Riga!

So I've made it to Riga, capital of Latvia, and have left Russia behind! The train journey was long, nearly 13 hours from Saint Petersburg altogether. After one of the most frantic scrambles of my life, I jumped on the train ten minutes before it left the impressive art nouveau Vitebsky train station in Petersburg and I was on my way out of Russia! For some reason not many people take the train from Petersburg to Riga in the middle of the winter so there were only two of us in the 6-person sleeping compartment. My travelling companion was a middle-aged man from Riga called Sergei who looked like an Orthodox priest with his dark formal-looking clothes, scraggly dark beard and quiet, gentle manners.

We sipped tea from our cool metal Soviet-era railway mugs (complete with engraving of the globe surmounted by the Kremlin, encircled by a cloud of orbiting Sputnik satellites and moonward-bound rockets!) and chatted a bit, or rather he chatted and I attempted a look of comprehension and confused the heck out of him when I tried to say anything much. So our talk died out pretty soon and I slept for most of the trip, besides a frightful awakening of incoming jackboots at 4:30 AM when the Russian border guards came on board as we reached the frontier! They were very thorough - the one guard in camo fatigues and ushanka checked all under and behind the radiators with his maglight while the mother of all border guards, an intimidating older women with dyed bright red hair and a long forest green greatcoat, made Sergei disassemble his luggage for her. I waited for my turn, starting to sweat a little and thinking about the two old coins (contraband!) hidden deep within my suitcase. They couldn't possibly detain me for those.. no, of course not.. Then she turned to me and asked something in Russian, which I totally misheard but thought must be something like "Do you have anything to declare?" I hesitated, unsure, then took a 50-50 chance and nervously blurted out, "err... nyet!" Immediately I sensed it was the wrong answer to whatever she had actually asked as Sergei gave a strange frown and the lady responded with a shocked and icy "Nyet??" I muttered and blustered, but she just turned and disappeared without anything further down the corridor of the train, probably for reinforcements to take me off - oh no! Now I was really sweating but thank goodness she never came back, and I realized after, didn't even glance at my luggage so I guess I said the right thing after all. It seems odd that they'd go to so much trouble to rifle through Sergei's things and search every nook and cranny and not even take a peak into my bulging duffel bag and backpack, but I'm not complaining!

Then the train rolled over the border and it suddenly sunk in as I listened to the next batch of border guards speaking in a distinctly different (but equally fiendishly incomprehensible language) and I thought wow, I've made it through alive and well - phew! Even though Latvia's probably just as totally foreign and strange as Russia, it somehow felt reassuring to be on EU territory!

I found my hostel in Riga after a little wandering aimlessly dragging my duffel bag (those little wheels on luggage aren't made for heavy, melting snow + cobblestones I've found - skids would be better here!) gaping at the unpronounceable street signs and trying not to look too flustered. Eventually I found it - ah! Another great thing about coming to such northern places in the dead of winter is that besides there not being anyone on the train, there's no one in the hostels either! I'd booked the cheapest 10-room dormitory hall as it was the cheapest and I figured it'd do for one night, but as it turned out there's only one other person there, so I ended up getting a giant room nearly to myself!

Riga's old town is very charming - all sorts of windy cobblestone streets and steep-roofed Hanseatic houses and beautiful brick cathedrals with really unique Batlic spires. Those charming roofs can be dangerous though! I was walking along one narrow road when I heard an ominous rumble and turned around just in time to see a huge pile of wet snow sliding off the roof three stories above right onto an unsuspecting father with a baby carriage! It was scary but both of them were ok, just shaken up!

It's amazing how much Russian you hear spoken here, I'd say almost half of what I hear on the street is not Latvian. Since 1941 when the Soviet Union annexed the tiny independent Baltic States, huge numbers of Russians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians were settled here and now form a very significant minority, about 30-40 percent Russian in Latvia. Of course the Baltic peoples feel their cut lure is under threat by this (and feel to some extent that these people are intruders, forced upon them unjustly) and so Latvian is still the only official languages and the rights of this Russian minority is a hugely controversial and continuing issue. Makes our little Quebec situation look like a cake-walk! There's a very good Museum of Occupation that goes over all this and all sorts of horrendous atrocities endured by the Latvians under the periods of Nazi and Soviet occupation - you can just feel the resentment and anger the people here have for all they suffered during those Soviet years.

Looks like that's all the time I have for - tomorrow, Frankfurt!