Riga Rigours

 The last time I was in Riga, I was on transit to London from Tbilisi, the day before I was due to meet Mary and Huiyun. Three odd hours was just enough for a quick sniff around the Old Town. This time we happen to be on transit again, to Minsk, with the day between flights more than enough for a saunter.

We arrived quite unprepared to a bracing -4 degrees Celsius. The biting cold drew out a few gems from Mary. The most memorable came after she admitted that, although wrapped snugly in a woolen blanket she might have looked more like a burrito, she was a teddy bear. It is so cold today, she chirped, I'm going to hibernate today. And thus dawn broke.

We didn't see the sun all day, but that only added weight to the late autumnal gloom that hung heavily from the bare branches lining the cobbled paths. A very gentle drizzle fell, which did little to hinder a very enjoyable ramble. Mary liked the Old Town a lot - the cobblestone roads, spires at every turn, shops selling all sorts of knick-knacks. She felt, in her own words, like she was in a fairy tale.

Romanticizing aside, Riga really is a neat little slice of Europe. A little history is in line here. Riga has always subsisted on trade, perched as it is on the eastern edge of the trade-route-riven Baltic Sea. The settlement began to grow during the Middle Ages, being on one of the strategic riverine trading routes which the Vikings plied between the Baltic and the Black Sea. Later, Teutonic crusaders established an outpost and eventually a bishopric here in the 1200s. Trade continued to fatten Riga, with the city joining the Hanseatic League and being drawn into the wider web of northern European history. The Teutonic domination also began a seven-century period in much of which Riga fell under foreign sway - Germanic, Polish-Lithuanian, Swedish, and finally Russian with two brief twentieth-century German interludes - and which ended only definitively in 1991.

All this was visible as we walked around town. The proliferation of churches and burgher houses attested to the growth of both ecclesiastical and mercantile influence, while Teutonic gables and Russian signs are holdovers of past Germanic and Russian influences.

Here is a worthy tale. This is the Cat House, erected at the dawn of the twentieth century. So the building was commissioned by a local merchant who was also hoping to gain entry into the Great Guild located right across the street. He was denied membership, whereupon he decided to drop two statues of angry black cats, formidable omens, on the roof of his building, with their rear ends facing the Guild. A lengthy court battle ensued in which the disenchanted merchant was eventually admitted into the Guild, in return for turning the felines away. The animals have since been adopted as a beloved municipal icon adorning a host of souvenirs from fridge magnets to bottle openers.

We enjoyed the food in Riga too, thanks to the lovely recommendations from Margharita at the Naughty Squirrel. Vilhelm's Pancakes and Delisnacks were both delectable. We liked the burrito and the Danish-style fries (basically, served with brown sauce and roasted onions) we had at the latter joint.

Seems like burritos are the new kebabs.

And on to Minsk!