Riga- We would never be the same again

The boat arrived in Riga at 11 am the next morning and so we had all day to do whatever there is to do in Riga, which is more than we thought. On the cruise we talked with a couple Latvian dudes who were on their annual trip to Stockholm. We asked them what they did in Stockholm and their answer was “eat McDonalds.” Which is weird, because there are many, many, many McDonalds easily found in Riga. We should know, we ate at one.

(hey, we were hungry and weren’t ready to face the language barrier quite yet!... Don’t look at me like that! Do you speak Latvian? Yeah, I didn’t think so!!!) The city is really cute though, there are tons of parks, cute old buildings, cute old buildings being torn down:

We mainly just wandered around the city, checking out churches and points of interest. Kathleen was looking through a paper that was for English speakers and found an announcement for a free ticket to a semi-final match between Riga and Skonto (another Riga based team). We decided, hey, why not? It’s free. So we wandered over to the stadium through some sort of sketchy areas of town, thinking the roar of the stadium would make it obvious to find. Well, 40 people do not make a roar. Yep, semi-final match between a cross town rival, and nada. So we walk up, I show some enormous bouncer a newspaper clipping and he says, “we don’t take this.” Before I can object, a more reasonable looking (and by that, I mean normal human size) interrupts and says that they do indeed take these. Well I keep walking, forgetting that I had everyone else’s coupons, and not thinking that they needed them since the stadium was only about 2% full, and I hear Blake, Kathleen, and Jason all yelling at me. Apparently the huge bouncer was not about to let them in without a coupon. Blake tried to alleviate the situation by joking with the bouncer, “I think there is plenty of room in here.” Yeah, bad idea Blake. I thought Blake was going to die. We are pretty sure the huge bouncer had a thing against Gingers (aka- Red heads, aka- Blake). After many a Ginger-head jokes, and one of Jason’s random tangents about how he likes to eat shredded ginger (the food, not, ewww), we came up with the best name ever for the over-sized bounder.... “The Ginger Shredder.” So we find seats (there were plenty!), already 30 minutes into the game with Skonto up 2-0. We were afraid we missed out on all the action, but Skonto, my most favoritist team ever kept on being awesome and finished 5-0. Skonto!!! (Clap, clap, clap) Skonto!!!

After the game we grabbed a beer at a bar that was completely decked out in frogs. No, really, all frogs. How weird is that? From the urban legends you hear about Eastern Europe, I suppose it could have been worse! (I luckily have never seen the movie Hostel that my parents mistakenly watched once.)