Riga, A Russian Taxi Driver’s Perspective

For evening meal we choose the out-of-town Lido amusement park where we had been before on our previous visit.  Kim was certain that it was a very precise eight-minute walk but we were all pleased that we overruled her and took the twenty-minute taxi ride instead.

The Lido looked wonderful, there was a skating rink with people enjoying themselves on the ice, someone had forgotten to switch off the Christmas lights and the whole place was like a huge fairy grotto made all the more impressive with the liberal covering of snow below our feet and a clear velvet black sky above our heads.  Inside there was a sumptuous display of self service fare all carefully arranged by meat types which to be honest only vaguely assisted selection, faced as we were by an overwhelming choice of food.

This place didn’t seem to fit the vision of Latvia as being a place to get away from and move to the east of England instead.  I know that with the lowest average wage it is officially the poorest country in the EU, and for that reason tens of thousands of Latvians have left for England where they can earn as much in a week as they earn in a month back home but this place was lively and vibrant, the food was excellent and inexpensive, and the customers seemed affluent and happy.  With women in stylish fur coats and extravagant high heel boots none of this seemed consistent with tales of migrant worker woes back home!

The journey back to the hotel was one of the highlights of the holiday! We left the Lido and looked for a taxi and it was just our luck to select one with a lunatic escaped from an asylum for a driver.  When it comes to taxi drivers we certainly can pick them.

Kim made the first approach and asked if he could take some of us back to Riga and to our surprise he indicated that he could take all five of us in his Renault Megane.

This was a vehicle that was clearly unsuitable for accommodating five passengers and probably not licensed to do so either!  Kim doubted this and just for clarification enquired a second time and clearly running short on patience he gave her his “why can’t this stupid woman understand look”, and immediately increased his carrying capacity to an absurdly optimistic eight!  Kim looked even more startled by this and even examined the interior of the car for concealed seats by sticking her head through the open window.  He responded by raising his eyeballs so far into the top of his head that if he’d had laser vision he would have fried his brains.  This was our cue to accept the five in a taxi invitation and we piled in.

Then the fun really started!  He immediately quizzed us about our national origins: “Where are you from?” He enquired, “England” said Micky, “London?”he followed up.  This is a standard opening conversation with a European taxi driver that frequent travellers will be familiar with; the only place they really know in England is the capital, and sometimes Manchester, so they always make reference to it “No, Lincolnshire” Micky informed him without managing to raise a flicker of recognition and immediately closing down this topic of conversation.

Taxi driver “Do you know Tony Blair?”, Micky “Well, not personally, no”

The scary driver went on to explain how from his personal perspective life was desperately unfair in Latvia.  From his explanation of conditions we discovered that he was a Russian living in Riga and by his own self-assessment suffering all sorts of discrimination (which is hardly surprising really when they (the Russians) had spent forty years or so kicking the shit out of the place).  His solution to the problem was the advocacy of a red revolution and I for one thought it sensible not to disagree too robustly.   He spoke with a thick Russian accent and had the unfortunate habit of preceding each statement with an unpleasant phlegmy hack that was half cough and half retch and definitely only half human.

“Times are hard, it is very expensive to live in Riga”, “No way” said Micky, half mocking him now, “This place is very reasonable!” This led to a few seconds of choking laughter and uncontrollable hacking by the driver and after a few more cost of living exchanges Micky, fully mocking him now, did eventually concede that life was getting a bit tougher in the west; “Yes,” he said “I have to agree, things are getting harder in England too, look at us, we used to have two wives each but now we can only afford one and a third to share between us!”

Then the driver lamented that it would cost him a month’s wages to stay three nights in a Riga hotel and again Micky put him straight and corrected his estimate to just the one night. This man was good fun and he even thought it was amusing when we directed him to the wrong hotel and he had to make readjustments to his route to get us to our intended destination.  And it only cost ten Lats, that’s what I call good value, a taxi ride, conversation and excellent entertainment thrown in.

Actually Russians have had a bit of a hard time since independence because when Latvia broke free in 1991, it granted automatic citizenship to those who had lived in the first independent Latvian state, between 1918 and 1940, but not to those who immigrated here after the war, when Latvia was occupied by the Soviet Union.

