About Riga

The 3 things I'll remember about Riga: Cheap food, cafes and beautiful girls.

Our 1st meal of fried dough with an assortment of ingredients from chives to cheese to bananas together with a cold beetroot soup costs about 2 lats + which is about 2 pounds. Nad if you want my slipshod economic analysis of it, a big mac costs 1.39 lat compared to S$3+ back home. Now Latvia isn't backward at all, throw one stone sure will hit one merc of bmw or lexus or it's your lucky day, will strike a bentley. I'm not sure why things are the way they are and this surely deserves some research on my part. But as my friend said, it sure seems like luxury on the cheap.

Riga was quite a pleasant surprise after the budget flight from London which lives up to airplanes being just airborne taxis. Open squares, cobbled roads, small paths, century old churches intermingling with little al fresco cafes - the whole works for charming European village. You could spend a whole day weather permitting to just sit there all day people watching. Maybe all this charming stuff is just confined to this area, this playground for the rich, maybe it's all an illusion - but I'm not complaining la, I'm not here to close the economic gap.

All the women here are ridiculously skinny and mostly beautiful. The stone throwing analogy also applies. Decked out in all manner of high fashion, sipping wine in the afternoon, walking the cobbled ways with much deftness on high heels. One really wonders where all these people come from. Things seem suspiciously perfect.

-a