Where the hell is my towel?

In a shameless emulation of another far less bewildered traveller, I give you the highly accurate account of my year in Uppsala, Sweden. Like the great man says, persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; those attempting to find a plot in it will be banished; those attempting to find a moral in it will be shot.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

The Land of Opportunity

So I went to Riga, Latvia last week because some people asked me to go and I mostly just agree to stuff.

The boat trip was much like every other boat trip across the Baltic...this one was my fifth and sixth times transversing that dull gray patch of water. The only difference was a) this boat was smaller and dingier than any other I'd been on and b) instead of travelling with a small (though loud) handful of American women, I was travelling with no less than ten exchange students from the International Media and Communications Studies crew. Henceforth I will refer to them by their self-chosen cognomen: IMCS. They are:

Three Bottle Josh: of Colorado and Napa, wine afficianado, tall and unkempt, rather awkward with a sense of repressed homosexuality about him.
Rameel: possibly the coolest guy in Sweden, a short Phillipines-born San Franciscan with excellent taste in music, a little beard, and an ever-present beanie.
Melaniea: some German girl I don't know at all.
Stevie G: a massive stubbled German, very soft-spoken after having his jaw broken in a fight at a party earlier this year. Claims to have once saved the world "from food poisoning."
Amie: one of the first people I met here, a short, overweight, deep-voiced former ballet dancer, nearly as vulgar as Ashley. Together they have a radio show they call "The Obese Hour."
Ashley: of the frog-tattooed ass, the French girlfriend who speaks Mandarin. She's a walking mass of neuroses and tells the filthiest stories of anyone I've ever met.
Goran: Swedish philosopher with a pipe and the most comfortable chair in Flogsta, apparently lately Amie's boyfriend.
Jesper: some Swedish dude.
Sofie: septalingual Finnish girlfriend of my German buddy Ben.
And lastly, Sarah, bane of my love-life and lunatic extraordinaire.

We were in three rooms all next to each other, each with two cases of beer apiece (oh duty-free shopping, how we Swedish veterans love thee!) and an abundance of bad Tunisian wine. It was on sale. We played a lot of poker and pretended to be scandalized by the filthy things Amie and Ashley spout continuously, while instead being quite bored, since we've heard essentially the same things every day since August.

Riga is a surprisingly nice city, though you get the immediate impression the whole place is owned by the Mob. There are a lot of very nice green parks, and lots of trees all over the city so in the spring with the leaves just opening and the sun shining, it doesn't look at all like it's endured seventy years of ComIntern repression. There is more conspicuous opulence than in other Eastern European cities I've visited, though it also seems to be overflowing with short, wide, scarred old homeless women.
Latvian bums, man. Easily set the bar for the most aggressive and deranged group of bums I've ever encountered. My favorite (?) was the woman who ran up to Josh with her hand out and just started screaming inarticulately at the top of her voice and followed along doing it until he threw a latt (the dull currency--the paper bills just have like brown rectangles on them, as though some committee thought "There's no famous Latvians, who are we kidding?") and she chased it.
Anyway, Riga is bigger and cleaner than Tallinn, with plenty of nice quaint buildings and impressive monuments:






It also seems bigger and more interesting than Helsinki, a city which I found to be a decided let-down. I felt like eight hours in Helsinki was about three hours too much, whereas I felt like Riga could easily have offered another day or two. Having now seen the Baltic from more sides than anyone really should (St. Petersburg is really the only Baltic city of importance that I haven't been to) I think Riga comes in a solid second behind Stockholm as the best, though possibly tied with Gdansk.
We drifted along the large park which takes up much of the center city, then along what looked like the main boulevards which branch out from the pedestrian street where that big monument pictured above is located. That's the Monument of Freedom, apparently. We found the central Market Square, the big cathedral, and finally the produce market.
I am not now, nor have I ever been interested in produce in the slightest. I quickly got bored and decided to follow the market and see where it ended. I proceeded down long lines of stalls where wrinkled apple-doll faced women in headwraps sold giant tomatoes and old brown bananas until I reached a doorway into a massive stone building. It was covered in those thick plastic strips like you might see separating the shop area from the retail floor in a hardware store. There was a faded sign painted over the door which I later learned identified the massive building as the city's zeppelin hangars.
Inside half the population of Latvia was selling bootlegs, ripoffs, knockoffs, factory defects, and just plain stolen goods. There was a full-on grocery store in there, complete with glass display cases showing off what I can only assume was bootleg cheese. The building was enormous, echoing, a riot of humanity and hardscrabble capitalism. I wandered for a while till I found a little cafe tucked away in a back corner, with four plastic tables and some plastic chairs and an ancient woman in purple who shuffled around wiping things with a dirty napkin and muttering "Aiyie-yie-yie-yie."
I bought what I assumed was a donut, but which turned out to be filled not with scrumptious jelly but in fact with some sort of incredibly greasy pig gristle. I indulged in a favorite pasttime of mine: stating my present circumstances in one sentence, to gauge the absurdity. So I said to myself, "Self, I'm eating a pig-gristle donut in a black market held in a zeppelin hangar in Latvia."

I hooked back up with IMCS after that and we wandered some more, stopping by the big Town Hall Square, where there's a statue of Roland (wasn't he French?) and a building from 1337 called (inexplicably, as far as I'm concerned) "Hall of the Blackheads."




Then we went to eat, the way you do, and I discovered that Latvian food is the heaviest, most massive and hearty fare on the planet. It consists entirely of meat fried in grease, potatoes fried in grease, and grease fried in more grease. It was a sort of crazy buffet place and the guy kept piling this stuff on my plate until I was reminded of that classic bit of advice: "Never eat more than you can lift."
So I probably consumed a solid kilo or so of grease and a liter and a half of dark Latvian ale and then discovered I didn't much care about the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia anymore. Or about anything, really. I had achieved Nirvana.

We dragged back to the boat, drank our way home, blah blah, the usual. Nothing especially surreal happened, nor do I have anything else of interest to report at this time. I give Riga three stars out of four--not worth it's own trip, but if it happens to somehow be on the way to or from somewhere else you're going, it's definitely worth a stop. Or a cruise from Stockholm for twelve bucks.

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