I left Rome, Italy, for Riga, Latvia, late in the afternoon, leaving beautiful weather behind. And entered a small storm. Landing in Riga felt hazardous. The wind toyed with the plane, pushing and tossing it around on the lap of turbulence. It was raining heavily, but shuttles waited nearby when we landed. We made our way across the tarmac to the airport, which felt ages away. I waited for my luggage, happy to have a hardshell suitcase, as I watched people pick off their soaking cloth luggage from the conveyor.
A long-time friend, J, whom I hadn’t seen in years, was waiting for me in the pick-up area. He lived a tram ride away from the Old Town of Riga in a building that looked as though it could crumble into dust at any moment. I had been forewarned. But that said nothing of the interior, which was plain but sturdy. It took a lot of button-pushing and turning keys in locks before the door opened to his apartment. It was a spacious place with high ceilings, large windows, and all the amenities one would expect. The kitchen overlooked the street. The tram stop was on the opposite side. During the day, after J had gone to work, I’d wake up, have breakfast, and watch the elderly people turn away from the stop after waiting 20 minutes. A lot of the same people appeared day after day, turning away five minutes before the tram rolled by.
On my first day in Riga, J was glad to show me around, but he worked the rest of the week, which was fine because the weather was cold and rainy. I slept until 10 a.m. almost every day. My experience in Riga was so different from that of Rome. I spent much of my second in the mall. There, I picked up a heavy jacket and a pair of leather waterproof boots. There had been so much rain it created large puddles in the streets, and on my way back to J’s apartment, I hopped from one dry spot to the next. On the few days that the rain let up a little, I took the tram into the old town. Maybe it was the low ceiling of clouds and the grey weather, but I often felt crowded by the low buildings, their myriad number of faces in the stone… Until I started gazing back.
It took time, but I was won over by the Art Nouveau architecture. With each step I took over the cobbled streets of the old town, another building appeared decked out in lavish faces, animal heads, iron balconies, and rounded windows and doors. I learned later that Riga has the highest concentration of this style of architecture of any city in the world! Most date between the early and mid-1900s. I snapped photos of everything. I was excited to find Wall Street, the Cat House, and the Three Brothers (a complex of three dwellings and the oldest in Riga). The entire afternoon threatened rain, with thick clouds overhead, but I was spared and the late afternoon saw sunshine break through thinning clouds.
The weather was fair, though still quite chilly on my last day in Riga. J insisted I make the trek to the top of the tower of St. Peter’s Church in the Old Town, which provides the best lookout over the Old Town. At the top, I found myself looking out at the buildings I’d walked by and had admired from the ground. It was worth the walk to the top. Most memorable moments: looking out from St. Peter’s Tower, dining at the Flying Frog, enjoying a stein of beer (1 liter!), and walking, walking, walking.
Except for the occasional tram ride, I walked all over the City of Riga and the Old Town, the latter of which I found much easier to navigate than any place in Rome. There was much less traffic and fewer people. Granted, it’s also a much smaller city. It was easy to commit the streets of the old town to memory, marking each one with a landmark: there is a church, a market, a statue, etc, and follow the streets out from the center. Rome, being the open-air museum that it is, seems to continue in all directions. Fortunately for me, the cities would get smaller as I hopped the next bus for Tartu, Estonia.
