Riga--part one

After I managed to work my logistical magic and procure us three tickets on the 2pm bus from tallinn to riga, derryn, rosa and I had a fourish hour ride punctuated by beautiful country scenery, great naps and bad foreign snack foods. We arrived, in the dark, to riga at roughly 7:30pm with no clue as to where we were.

The good news though, temperatures were going up: -19c!

We called the day mostly a write off, hit up the cash machine, ate dinner and promptly fell asleep in our hostel room made for 15. The next morning, Rosa and I layered Derryn under a pile of blankets and hit the town. And what a town it was.

Statue of Roland, though i'm not 100% certain who Roland really is
The House of Blackheads in Riga's central square--once home to all the merchants' guild
i am beginning to notice a theme of largescale vast emptiness in all of these photos...

bad hair aside, this fish head served us the final bill
brunch--pumpkin tartlets and beer. it's never too early for beer on holiday, right?

lots of colourful buildings

hat! snood! ice!
The inside is as dark and depressing as the outside, really a metaphoric victory to aesthetics. However, the museum was free and outlined the history of Latvian occupation from WW1 to present. Rosa and I spent the best part of two hours learning about Latvia's role in the USSR's powerstruggle. It was informative, interesting and really very sad.
The Three Brothers--(though you can only see two) are the oldest houses in Riga

More to come!

Tallinn

Tallinn happened to be about just as cold as Helsinki, which is really no surprise; the city sits roughly 50 miles across the sea from its Scandinavian cousin. But for whatever reason, it felt delightfully tropical. Okay, well that's a lie, but I think the cobbled narrower streets of the city centre did a better job at preserving the little warmth that lingered in the February air.

And first glimpses did not disappoint. From snowy rooftops to onion-domed churches, we were a little bit more than enchanted.





And everyone knows that the first thing you do upon arrival in an Estonian city is to eat...greek food. It's all we could find, honest. We sat by the fire place, we ate and then Derryn sauntered back to our boutique hotel (discount!) and Rosa and I proceeded to comb the city for old books and USSR memorabilia.

We ended up finding one garlic(!) restaurant, one snood(!), an irish pub and the Estonian answer to the German beer hall. We may have also been the butt of a group of Russian schoolchildren's jokes, but when your body parts are mostly frozen, humiliation doesn't feel like anything.

where has this place been all my life?

a little bit like paris?
in the cobbled nooks and crannies off a side road

I think this photo aptly captures the nature of the cobbles and the ice. Apparently, residents of this part of the world spend four months sliding around on ice covered pavements. It was a health and safety inspector's worst nightmare.
Estonians are big on their tea houses and cafes. This one was chocolate themed. If you ever wondered if chocolate could be a successful theme, let me set the record straight. Yes.

in the central square
with frostbite to the brain
still four inches of flesh uncovered in the extreme cold

Before heading on the long (12 minutes in sub-zero temperatures) walk home, we fortified ourselves with larger than big beers. This happened to be the last time we saw Derryn out of bed for the rest of the trip. Which begs the question, what strange power does estonian beer really hold?

So we didn't spend much time in Estonia due to the Helsinki debacle outlined in the last two blog entries. But we managed to rectify a too short stay in Tallinn the next morning by getting very lost on the tram system and doing a delightful loop of outer, outer outer and outer outer outer Tallinn. It wasn't quite the trip to Estonia I'd imagined, but I'm hoping it's not going anywhere any time soon and i can go back.

Just not in February.

Helsinki (days two and three)

Having woken up without frostbite et al, my travel buddies and I ventured into the deceptively inviting blue skies of Helsinki city centre in search of, well, something. anything, really. within five minutes, two things became very clear: 1. it was very, very, very cold. 2. it was very, very, very deserted. The immaculately cared for grids of streets were bereft of people, shops and eateries were closed and we, mistakenly, walked into an open coffee shop that turned out to be a church group social function filled with pasted on zombie-smiled men, women and children holding religious flyers and other paraphernalia.

which is probably the only reason I agreed to walk on a frozen sea in a pair of steve madden boots. Why i brought steve madden boots on a helsinki holiday is another question altogether, but i can safely say that said boots were far from waterproof and after seven minutes outside, the pain in my toes ceased. I was grateful but aware there would be repercussions later.
just another winter's day for this icefisherman




After our little walk, we struggled to decide between which of the two open, identical, sterile coffee shops we should sit in. Perhaps Robert and Wayne are feuding brothers and going into the 'wrong' one would start some kind of bloods v. crips style gang war. Probably not. We hemmed and hawwed for roughly nineteen seconds, consulted the menus and came to the realisation that the shops were exactly the same. It seems Robert's and Wayne's coffee learned something from the Starbucks school of business management and put their shops in direct competition of one another right next door.


