so apparently a lot of stuff is closed in riga on sunday. oh well, i guess i was in the mood for a hike with a week's worth of laundry on my back. how am i supposed to keep track of the days of the week when i'm on vacation anyway?
dirty underwear aside, riga is a nice place. it seems much more like a living breathing city than tallinn does. not that tallinn is dead, it's just that its old town is too preserved and perfect. even the city walls are still standing. that means it has become a quaint little tourist enclave that is separated from the rest of the city where the locals who aren't selling postcards live and work.
riga, on the other hand, has an old town that is woven into the fabric of the surrounding city.
they have obliterated most traces of the soviet union in both places. mrs. noz just came from the museum of the occupation of latvia which was actually quite well done. i was wondering how they would deal with the nazi period here (many latvians welcomes the nazis as liberators from the soviet occupation and because of the nazi's strong anti-communist stance), but i thought it did a good job of acknowledging that many latvians favored the nazis and yet did not whitewash nazi crimes.
anyway, tomorrow we're gonna try to leave riga and explore another bit of latvia before we move on to lithuania the day after. i've gotten a couple of emails about the new flight restrictions. honestly, i'm hoping that this all gets cleared up in the next week before we have to fly home. we have the BBC in our hotel room here and apparently the consensus in england is that the heightened security restrictions there, at least, are unsustainable. we shall see whether they last another 6 days.
