Sausages Rule in Riga
08.10.2016
7 °C
On the edge of the old walled city of Riga is a pristine indoor food market of monumental proportions. Pork is the staple of the meat section with hundreds of stalls offering every inch of pig from the snout to the tail together with dozens of stalls laden with pork sausages of every size and shape. These sausages were truly elephantine...
Some of the fruit in the outdoor market were equally huge...
But there is much more to Riga than food, (though it is plentiful and good), and its strong point is its architecture. It has a wealth of well preserved Germanic edifices from the 17th and 18 centuries ...
This is the 14th century facade of The House of Blackheads – a guild of unmarried merchants...
And this is one of the many quaint alleyways...
There is also an entire district of ornate art nouveau from the Roaring 20s... 
The burgeoning Baltic cruise industry has swamped Riga with boatloads of foreigners in recent years and English is de rigeur for anyone serving tourists. But fifty years of Soviet domination takes more than a couple of decades to dispel and many people still speak Russian.
English and American TV and movies are rarely dubbed into Latvian and young Latvians worship Bieber and Adele. However, Riga's excellently presented war museum inside the medieval fortifications, (the Powder Tower circa 1330), has almost no English explanations. The modern 14 screen cineplex however offers all the latest English language movies with both Russian and Latvian subtitles and we spent a pleasant evening avoiding the rain watching Meryl Streep's portrayal of Florence Foster-Jenkins.
Modern stores and upscale shopping malls abound in Riga and one innovative boutique sells all its fashions by weight...
While the hotel staff both in Tallinn and Riga are friendly and extremely helpful, the shop workers appear generally dour and disinterested. If only the weather would cheer up maybe the locals would have something to smile about. This enormous statue dedicated to the animals that lost their lives in the early days of soviet space exploration certainly made us smile...
Posted by Hawkson 05:47 Archived in Latvia Comments (6)
