Jūrmala

Thirty-five minutes on the train from Riga and we were in Majori, one of the major towns in Jurmala, the Baltic equivalent of the French Riviera, home to jet-setting, high-flying, glamorous Russians. Strangely in the middle of winter there didn't appear to be many of them around!

We started our visit with a walk down the main drag, Jomas iela. Along the route there were many shops and restaurants, and a number of set-ups that looked like in the middle of summer would make a pretty awesome beer garden. We chose one of the restaurants, Alus Krodzins, for our lunch. As we'd become accustomed to, we started the meal with some Latvian garlic bread, washed down with a couple of beers, I had a Brengulu Lager and Jonny had a Tervetes Alus. For lunch we then had chicken shashlik and a pork chop with cheese with potatoes to share. Both these meals were very nice.

After a couple more beers we set off on a walk along the beach. The beach was really cool! The sand underneath your feet was frozen and there was a barrier of snow, which was where the high tide reached up the beach. Surprisingly, we weren't the only nutters walking along the beach in the middle of winter, everyone was very rugged up because it was quite blowy. We reached Dzintari and turned around, walking back past Majori and further along the beach.

We came off the beach and walked back into town along Juras iela, which is home to a good stretch of colourful art deco wooden houses. These houses were in various states of disrepair, as you can see from the photo, with the beautiful green house with ornate detail in the third photo across the road from the bleak, abandoned hotel in the fourth photo. Although there were lots of beautifully maintained houses, there appeared to be a disproportionate number of abandoned and rundown places. The only reasoning we could come up with for this was that potentially after the downfall of the USSR these properties had been taken from the owners, but the government had not sold them on, leaving them to fall into disrepair. This problem could be further enhanced by the current travel sanctions placed on Russia and the effect that this may have on the tourism industry in Jurmala.

Post-walk we were in need of a warming beverage, so returned to Alus Krodzins to continue where we left off. We knocked off a couple more and had a chat to another pub-goer, Janis, a local who was very surprised that an Aussie and a Brit would bother visiting Latvia. At this stage we had met three Latvians, Janis and his son Gustav Janis from the tour and Janis from the pub, which lead us to confirm that Janis is the most common name in Latvia.

We made a dash for the train to get us back to Riga, only to see it moving away from the platform. Fortunately while we were in the pub it had been snowing, so missing the train gave us the opportunity to play in the snow that had fallen throughout the day! I built a mini snowman on top of the garbage bin and a number of snowballs were thrown. We were a little cold and wet getting back on the train into Riga.Read more