We started with the book section, not that we intended to buy any, but it happened to be along the street (Pragas iela) leading to the main part of the market and it is fun to read titles and authors in Russian and to try and figure out what the novels are. You phonetically read the author's name and find out it will be something like Stephen King or James Fenimore Cooper. Then you sound out the title. Often you get verbal fruit cocktail, but occasionally you find something like 'Spion' by James Fenimore Cooper. That's what we call THE SPY.
Evelyn writes, 'I'm not sure what conditions were like here under the Soviets, but there certainly seems to be a large quantity of consumer goods here now. Latvia seems more prosperous than Lithuania-- more cars, more books, more everything. True, Riga is 50% larger than Vilnius, but I think there's more to it than that.'
However, people still provide their own shopping bags. (This is common throughout all of Europe, which is in general less into wasteful packaging than the United States.) Here, the most popular bags seem to be ones with American designs on them (the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, and so on), and there were several vendors at the Market selling plastic bags.
We continued on to the food section. The food section is the original market, housed in five Zeppelin hangars left over from World War I, though the market has sprawled out over a huge area around them. One hangar is devoted to meat dealers. You go in and you see pigs' heads and sheep's heads lying on counters. This makes for some very good photography. When you travel there are more interesting pictures to take per square foot in a meat market than just about any place else. People come in with their dogs on leashes and the dogs walk around wide-eyed. Who knows what goes on in a dog's mind in a place like this? In general it is pretty tough to figure out why animals do what they do. Mark says, 'I am told that if you climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa, close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude. Perhaps the heat finally got to him and he wanted to get up where it was cooler. But who can even guess what was going on in the leopard's mind?'
Evidently what we were seeking was cookies and soda. In all events that was what we bought and took back to the room. Mark also got a Mars bar, which is considerably cheaper here than at home, maybe half-price. We passed up buying any hogs' heads.
The bread is interesting also. All sorts of fancy-looking loaves costing US$0.30 to US$0.80.
We returned things to the room and then went out to eat and hear the concert at the Dom, since we had managed to find out from someone near the church that there would be a concert tonight at 19:00.
We could not get tickets yet at the Dom. We went to a restaurant called Pie Kristapa. This place was founded by three farm collectives as a place to sell their goods. Evelyn had two local dishes: a mushroom salad and gray peas with smoked fat. Mark thought he saw squid on the menu and ordered it thinking it was in a sour cream sauce, only to find it was not very good fried calamari. All together, dinner with beverages was 8 lati (US$14.40), which seemed a bit high. Maybe squid is another expensive thing here.
After dinner we went back to the Dom, but it was still not ready for us. We sat and talked until 18:30. By then we could get tickets (1.5 lati each). The program was a one-hour organ concert played by Martin Vests. He was playing organ music by J. P. E. Hartmanis, Felix Mendelssohn, J. Brahms, and J. Reinbergers.
We found the concert a little disappointing. The organ was impressive, but there was little melody to any of the pieces. It was all music you might march out of church to. Evelyn and I agreed we liked the opera the night before a lot more.
On the way back we got hit by the 'Postcard Mafia.' Things are not nearly as bad as India but it is hard to get very far in the Old Riga area without being hit upon by someone trying to sell you postcards. Back in the hotel we tried to see if there was anything interesting on the television, but in English they have just news, sports, and MTV. It is odd to see MURDER, SHE WROTE in German.
May 14, 1994: We slept well last night. Evelyn says that if anything she was too warm, having put the extra blanket on the bed, just in case. We still woke at 5:30 with the sun, but she managed to go back to sleep for a while.
Mark writes, 'One of the first things I wanted to do this morning was figure a way to keep sorted coins sorted so I could more effectively use up coins rather than keep giving bills. The situation really called for a wallet with eight pockets for the eight denominations of coins. I found a clever way to fold an 8.5-by-11-inch sheet of paper into just such a wallet. A little facility with origami is useful for travel.'
We tried the television again and discovered that there was some English television. They had an infomercial for wrinkle cream that Mark says he almost wishes they had dubbed into German. Last night there had been some odd sporting event involving riding a motorcycle over an obstacle course with things like piles of rocks with water tunning over them, tables with their tops placed at various angles, etc.
The weather is much better today. Yesterday was cold and windy, and we were afraid that was normal Riga weather. But today is warmer and not at all windy.
Breakfast was pretty good at the hotel. It is included with the room. There are four kinds of fish (perhaps five--there was something in aspic we could not quite identify). There was beet salad. There were three kinds of juice: tomato, apple, and pineapple. Evelyn seemed to be the only attendee who realized there were choices other than pineapple. Incidentally, you never see juice in cans here. They seem to have gone over entirely to juice in boxes. There were also some nice pastries with breakfast, including poppy seed with chocolate frosting. With a breakfast like this, we're set until dinner.
