Our first full day in Riga started with a chilly walk through Old Town and a tour of Art Nuvo architecture. We visited the major towers in the Old Town after walking through The Park across the street from our hotel, Europa Royale. Our God included the Independence Monument, erected to commemorate independence from Russia after WW I! We passed by the Opera House and crossed the Bridge of Locks where lovers and newly weds fasten padlocks engraved with their names before tossing the key in the canal (this sounds familiar). The preserved and carefully restored Old Town is grand with a surplus of restaurants and churches. After 3 hours we entered a warm lovely restaurant for an included lunch after such we met our bus for a drive to the Art Nuvo district and a tour of an apartment in one of the buildings such had been the home of one of the master architects of the area and is now a museum.
We arranged with one partner to be dropped near the synagogue in Old Town and and after some serious navigating we found ourselves at the locked gate. 🙁
We returned the next day to find the price of entry was 2 Lat (about $4 each) and peering through the curtains we decided it wasn’t necessary to go any further.
Monday the 14th, started off far more grim. We stopped first are the site of the Great Choral Synagogue, which is now an open Plaza with reconstructed broken walls and a commemorative plaque to the non Jewish heros who helped some survive. On from there to Silispils Camp where 632 children died of hunger and cold and some 12,000 were slaughtered (according to Baiba that number is open to interpretation both higher and lower). After walking the Memorial grounds to the sound of a distant heart beat emanating from a black monument to the children we regrouped on the bus to stop at Rumpulus woods, the site of one of the first machine gun slaughters which over two non consecutive days took 24,000 lives in 1941, most from the Riga ghetto but also 1,000 Germen Jews brought in to be killed.
Finally we are done for the day with horror and following a happy stop (bathroom break) in a mall we were dropped off at the market which is housed in four Zeppelin hangars, which will give some clue to the size of the market. After our tour we had free time and we joined with John and Suzanne to buy food to make up our lunch and something “unusual” to present to the group tonight. We found a dicon radish and salsa. We found a patch of stone pavement enclosed in a some wall behind a church to make our lunch stop sitting on the ground leaning on the wall in the sun. As we walked towards the hotel we stopped in a coffee shop to conclude the meal and the experience.
After an interesting presentation and Q&A with a professor of political science from the University we got out the “unusual items” we had all chosen in the market and sampled and snacked on them. Satisfied I went off to sauna. Afterwords I joined Carol in the bar and had a beer while she had salad and wine. Today was a transit day and we left Riga for Tallinn. We stopped at yet another Castle in Cecis Latvia where we climbed the interior spiral stairs by the candlelight after bowling with wooden bowling balls on a not very smooth out door Lane. The Radisson in Tallinn is very nice and modern.