Under Soviet rule during the Stalin years thousands were arrested and sent to Siberian labour camps, or executed. Later, hundreds of thousands of Russians, Belarussians and Ukrainians flooded into the republic under a deliberate policy of Russification. The Latvian language was squeezed out of official use.  Latvians were resentful citizens of the USSR and by 1991 they comprised only half of the population of their own country, while in Riga only a third were Latvian.

Today Latvia is determined to revive the national identity. It says that its policy towards Russians who immigrated there during the Soviet period is aimed not at punishing them for the ‘crimes’ of the Soviet regime but at ensuring that they learn Latvian and integrate fully into society. In order to naturalise, Russians must take a test in Latvian, and pass an exam about Latvian history in which they must ‘correctly’ answer that the country was occupied and colonised, not liberated, by the Soviet Union in 1945.

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More posts about Riga…

Jurmala by Train

Jurmala

Riga – The Skyline Bar

Works outing to Riga

Riga- Lunch at the Lido

Rosa Klebb’s endurance sightseeing tour of Riga

Sigulda, Latvia

Latvia Dining – a Chronic Case of Indecision

Jurmala, Latvia

Riga sightseeing

Riga – Festival of the Family and a BBQ

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Tallinn, Pirita

The weather in the morning was exactly the same as the day before and the snow we had hoped for, and the taxi driver had promised, had failed to make an appearance.  A thick blanket of cloud was draped over the city and the darkness made it seem earlier than it really was.

The sightseeing contingent of the party was reduced from eight to six as Mike W and Helene made the strange alternative choice of a shopping morning and the rest of us set out with the intention of finding the bus station and taking a trip along the coast to the marina and beach at nearby Pirita.

We skirted the old town and headed for the ring road and found a busy bus terminal where we bought tickets from a helpful lady in a nearby kiosk who explained with little English and a great deal of difficulty that we needed to catch the number 5 from a bus stop a little way away and through an adjacent park.

Unless the local Estonian people could speak English (and thankfully many of them could) communication was quite difficult because unlike most European languages, which evolved from ‘Indo-European‘, Estonian belongs instead to the impenetrable Finno-Ugric branch of languages, making it most similar to two of the World’s most difficult languages to learn, Finnish and Hungarian with an uncommonly large number of vowels which make it a bit of a mouthful for beginners.

We found the bus stop and didn’t have long to wait for the bright green flexi-bus to arrive and once on board we were away and heading out of the city past the busy ferry terminal and then onto a road that followed the shoreline north.  There was a scrubby beach and a bleak uninviting grey sea that stretched out beyond a couple of islands and then on to Finland.  We had considered taking a trip to Helsinki and if the weather had been better, perhaps with some blue sky and sunshine, then we might have made the two hour crossing but the Gulf of Finland didn’t look especially inviting today.

After fifteen minutes we arrived on the outskirts of Pirita and the bus turned inland.  This is where we should have got off but Mike, who was in charge of the map, was confident that this would only be a short detour and the bus would promptly rejoin the main road and take us into the middle of town.  At the first junction he predicted a left hand turn but the bus went right but there was another junction ahead and he was certain this would turn left but again it went right and we were heading further inland and by now it was too late to get off.  Not sure of where we were going we asked a fellow passenger who confirmed that the bus would eventually arrive in Pirita but he seemed genuinely bemused why we hadn’t got off earlier.

The bus passed through deciduous beech woods completely stripped bare of leaves – now a golden carpet, open parkland and communities of little wooden houses all shut up in preparation for four long months of winter.  It was a pretty little route that turned out to be one of the more up market suburbs of the city and finally we came to a small commercial centre where the bus turned around and took us all the way back in the opposite direction.  And I mean all the way back because at the turn off where we should have left the bus in the first place it turned around to set off back to Tallinn and we had to leave it in exactly the place that we should have thirty minutes earlier.  We had no complaints however because this had been a good value trip at only 9 Eeks (about .60p).

