Image by kafeole.
On the train to Riga we were sitting with a lovely woman called something like Lillian. She was a pensioner in Russia and was visiting her daughter and granddaughter whom she hadn’t seen for a long time. She didn’t speak much English and we didn’t speak much Russian but with our phrase book we managed to communicate with her. We had our photo taken with her at the end of the ride. A lovely woman to meet.
Riga was a great city. It was big enough to have a great cultural scene; opera, theatre and the like as well as a good dose of alternative youth culture; but also small enough to be friendly and pretty and liveable. I would love to go back there one day.
It was also the one place on our trip where it was cheap for us. We’d had some expectation that touring Eastern Europe would be relatively cheap, but we were very wrong. However, in Riga we bought a big dumpling lunch for two people plus a beer and a soft drink for about €2.50. It was so thrilling to not feel sick at the amount of money you’ve spent on lunch.
The day we were leaving Riga for Leipaja we walked around the markets and I felt someone fiddling with my big backpack so I swung around and said indignantly in a broad Aussie accent, “Are you right?”
The young guy just stared calmly but menacingly back at me. “Are you looking for something?” I asked him. “Is there something in my backpack that you’d like?” I kept staring him down. Eventually he said, “I don’t speak English” and walked away. Not one to take shit lying down I called after him, “Right. I see. But you know how to get into backpacks though don’t you?”
At first Tracey didn’t realise what was going on, as she was a couple of metres in front of me. After he’d left, she asked if I saw what he had in his hand. I’d seen the pig stabber that he was probably going to shred my backpack with. “No, I mean the really big knife he had”, she said. Ah… Oh well. Alls well that ends well. The funny thing was, the zip that he had opened was my compartment of dirty clothes and they were so stinky he was welcome to them!
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