Europe 2017: Day #16 Churches and Art Nouveau

Friday, 18 August 2017

After all the emotional stress of yesterday we had ended up with a pretty good studio apartment in Riga, right in the middle of the Old Town. We had hoped for a two-room apartment with washing facilities but given the desperation of the previous day we were thankful for what we got.

Mirrored ceiling

The mirror's on the ceiling, but there was no pink champagne in the fridge.

On checking my email using the apartment wi-fi I discovered the note about the true nature of the check-in, where we had to go and what we had to do. All too late now.

The only thing we had planned for this day was a long, private walking tour through the Old Town and Art Nouveau district of Riga. We had arranged this to be associated with our first accommodation in Riga and we were to be picked up out the front of those apartments.  We figured it was just too hard to change the pick-up place so we trundled off in the morning to the right street and got there about 10 minutes before ten. Only to find that the exterior and ground floor were being renovated.

There was no number on the building, though I did see it sitting on a chair inside, no name on the outside and no indication, as we discovered by asking the builders working there, that to check-in you had to go to the back of the building in the neighbouring street.  If we had arrived there the previous night as expected we would have been completely lost. This tended to take the edge off our previous accommodation frustration, though only a tad.

Frustration started to return, however, when our guide still hadn't turned up after half an hour. Our friendly builders helped us again by phoning the company running the tour and we got their address, which we immediately realised was in the same street as our check-in hotel.  We were starting to think that Riga really didn't want us to visit.

We made our way to the address indicated for the tour company only to find a set of buildings with little or no signage.  So we headed across the street to our hotel and asked for their help.  Five minutes later our tour guide arrived. Seems she had been held up in traffic and tried to contact us on our mobile number - Australian and therefore of no use at all - and then decided to head to her office when she got the call telling her where we were.

Another disaster averted and I saw no advantage in getting angry about any of this.  I was on holiday and determined to make the best of everything that came my way. We headed off and the next three hours were excellent.

Riga Old Town differs from Tallinn in that a lot of it was flattened during the war, so a lot of the buildings are actually quite new, built to replicate what was there originally and built in the past 20-30 years. Some of the buildings which did survive the bombings mostly intact were the many churches scattered throughout the Old Town. Even so there were quite a number of interesting and quirky buildings, with unusual decorations.  This was especially true of the Art Nouveau district just outside the Old Town.  There are just too many to mention and the district is now one of the greatest collections of Art Nouveau architecture anywhere in the world. It is just one building after another down any number of streets.  One of our favourite pieces was the almost spiral staircase at Alberta iela 12.

Spiral staircase, view from below

Our guide Maria ended the tour by leading us to the main Riga market, where we had a meal of Latvian dumplings - rather like ravioli with tomato and sour cream sauce - and a wander around the market stalls before returning to our apartment for an early drink and nibbles before dinner.