Riga

📌 We arrived in Latvia via bus, keen to see another Baltic country, this time basing ourselves in the capital, Riga, and exploring from there. Riga was a large city, it was busy and cold but we managed to explore most of it over the 4 days.

📌 We started our first full day with a trip to Cesis, this area was of interest due to its 800 year old castle and also to get a taste of Latvia outside of the city. We wandered around the small quiet old town, enjoyed some delicious and cheap coffee and then headed to visit the castle and museum. The castle was a great experience, it felt authentic as we toured the grounds ourselves, it was quiet and we had to use a flame lit lantern to navigate around the dark rooms of the castle. The museum was a nice addition also, providing an insight into Latvian history.

📌 During our days in Riga, we visited several breweries, enjoyed some cold evenings at the Christmas market drinking mulled wine and admiring the lights. We also ventured out to the art nouveau district, one of the most concentrated areas of this architecture in all of Europe. We also learnt that Latvia has approximately 40% native Russian speakers hence it was worth trying a Russian restaurant for dinner one night, this resulted in some delicious beef stroganoff, creamy cod and some standout pelmeni dumplings.

📌 One other dining highlight of Riga was eating at a mediaeval restaurant housed in a former cistern, where the waiters were servents, the food was very old fashioned and the atmosphere was very cool! We enjoyed rabbit stew, chicken, legumes and some delicious dark beer. The concept was very cool.Read more