Sitting here and reflecting on yesterday I have to admit that it was a strange day. I fell asleep in one of the strangest situations I have ever been in. The sun had set long ago but the sky was still glowing in a variety of colours ranging from blue to yellow. There probably are more beautiful sunsets with more colours and with more light, but none of them come close in intensity and romance to that night on the beach.

We had arrived in Riga in the morning. When we left the airplane we were greeted by a blue sky, which completely failed to contain any clouds at all. To take a short cut through an otherwise very boring story I will leave out the uninteresting details of the following events. Let’s just say that we took a bus. We then left most of our baggage in the central train station and decided to eat something.

The whole invention of lockers and being able to leave your belongings in a protected place is quite a smart one. Although in Riga the place is not only hard to find but on top of it also looks quite creepy. To find it I had to ask someone because the signs were misleading and confusing to such a degree that we walked through half of the building before I gave up and asked the lady in the ticket office. We finally found it, following the lady’s instructions, in the basement, down the stairs, opposite of the toilets. There was a long row of small lockers and a slightly smaller room behind bars with shelves and a small old bearded man standing behind them. I am consciously using the past tense in this context because when I came the next day to reclaim the baggage the whole row of lockers had miraculously vanished over night leaving only dirty shadows on the floor to be witnesses to the now deceased lockers. Any-way the small old wrinkly man takes your baggage and gives you a metal coin with a number on it in exchange. And for the ceremony of trading all your belongings for a cheap and meaningless coin you also have to give him a Lat. Regardless of how long you want to leave your baggage in there he will charge you a Lat. He did with me anyway and to indicate this he said ‘Lat’ and held up one of his fingers up as if to demonstrate this point in a more detailed way. That appears to be the price for one day, but a day doesn’t mean 24 hours, well yes it does but not the way that normal people would interpret it. It means a day from sunrise to sunrise. So when you return the next day to finally reclaim your stuff you should be prepared to pay another Lat because the inevitable will happen and he will charge you another one. And although the place looks a little like a prison or the ‘WE BUY’ area of a second-hand shop they don’t sell your baggage to customers on the other side. At least they didn’t with ours. The probability that you will get it back is quite high.

With a huge weight lifted off our shoulders my girlfriend and me began to re-explore Riga. I’m still impressed by how little it managed to change during the last year. Of course there are a few more construction sites here and there, but basically it’s still the same town that we lived in last year. Our first day in Riga was quite uninteresting, I would say. We had a late breakfast at 11 o’clock in the only remaining Pelmeni restaurant in the Old Town and then went shopping on Riga’s market. You can find it right behind the central train station and since you can see the huge market halls already from far off it will be quite hard to miss it. In the halls you can by virtually anything, from underwear over dried fruit to fish, cheese and various meat products. Outside the halls you can buy shoes, CDs (you will be amazed by the prices right up to the moment you open the jewel case to discover that you just bought an illegal copy. Those who have moral scruples should be careful when shopping and all the others should bring an extra bag.) fresh fruit and so on and etc. The list is endless and neither do I want to spoil the adventure of exploring the market for you nor am I bored enough to wreck my mind for the last details right now.

By the way: You shouldn’t miss the opportunity to sit ice-cream-eating in one of Riga’s many parks. It’s a nice and comfortable way of spending time provided the weather is good and provided none of the police patrols discover you. But you can always pretend not to understand what he wants and to be a foreigner. Especially good works when you pretend both at once or if you actually are a foreigner and not acquainted with the official language. Then reason being that it is forbidden to sit on the well-kept grass in some of the parks in central Riga. Rather silly concept, but the law is enforced.

And thus the day slowly approached its end. And after a day spent walking through Riga with heavy backpacks and with sweat dripping from our noses in amounts to make the Niagara Falls embarrassedly pack in and go away we decided to spent the remainder of the day at the beach. We were only briefly hampered by the realization of having forgotten my (!) swimming trunks and went on. Now there are several beaches around and in Riga. That is not very surprising since the Baltic Sea does a funny thing there and creates a natural bay there where Riga lies.