As the bus disappeared down the road we wondered if we had made the right decision because the place was austere and charmless with a desolate sea front with only a concrete promenade of obviously inadequate construction that had completely collapsed into the water and was no longer suitable for its intended purpose.  Everyone declared it to be coffee time but all that we could find was a forlorn looking monster of a hotel called the Pirita Top Spa that turned out to be a dreary leftover from the days of Soviet occupation.

It had been constructed in the late 1970s and now, as though a symbol of all that communism stood for in Eastern Europe, it is in the advanced stages of decay with crumbling concrete, peeling paintwork and a harsh unattractive appearance and just like communism one day soon it will be gone completely.    It must have been lovely having the Soviets as imperial occupiers because one of the most burdensome legacies of the post war era is the environmental damage they inflicted on their unwilling hosts and this place certainly contributed to that.  As well as monstrosities such as this they left behind widespread pollution and across military installations on Estonian territory the army dumped hundreds of thousands of tons of jet fuel into the ground, improperly disposed of toxic chemicals, and discarded outdated explosives and weapons in coastal and inland waters.

The Estonian people resented the occupation and after regaining independence in 1991 the restored Republic only recognised citizenship of those who were a citizen prior to the Soviet occupation. This affected people who had arrived in the country after 1940, the majority of whom were ethnic Russians who were now required to have knowledge of Estonian language and history before being granted citizenship.  The United Nations considers this to be a breach of human rights and who am I to say whether it is right or wrong?

Inside the hotel there had been some effort and a bit of an improvement but I don’t think I will be booking my summer holidays there.  After returning home I checked the hotel web sites for customer reviews and this simply confirmed this decision for me.

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g274958-d277102-Reviews-Pirita_Top_Spa_Hotel-Tallinn.html

From the outside we could see that the hotel was built in the style of a beached ocean liner and the reason for this was that it was constructed as a training camp for the 1980 USSR Olympic team so presumably then, not designed for comfort and pleasure.  It has undergone a couple of refurbishments but it must be hard to do anything with a building erected in this period, and one thing for certain is that it will never look good.  The 1980 Summer Olympics were held in Moscow and the yachting events were held here in Tallinn, which was the first time that the Games were held in Eastern Europe and that an event took place in an occupied country.

Twenty-one years later Estonia was firmly part of the west and was the first ex Soviet occupied country to win the Eurovision Song Contest followed in the following year by neighbours Latvia.

It certainly was a curious structure, a monument to the past with no place in the future.  We wandered around the boats and the inadequadetly stocked sports shops and then when we certain that we hadn’t missed anything returned to the bus stop and caught the 1A back into Tallinn, this time going directly there without Mike’s unnecessary detour.

Tallinn, Old Town

Before dining however we walked through to the opposite side of town and along the ‘wall of woolens’, so called because here there were more market stalls cut into the arches of the original city wall and then we were tempted to part with thirty Eeks each to climb to the top of the tower for a two hundred metre elevated walk looking down over the rooftops and the narrow medieval streets below.  Actually it wasn’t that thrilling it has to be said but we couldn’t really expect a great deal more for only £2 a ticket.

Back at street level we wandered down the delightful St Catherine’s Passage in between fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth century buildings where artisans and craftsmen and women were preserving medieval crafts such as glass blowing, intricate iron work, jewellery and leather work.  At  the end of the passage was a basement restaurant where we stopped for a bowl of soup and a glass of beer and we successfully negotiated the potential crisis moment when Sue and Christine both found something on the menu that they could order with confidence and enjoy.

By mid afternoon when we left the subterranean restaurant it was already starting to get dark because thanks to the ‘polar night’ phenomenon, in the Winter, Tallinn, on the same line of latitude as the Shetland Isles, enjoys only a few short hours of daylight. It has late sunrises and early sunsets, which creates incredibly short days and endlessly long nights.  On an overcast day like today the effect was even worse and it is little wonder that Tallinners have been known to have a tendency toward seasonal depression as a result.

In the market the lights on the Christmas tree were starting to appear brighter and the fairy lights decorating the wooden market stalls looked inviting and tempting.  We walked through once more and planned to return later and then with the temperature dropping again and a renewed optimism about the prospects of snow we made our way back to the Von Stackelberg.

