Riga, Latvia (Day One)

We had another sea day yesterday, and today we arrived in Riga, Latvia.

Because we didn’t arrive until 1pm, I had a morning class. We’ll be staying here overnight, though, and leaving at 1pm tomorrow, which gives us plenty of time to explore.

Riga is another city we’ve never been to before, so we decided to take the shuttle bus into town, mostly to see where it drops people off, but with the vague notion that we should almost certainly be able to walk back to the ship without having to catch a return bus. As it happened, we just missed the half-hourly shuttle by only a couple of minutes, which meant we then spent the next half an hour sat on the bus waiting for it to leave, which was a little frustrating to say the least. We really needn’t have bothered; we realised very quickly that it would be very easy to walk into Riga, it not being very far into the city at all, but also – just to make things worse – the shuttle was held up in rush hour traffic, so it seemed to take ages to get to the drop-off point.

Once there, our first stop was St Peter’s Church, where we bought a ticket to go up the tower, which was via a lift – so, no steps to climb. The views were definitely worth the ticket price…

From here, we headed towards the Freedom Monument

and then to the Powder Tower, which is now a war museum.

On our way back towards the ship, we paused to admire part of the old medieval City Walls, which looked like someone had just chopped it off. We passed Riga Castle, which is also a museum, but it was getting late, so everywhere was closing. The final stretch was alongside the river, and back the port.

We’re here overnight, so we plan to take another walk into the city tomorrow morning before leaving at 1pm (I have another class tomorrow afternoon. I took this rather lovely photo of the sunset from the balcony…