Party in Andrejosta

Riga, Latvia

22nd September 2007

I got up this morning and took a bus from Tallinn, Estonia down to Riga, Latvia. The bus trip takes about 5 hours. Along the way we stopped in Parnu, in southern Estonia. I hadn't been here in a year but I remembered it quite well.

The bus driver drove like a mad man and it took a lot of getting used to watching him overtake huge amounts of vehicles with little margin for error throughout our entire journey.

The coastline along the highway to Riga was amazing, it was just this really long beach that kept going and going. The forest surrounding the road was full of people picking mushrooms.

I got to Riga earlier than expected and had to wait about 15 minutes for my cousin and his girl friend to pick me up. I sat in the bus station and looked at people as they looked at me. There were all these old ladies who would look at people with this look of disgust and suspicion. Women who were young were often stunningly beautiful while women who looked a day over 35 looked really ugly. It was shocking to see such a contrast. I bet their husbands were shocked when they woke up on their wife's 35 birthday ;)

Eventually they picked me up and we headed back to their place. We spent the afternoon chatting, enjoying some beers, eating in a nearby restaurant that played traditional German polka music, drinking in a pub called "I love you" in the old town, watching videos on our computers and finally, off to an abandoned warehouse party in Andrejosta, on the river Dauga, not too far away from the city center.

It was a free but private party, you had to know the organizer or one of his friends to get in. Luckily for us, the organizer was my cousin's neighbor. They played a lot of experimental electronic music that sounded very original, unique and really good. They had setup a living room on one end of the stage. It was a ritual for one of the groups playing to re-create their living room on stage, they would sit and chill out in it for the first few minutes of their performance until they got into it.

After their performance, they let us sit with them on stage and smoke an Egyptian water pipe with them. It was really nice to be able to have that bit of interaction with them. Almost every single pic in this blog was taken by either Girts or Diana, so thank you to them for sharing them :)

I kinda felt bad for not having any Latvian language skills. This is only my second trip here so I don't think much could be asked of me, but I feel bad putting people out of their way to speak English when I am ethnic Latvian and could have learned the language in Canada. Saying that, until 2004, I never thought I could come to Latvia without a lot of trouble. Latvian seems a lot easier than Estonian though, so maybe it wouldn't be impossible to pickup. I'd need some Latvian friends around here in London and at the moment, I don't know any. Most of my friends are English or Estonian.

Norris said to me the other day that I've mastered the art of ordering food in Estonian :)