We went to the train station to try to get tickets for our trip to Tallinn. We won't go through the whole 'kase commedia' but we kept being directed to windows we could not find and into wrong buildings. Somebody looking for a handout decided to try to earn a gratuity by directing us around. All he ended up doing was joining us as we were repeatedly misdirected. We finally found the window we needed (after three windows in two buildings) in the advance booking hall. We had been looking for an outside entrance, but it is reached from the suburban train booking hall through a not-very-obvious door. The 'Lonely Planet' said this, but somehow it didn't register, and Evelyn was trying to use the (aptly-named) 'Baltics & Russia Through the Back Door' instead (which has a better map of the train station complex). We had written down what we wanted so it was fairly quick once we found the window, and cost 10.28 lati for the two of us (US$9.25 each). (The odd amounts you will see for prices in this log are not because of any sales tax. Apparently the Soviets were really into precision pricing, maybe to make people think that they were paying exactly the right amount for something and not a little extra.)
Our first sightseeing stop of the day was at the local VolkswagenAudi car dealership, for which we grabbed a bus. We caught the bus in front of the Orthodox Cathedral. They use a zone system for the buses, so we each needed a zone 1 ticket and a zone 2 ticket for each direction. At 4 santimi each, that makes a one-way ride US$0.14. Public transit is much cheaper here than back home, that's for sure.
We kind of like just grabbing a bus and riding. You learn a fair amount about a country just by riding a bus and keeping your eyes open. The differences between the well-maintained city to attract tourists and the outlying areas is very striking. It looks as if, much more than Lithuania, Latvia is trying to attract tourists. There was some of the same difference in Vilnius, but not so much differential, we think. Because Riga is so metropolis-like it is surprising to see how badly kept the suburbs are. Moreshions from a bus come later. Oh, one more detail: the younger the people are, the more Westernized they are. You see a lot of older women around whose only advantage under the old system was an opportunity to get fat. Some are a third as wide as they are high, which is not very. Both indicate a poor diet. You see than in their babushkas going around fulfilling their business and paying little attention to anything but their business, almost like little beetles. And you see girls maybe thirteen or fourteen years old with plastic watches but with the local stylish stockings and mini-skirts. After years of modest, utilitarian Soviet fashions, this Baltic area-- chilly by our standards for May--has gone in a big way for the miniskirt. If your thing is blondes in mini-skirts, at least for the time being the Baltics are for you. (At least so Mark says.)
We got off the bus, apparently in the middle of nowhere, because we were headed to the local car dealership. (We stopped to take pictures of a goat.) Well, our destination is more than that; it is also the local Motor Museum, a museum dedicated to the history of the car.
The museum is located on S. Eizenshteina iela half a kilometer from the bus stop. Evelyn notes, 'I guess Latvia (and Riga) are proud of Eisenstein if they named a street after him (and kept the name). On the one hand, he was from Riga and one of the great filmmakers. (His father was one of the major architects of Riga, responsible for many of the buildings we've been talking about.) On the other hand, Eisenstein made films for the Soviets about the glorious revolution. I guess the Latvians decided he was great but misguided.'
The Motor Museum was the brainchild of the Antique Automobile Club of Latvia, apparently one of the more enthusiastic antique auto clubs of the world. Russia got her first cars from a factory in Riga, so automobile history goes back quite a ways here. So even though we're not much on the way of car buffs, this is a major local attraction that we figured we should see. This is a collection of famous cars that would do any casino in Las Vegas proud. They have historical cars and models of many more as well as photographs. Included with some of the classic cars are actual waxwork figures of the original owners. They have an armor-plated 1949 Zis weighing eight tons. Its proud owner was a pleasant-looking moustached gentleman named Josef Stalin. Standing next to his 1934 Lincoln is Maxim Gorky, or at least a wax image. There is a Rolls Royce whose original owner was a gasoline enthusiast named Molotov. Erich Honecker's Mercedes 460 has had all symbols of Mercedes removed. Why advertise capitalism? Of course, the centerpiece is a badly wrecked Rolls Royce Silver Shadow (black despite the name). The driver apparently piled it into a truck. Behind the wheel is a stunned-looking wax statue of Leonid Brezhnev. Apparently after his accident the Soviet press claimed Brezhnev was not making appearances because of a 'bad cold.' The truck driver, Mark speculates, went on in his career to deliver frozen fish someplace where he did not need a special freezer truck.
There are two floors of cars, most with famous owners, or perhaps famous only to car enthusiasts.
After we stopped for a Coca-Cola. The woman short-changed us 10 santimu. Mark tried to explain, but language got in the way. Evelyn popped up and wrote '5.00-2x0.35=4.30'. We find pen and paper make communications a lot easier. Walking back to the bus stop, we walked via some high-tension lines that actually buzzed. We walked a little faster, unlike the two women who were sunbathing under them. Instead of taking the bus from the nearest stop, we walked down a couple of bus stops because there was supposedly a film studio, Kinostudija, along that road (Shmerla iela). We found it, but it was pretty much closed up for the weekend. (We could see the top of what we suppose was a sound stage. |