From there, things the opposite of remarkable happened. So unremarkable, in fact, that I cannot remember.

Day three very much mimicked day two minus the excursion on the gulf of finland and the decision between Robert and Wayne. We walked for six minutes, ducked into a building, drank a hot beverage. Darren got ill, stopped talking. Rosa went for a walk, got lost. I read a book, got a sad call from america. we all sat in mutual misery in the hotel sauna welcoming the onset of sweat that signalled warmth and heat.
watching people fall in the city centre
excuse me?
Tuomiokirkko, Helsinki's biggest Lutheran Cathedral
like the rest of the Scandinavian churches i've seen, it's more beautiful from the outside. The inside was very plain and simple...totally contravenes the 'paving a way of gold towards heaven' practises of Catholic and Orthodox Cathedrals


it looks pretty, it really does
the highlight of three days in frozen hell

And on tuesday morning, we got to leave! We superstar ferried back to Tallinn, Estonia with only one minor glitch; the ferry got trapped in the ice 100 meters from the dock in estonia. No worries, after two hours of moving forward and backwards, the ice broke and we were free to explore the -19 degree delights of mainland eastern europe.

from Tallinn to Helsinki

I often make stupid choices. This is the only way to justify my decision to venture on a week-long trip to Helsinki, Tallinn and Riga at the height of the coldest month of the year, February. In my defence, I'd been wanting to go to the Baltic states since I worked at summer camp with a girl from Estonia in 2002. And I didn't go blindly into the valley of ice--Rosa and her friend, Derryn, were accomplices in my foray.

So let's call the trip a lack of clear communication.

I've gotten into the habit of meticulously planning my work, social and private life. So when it comes to travelling, I need a reprieve and all I do is book the flight, close my eyes and hope it all works out. I hate booking hotels and hostels. I don't check weather reports. I just crack open the lonely planet/wikitravel page when I get on the plane and/or hope someone else is more organised than me. This may come as a surprise to those of you who know me. But it's true.

As it turned out, Derryn was far more organised than me. He works for a tour booking agency and found us as cheap hotel deal. He thumbed through guidebooks and decided that we should spend three nights in Helsinki, one night in Tallinn and two nights in Riga. I was skeptical but didn't argue.
Like lambs to the slaughter, Rosa and I stumbled off the plane in Tallinn to hop straight onto a ferry across the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki where Derryn awaited us. Hordes of people loaded onto a cruise ship sized boat that cut across the ice in a surreal feat of man versus machinery.


These hordes stocked up on duty free inexpensive beer and liquor by the crateload. Students, professionals, old people alike. We laughed condescendingly and commented on their apparent alcoholism. How little we knew.

On the other side, Derryn greeted us with a wall of arctic, freeze-any-body-part-that's-not-covered-air. -24 degrees celsius air. Air that takes your breath away. Air that doubles you over in pain because, strangely, it's so cold you feel like you're on fire.

and that was only the beginning.

We checked into the hotel and began the process of bundling up that took at least five minutes--Tshirt, jumper, second jumper, scarf, gloves, coat, snood, hat. Outer extremeties covered? check. Face covered? check. Walking plan made to jump into a building within a five to seven minute window? Double Check.
We sought drink. It seemed logical seeing as it was so bloody cold. three rounds each and 100 euro (each) later, we came to the sobering realisation that Helsinki lived up to its name--hell on earth. A bottle of wine cost 26 euro, entry to a mediocre club, 14 euro and outside, still a soaring low of -24c.

We re-consulted the guidebook to find another sobering set of comments: 'go here and here with excellent this and that'. Okay, fine. Followed by the phrase: 'open in summer only' attached to every.single.free.cheap.and/or exciting thing to do. And next to the things that did indeed remain open through the ice-fires of hel: 'closed on sundays in winter'.

good thing we arrived on a saturday night.