Latvia, snuggled between Lithuania and it’s Northern neighbor, Estonia, really flies under the tourist radar. This country of 2.5 million has lots to keep any traveler busy without all the tour groups you might find in other worn out former communist posts (Prague, I am talking about you!). Traveling through the country is very easy and is [...]
Nice collection of road signs and other amusing signs encountered while traveling through the Latvia. For those of you that are confused, Latvia is South of Estonia and North Lithuania. Is your 9th grade geography coming back to you? Thought I would only do one post for the entire Baltic region but the signs vary [...]
There are hundreds of benefits to traveling solo: paying more for accommodation, getting lost, eating alone, having to suffer soley through the gaps in language and communication. But my most favorite is of course, taking the ubiquitios picture of myself in some town. Here is my Latvia/Lithuania travel photo essay of the modern single traveler.
[ad# Adsense:vert/no outline] There are some cardinal rules in Latvia. 1. Beautiful people are everywhere. 6 foot giant Amazon women in skin tight jeans roam Riga. 2. High heels are obligatory wherever you go whatever you do. 3. Magenta is the hair color of choice for women over 50. 4. The new new hairstyle is [...]
Jelgava (pr: yel gava) sits in Southern Latvia about 50 kilometers from the Lithuaninan border. While spending more than 1 night here is unnecessary, the city itself is small and especially colorful, housing some very well maintained kaleidoscopic churches and palaces. While I don’t know their names, they were all about 15 minute walk from bus terminal [...]
Karosta Prison sits in the North end of Liepaja, Latvia. When the hammer & sickle flag flew over Latvia, Karosta was a military compound housing over 40,000 military personnel. The prison it’s self was once a hospital and was used for mainly for Russian solders. Today it sits in the middle of the empty compound [...]
Liepaja (pr: Lea Paya), Latvia has 2 sides. One is a small seaside town of 80,000 with waterfront park and the other is a lonely, gritty city with depressing wooden apartment houses and sullen decaying red brick ones. The city you find almost certainly depends on the state of the weather because Liepaja can go [...]
A little known fact is that Riga is dripping in early 20th Art Nouveau architecture. You wouldn’t know to look at her, but there are hundreds of little hidden gems all over the city. Some completely restored (There is a section of town where you can see about 15 different examples, all in pretty good [...]
Riga Riga, you are so beautiful. There are no if’s and’s or but’s about it. Riga rivals any major European city in architecture, nightlife, cuisine, and history, so where are all the tourists? Anyone who has ever been to Prague, rain or shine, warm or cold, knows the sheer amount of warm bodies the city [...]
Riga has a 800 or so year old history but what fascinates me most are the last 70 years of it. This starts with the Soviet occupation in 1940, then Germany’s in 1941, then the Soviet’s again from 1945 until 1991. As many as a quarter of the current population have not grown up with [...]
