I didn’t sleep too well last night, which always seems to happen the first night I am aware.

We got up and had cold showers as we couldn’t figure out how to get the hot water on.  I wonder if it’s like St Petersburg here and there is no hot water one day a week?  Anyway, we had our cold showers and made our way down to the kitchen.  On the way we noticed that the door to our dorm had a ‘DANGER ELECTRICITY’ sign…interesting.

Having made it to the kitchen we accidentally woke up the hostel receptionist, who strangely seems to sleep there.  Due to a severe shortage of nearly everything we had a fruit tea each for breakfast whilst we decided where to go first.  We picked up several leaflets which gave details of free city walking tours.  The one that appealed to us most started at 12:00 so in the meantime decided to go to the National Opera House in order to book tickets for tomorrow night.

We actually had enough time to purchase our tickets, visit the Catholic cathedral which I saw last time I was here with Sean and pay a quick visit to the State Museum of Art.  The Latvians sure like painting nude ladies!

We arrived at the Laima Clock, named after a Latvian chocolate company, at exactly 12:00.  Our tour guide, Meg, spent the next two hours showing us around both the new and old parts of Riga.  The architecture is incredible which is almost certainly due to the country being ruled by Germany, Sweden and Russia since its birth.  In fact, Latvia has only been independent for less than fifty years of its eight hundred year existence.

A strange American member of the tour group left without saying a word at Swedish Gate but apart from that everyone had a thoroughly enjoyable time.

After the trip finished we went in search of lunch.  Claire managed to find a street-side café which offered two courses (although really just two different beef dishes) for L3s.  She’s showing signs of becoming a Scottish backpacker after all!

We wolfed down our lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon in the Museum of Latvia – 1940 to 1991.  Although Claire and I knew a lot about the history of Latvia it certainly was interesting to see the Latvian’s account of what happened!  Needless to say there was a lot of propaganda.  There was some light relief when a loud, and rather ignorant, tourist asked a tour guide lots of stupid questions – what was wrong with the Russian occupancy? etc.

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