We needed some beers and a bottle of wine but we didn’t pass any shops so as it was still early Mike S and I walked around the city ring road in search of a mini market.  The route we chose took us towards the railway station and this wasn’t any real surprise because is a railway man by profession and enthusiasm and after about a kilometre or so we were outside the ticket office and an impressive Soviet Steam Engine, the L2317, a 2-10-0 locomotive built in 1953 in Russia at a factory in the Moscow railway suburb city of Kolomna.

The Russian L-series locomotives were one of the more advanced steam locomotives built in the former Soviet Union. They used stocker to feed coal and had a relatively low axle load of eighteen  tonnes to be compatible with the clapped-out railroads of post war Eastern Europe.  It was a mighty black iron beast with red wheels of almost ninety tonnes that really deserved a name rather than just a number, which during its working life pulled mostly freight trains between Russia and Estonia and after it was decommissioned was rather ignominiously used as a static boiler to heat nearby houses.  It has been externally restored now and sits tall and proud outside the railway station, which was where we went next.

We were now in the working part of the city and a long way from the Christmas market and the students dressed in medieval costumes and the overpriced restaurants.  The station felt tired and past its best and next to it was a tram station that conjured up dreary images of the old days of the Soviet Empire and what was surprising was that the passengers on board looked grey and tired and firmly locked permanently into a 1960s Tallinn time warp.  The trams whirred and screeched and sounded bells to warn of their approach as they drew up and pulled off, setting down and picking up and clattering away again between the rows of old wooden houses and out towards the proletarian flats of the city suburbs.

Next to the station in an ugly 1970s concrete shopping mall we came across a two-story traditional food market selling fish, meat, vegetables and everything for the working class weekly shop.  Everything that is apart from alcohol so we were about to give up when we came across a small kiosk with cans of Estonian beer in the fridge and a screw cap bottle of blossom hill red wine.  Not exactly traditional but without a corkscrew we were severely limited for choice.

Mike and I returned to the hotel and shared out the alcohol.  I went back to the room to drink it and Mike went back for a second look at the L2317 and the finer details of the Baltic Station that we had missed the first time around.

Later we all met up in reception and wrapped up in hats, scarves and thermal gloves walked back into town making our way past the skating rink that we decided to leave until tomorrow, towards the Raekoja Plats where we were surprised to find the market closed.  It was only eight o’clock and I would have thought a Times listed top twenty Christmas market would still be open in the evening.

We dealt with the disappointment as best we could and then began the search for a suitable eating establishment.  We didn’t take too long over this and agreed upon one of the medieval banquet houses, the Peppersack, that was located in an old building not far from the Town Hall Square.  There was a good menu of hearty food and we enjoyed meat skewers and fillets and best of all plenty of Estonian beer and wine to wash it all down.

All we needed now was some snow but sadly there was none as we left the restaurant and walked back to the hotel with the objective of a final night cap.  There was no hope of that at the Von Stackleberg because the bar was closed so we wandered across the road instead to a modern glitzy hotel that was still open, and our final drink and made our day one assessment of Tallinn, which we agreed we all liked, before calling it a day and agreeing to meet at nine o’clock in the morning for breakfast.

Tallinn, Estonia

This year we have spent a lot of time in Western Europe and especially Spain but in December it is time to go East and visit a Christmas market and despite being disappointed in previous years on visits to Slovenia and Austria, which had been full of cheap trash from the far east, we remembered that the market in Riga in Latvia had been very good so we chose to return this year to the Baltic.

Having visited Riga several times in recent years we looked this time for an alternative destination and settled on Tallinn in Estonia.

When the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia made their accession into the European Union in 2004, few people, me included, were even remotely aware of where the mysterious sounding capital cities of Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn actually were.  Up until the end of the 1980s, and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, these countries were subsumed in any World Atlas into the massive smear of scarlet that represented the USSR and these once great cities had been hidden behind the Iron Curtain for so long that they had disappeared from the consciousness of many of their Western neighbours.

