Jomas Seta Jurmala

... a little passenger ferry to go from A to B, this was a freakin cruise ship!! I was on board the Silvn Festival from Riga to Stockholm. This thing had 9 floors, with everything you could want from a onboard supermarket, cinema, salon, disco, and live band. holy jeeves. I was in a female cabin with a Lithuanian gal named Elena, who was similar to myself (as in she was going to a conference in Stockholm, hers was on EU development). I stayed out on ...

... it by a black marker and moved out to town. Of course, there was another gorgeous day before me. Jelgava is the fourth biggest town of Latvia, and judging by what is said and written about it, one would assume that according to its significance it's even higher up on the ladder. At first sight already, you could see it was a very charming town and it was obvious it merited at least one whole day to be seen properly, and not only three or four hours that I was able to set ...

... and, getting confused as to which way our clocks would need to be turned once we enterd the new time zone, we initially thought that we would be arriving in Lativa at 10:40am Latvian. As time ticked on and we showed no sign of arriving we began to panic a little as, if we were right about the time, the train was running alarmingly late and we were going to be cutting it very fine to get to our flight on time. I eventually worked out that as we were traveling west, we were ...

... up and were fine. We started the day with a good look around Old Riga (the old town), taking in sights such as Black Gates house, the Swedish Gate, Cat's House, the Gunpowder Tower, and the churches and cathedrals of course. We were dissapointed with the fact that St Peter's Cathedral's tower was closed to the public, as it offers superb views of the old town. So we moved on to see another Cathedral, the Dome Cathedral. This was great inside, a bit like ...

... had organised a pub crawl (starting at 11.30pm and in his own words called it the 'death crawl'). this is a big change of pace from generally our travells to date but travelling is all about actively participating in the local culture so out we went (in we came at about 5.30am). a good night was had by all. Needless to say we felt particuly sorry for everyone who arrived on the sunday... Today is Monday and after 2 and a half days in Riga we have finally ...

... were closed; perhaps these were the ones written in English. Mary Moment of Brilliance #1: The security guard started gesturing for us to leave as we entered one of the exhibits. I thought it was closing time, but Mary realized that he wanted us to start on the other side of the exhibit, and then make our way around clockwise. So Mary didn't do ONLY embarrassing things during this trip - unfortunately, she was so ...

... on foot from then on and I had an awful job to stop him confronting the driver the next day (like we purposely tracked him down). Anyway we rock up to The Grand Palace hotel on Pils 12 which looked exceptionally nice (I had booked it on the web and it seemed to be 3/4*) and so I cockily give my name and they say they cannot find the reservation and I get a bit annoyed, as there had been some messing with the reservation on the phone earlier that day that was supposedly resolved and I ...

... to be stamped, but still a lot quicker than if we had waited in line. Then disaster struck. About 2km after going through the border, the engine died, and the car slowly rolled to a halt. We had run out of fuel. So the driver had catch a ride to the nearest fuel station (which turned out to be only about 1km away), and then hitch a ride back. Then the car wouldn't start, but finally after over an hour of waiting we got going again. We ...

... Glenn! After twiddling our thumbs for an hour, the next bus came, and jumping out at the train station... there were no more trains! So we raced over to the bus station where a bus to Riga was about to leave. We each got the last seats (at opposite ends of the bus) while a few more people that got on after us had to stand... it was a long trip back to Riga, so we were lucky! Back at the hotel, we had to pack... it was an early start the next day... off to the next country - Lithuania!

... who works there for a decent cup of coffee. We ended up sitting at the only cafe in the departures lounge drinking expensive java and watching MTV. That's pretty brutal for 5 am. Especially after having running around for a week after Jani (Summer solstice) and the Latvian Youth Song Festival. check out the pics.