea food. I saw a lot of interesting looking sea creatures and smelt it all. Outside there were more clothing stalls set up and a lot of interesting looking people to add.

From here we went to St. Peter's Gothic Church and saw an amazing view of Riga from the top of the tower. We also went to the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia. I'm sure to many this sounds boring but it fascinated me as I knew nothing about the history of Latvia other than that I thought it broke away from Russia. Boy did I learn alot. It became and independent country after WWI in 1918. Then was occupied by the Soviets in 1939. Next taken over by Nazi Germany from 1941-1945, and then back to the Soviet rule. Finally they had independence in 1991. An amazing history really.

After the museum we pretty much just walked the streets the rest of that day as well as Saturday morning. The old town in Riga is really pretty with cafes everywhere an a ton of shopping to be done. It's know for it's Amber, so I was able to buy some jewelry from there. Sunday morning we were off to go back to the Freedom Monument to take some more pictures when we came across a road block along the way. There were police everywhere...hum...what's going on. We found out through a couple of Americans who were working in Riga that there was a big memorial parade going on that day. Shouldn't be a problem right, well that's not the case. Apparently it was to remember those who died in WWII. Some people have objections to that as they were fighting with the Nazi's, but in reality they had no choice. So kind of a touchy subject and I guess in past there had been some problems. Well with all the cops that we saw dressed in riot gear, there were definitely no problems on that day. It pretty cool to come across that event while we were there.

So that was our time in Riga, we then flew back to Berlin. Got there around 6pm which left us a couple of hours to kill before we took a bus back to Prague at midnight. I was able to go back to Checkpoint Charlie and check out that museum which had a ton of information about the Berlin Wall and the efforts people made to escape under/over/through it. Another interesting museum.

Here some pics...