North Sea Serenade – Riga, Latvia

Today was a beautiful lazy day because we didn’t get into port until 11:30 A.  We took a tour of Riga and it was very similar to Tallinn.  It’s so sad to see what countless years of occupation and depravation can do to a society.  The buildings are bleak and colorless because the Soviets did not want the working class to see the remains of the bourgeois society and so simply painted entire buildings black, gray or brown.  It is such a shame because the buildings here are done in a lovely art deco style with reliefs of Greek gods and goddesses on the faces of the buildings which now blend into the background because it is all one color. Oh and they planted trees in front of the buildings so they couldn’t see them even more.

The past few years have not been kind to Riga and the buildings are worn and decayed and are in need of some vital renovation.  We saw the Freedom Monument – which is beautiful only because these poor people have been conquered again and again because of their strategic location to the Baltic.  They have been conquered by the Swedes, the Danes, the Russians (the Empire not the Soviets – yet), the Germans and then finally the USSR.  And each occupation took both their natural resources and their youth.  And now the recession is taking them too.  She said something like 40% of the youth have left to find work in other European Union countries and will never return. 

Well anyway – we saw the National Opera House which was originally built by the first German land barons but was very pretty.  We went to the Town Hall Square and she told us a very interesting story about the sailors who traveled and brought back the first black men from Africa and they were so amazed that people actually had black skin that they clad them in the finest clothes they could offer and so only their heads showed and the people just naturally assumed that the only part of them that was black was their heads.  So they called them the blackheads.  The name stuck and was then applied not only to the black people who came to the country but also the sailors and foreigners which then followed.  

We saw St. Peter’s Church which was lovely but definitely needs some renovation.  Then we went across the Daugava River and the last two stops I didn’t even get out of the bus.  The last was the Riga Castle and it was nothing special even though it was apparently built in the 1200s.  But it also needs some work.

So now we are on our way to Visby, Sweden.  We came back to the ship, lost at trivia, lost at bingo and now are going to a reception with the captain because we are returning Regent sailors.  Yay us.  J