Castles, Cake, and Open Road

This post is just for the odds and ends of Riga I didn't put in the other ones but don't want to leave out! One of my favorite things we did was an Art Nouveau walk. Art Nouveau is a style of both architecture and art popular between around 1890 and 1910, and Riga has the highest concentration of such architecture in the world in its center. This construction exploded at the turn of the century in Riga, because the bourgeoisie needed somewhere appropriately impressive to live.  The detail and whimsy are amazing, and I spent a good amount of time gawking with my head turned up.  We also went to the Riga Ghetto and Latvian Holocaust Museum, which as one would expect is very sobering. The stones there are actually brought from the Riga Ghetto, and the walls list the 70,000 Latvians and 25,000 other European Jews who were brought to Latvia to be murdered.  In the room above, each glowing box had a picture...

Riga was phenomenal! Its Old Town was much larger than I expected, and that combined with about a 20-minute walk from our hotel had us walking about 24 miles over the three days. (Elowen, of course, rode in her baby chariot.) After our first drizzly day, the next two were sunny and perfect--crisp but not cold--and ideal for exploring. Our walk down the Esplanade to Old Town took us down past the Riga Nativity of Christ Orthodox Cathedral, which during the Soviet era was turned into a planetarium and a church but is now once again a church. Elowen loved the ringing bells and was dancing down the street when we walked by. We also, of course, had to take our pictures in the Latvia sign.  Our first stop of the day was Central Market, where each hall had its own specialty--fish, meat, dairy, sweets, and bread. It's also a Unesco World Heritage Site and the largest market in Europe! We bought Elowen a bag of blueberries, her true love, and ...