Even after they were restored to independence the view of most people was that many years under the jackboot of communism rendered them greyer than an Old Trafford sky on the first day of an Ashes Test Match and they didn’t feature on many travel itineraries.   But Estonia has caught up quickly, it has more internet access than any other EU country, is the birthplace of the internet application Skype and in 2009 it was ranked sixth in the Press Freedom Index, which is an annual ranking of countries, compiled and published by ‘Reporters without Borders’ based upon an assessment of press freedom records.

Estonia is located in the North East of Europe (the most Northerly of the three Baltic States) and South of the Gulf of Finland, which separates the country from Scandinavia. It has nearly four thousand kilometres of coastline and one thousand, five hundred and twenty islands in the Baltic Sea.  It is one of the smallest countries in Europe (148th in the world), and although it is larger than both Belgium and the Netherlands the population is a little over 1.3 million.

Whilst Estonia is a member state of the European Union it probably counts itself lucky that it hasn’t met the economic criteria to join the Eurozone and this is a country that makes financial transactions in thousands rather than tens of units so for the first time since Croatia in June we had a wallet full of unfamiliar notes and were enjoying the self deception of feeling like millionaires.

It was a mid afternoon flight to Tallinn, which meant with the two-hour time difference that we didn’t arrive in Estonia until just after seven o’clock.  Because we were flying due east we had flown deep into the night and once outside the cabin there was an icy blast from a spiteful wind that was blowing sub-zero temperatures around the Lennart Meri Airport (named after the second President of the Republic) that made us securely fasten our jackets and pull our hats down over our ears.

Thankfully it didn’t take long to get through passport control and the attentive police sniffer dog and make our way outside of the small airport building to find the best way of getting into the city.  It wasn’t any warmer outside the arrivals hall as the wind forced its way under the canopies and sent the cold air searching into every corner.

As we wanted to get there as quickly as possible it was a bit late to queue for a bus so on this occasion we broke one of our normal travelling rules and took a taxi for the four kilometre journey to the city and to our hotel the Von Stackelberg just on the edge of the old town.  Two taxis for the eight of us because this was a holiday club trip, which was sadly one member short because Micky had had to cancel due to family business.  Fellow founder members Sue and Christine were in the group and so were Mike and Margaret who had been with us before (Salzburg) and there were two new faces this time, Mike and Helene.

Our Taxi driver understood and spoke perfect English and he gave us a brief history of the city and the tourist industry, made some dining recommendations and gave us a weather forecast all in the space of fifteen minutes before we arrived at the hotel.

The Von Stackelberg was an old building that had been completely refurbished and the reception was cosy with a bright modern style.  After a complimentary drink we found our superior Zen room on the third floor and were delighted with the view from the window of the city and the floodlit castle.  Although it was cold outside the room was warm and comfortable and so too  was the basement bar and restaurant where we reassembled together after a few minutes of unpacking for a first drink in Estonia.

The waitress was keen that we order food but we didn’t have time for that because we wanted to go to the city for the market and some sightseeing so we explained this to her as best we could and then set off into town on foot.  We passed underneath the floodlit walls of the Toompea Castle, the home of the Estonian Parliament, and then below the tower of the Aleksander Nevski Russian Orthodox Cathedral and on to an elevated part of the town where there were viewing platforms that looked out over the northern half of the old town, the city port and the Gulf of Finland beyond that.

It was half past nine and the place was strangely deserted, perhaps because it was Sunday or maybe because it was just so cold.  There were no signs of any restaurants and as we weren’t sure just how to get to the middle of the old town we worried about running out of time so all agreed that we should return to the hotel and eat there.  A couple of years ago we arrived late on a Sunday night in Riga and everywhere was closed like this so this seemed like a good idea.

Back at the Von Stackelberg the friendly waitress in the black uniform that matched the contemporary hotel décor was pleased to see us and after preparing a table took our orders and served us with beer and wine.  The food didn’t take long to come and it was tasty and filling and we congratulated ourselves on a good decision to return to the warmth of the hotel basement rather that wander about aimlessly in the chilly back streets and alleys of Tallinn old town.