Day 512: Train to Riga

Another day, another country! Up super early this morning, since we had an 8:15am train to catch. Said a fond farewell to our studio apartment which has been a great little spot for the past week. Walked over to the train station and boarded with plenty of time to spare - nice new train with wifi and power sockets, though I spent a lot of the trip listening to podcasts.

It's funny, the three Baltic countries are usually mentioned in the same breath and travelled together, but they're actually not that well connected to each other. Most of their infrastructure from the 20th century was developed with the intention of connecting to Moscow rather than anywhere else! So we rode the train for three hours to a small town on the border with Latvia.

Here we hopped out and had a three hour wait for the Latvian train to turn up. So we chucked our stuff in a luggage locker and headed into the town. Fairly quite, though we managed to find a good restaurant where we had a couple of drinks and some mains for about 25 euros. Crazy that we can have so much when in most of the Nordic countries a single dish costs 25 euros.

Made our way back to the station where the train had arrived and was waiting, so we hopped on and eventually crossed into Latvia. This was another three hour ride, with excellent wifi though no power sockets this time.

Caught a tram across downtown Riga to our Airbnb, which we'd both kind of forgotten was a basement. But rather than a basement, this was basically a cellar, complete with musty smell and bare stone walls. Very odd, though we got used to it. Would've been nice to have at least one window though, particularly since it was warm and sunny outside!

Not wanting to sit around in a damp cellar, we headed out for dinner and ate at a burger restaurant (ironically neither of us had burgers) which came complete with a craft beer wall. They gave you a swipe card and you basically poured your own beers, which were charged at a per mL rate - drink as much or as little as you please. I had small amounts of three different Latvian beers which were quite nice!Read more