Personally I have been to two of those. One of them is called ‘Bolderja’ and is a nice and quiet one. There aren’t so many tourists and it has no major disadvantages apart from the military area right behind it in the woods. To get there all you have to do is to hop onto a bus number 3 and then get off at the final stop and then either follow your nose and your ears or the people. The other beach is in Jurmala. Jurmala is a famous holiday resort in Latvija and also known in the neighbour countries. It has an incredibly long beach made of the finest sand and beautiful houses and hotels. Being in Jurmala can be expensive since it’s a major holiday resort. To get to Jurmala you can either take a train or a mini-auto bus. When you are in Jurmala then all you have to do is to find the beach and then make sure that you get some room on it. But be careful: The thing that annoyed me the most when I went swimming there was that even a long way from the shore the water was still so shallow that I with my mere six feet was still able to stand and in fact had to kneel when I wanted the water to cover me or at least have water to the neck. It was very discouraging for me to swim and swim and still be able to breath when I put my feet on the ground. After you finished swimming it’s probably time to think about a place to spend the night. That’s what we did anyway. Our initial plan had been to sleep on the beach but we were slightly appalled by the number of people still walking around at nine o’clock in the evening. That was when someone guided us to the fairy-tale house. It’s a page right out of a book. Right behind the beautifully crafted house were several small huts, numerous huge wooden statues showing animals and a wood with a path to the beach. I was perplexed and amazed. The whole place was just stunning and unbelievable. They even had a fireplace somewhere in the garden. It just looked terrific. It was the perfect place. Anyway, all the romance aside we decided to ask someone there. After ringing the doorbell a couple of times a very tired looking young man opened the door. He was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and looked indeed very much as if we had just woken him up, which I hope very much wasn’t the case. Despite his quizzical looks we struggled on and brought our quest forward. The look of confused tiredness turned into a puzzled frown. A couple of questions seemed to pass over his face and then tried to be there simultaneously, failed and gave up. We had to explain our problem again. We told him that we were two Danish students and that we would be very delighted to be allowed to stay in their garden for a night and no, we didn’t have a tent but our sleeping bags would suffice. What seemed like a good idea then is to me just amazingly dumb now that I come to think about it. Anyway the apparition in the doorway took its mobile phone which had been concealed somewhere around his person, dialled a number and started talking to someone who probably knew more than him. The person in charge seemed to agree because when he hung up he smiled and said that we would be welcome to stay of course. He then offered us a place in the house, but we refused out of modesty (another one of those dumb notions). He then said that we could choose any place on their grounds if we wanted to and pointed the fire out to us. The only restriction was that we shouldn’t exactly camp on their front lawn. And that was it. With that he went back inside and we never saw him again. We then did as he had suggested and went to sleep. What sounds so easy that it fits into a small sentence was in fact a process that took over an hour. And choosing the spot was still the fastest. We simply put our things down close to the fire, half way into the forest behind the house. We spread our blanket out on the ground and started to unpack the things we would probably need for a night in the open. Sleeping bags, no mosquito spray, warm clothes and no mosquito spray. My girlfriend took the sleeping bags and started to zip them together to make one big sleeping bag for us to sleep in. The fact that neither the sleeping bags themselves nor the zippers were the same size didn’t seem to worry her the least. After having forced the first zipper nearly closed she gave up and apparently was very annoyed at the sleeping bags. Then we sulked a little and I sighed a what-a-surprise-could-have-told-you-so sigh and suggested that we could just leave one side open. We still didn’t have any mosquito spray at all. We changed into sleeping clothes and crawled into the bags. Sleeping clothes means long-sleeved skiing underwear for my girlfriend and long warm jogging clothes for me. We were after all sleeping under the open sky and we had to be prepared for the worst. We lay down. We lay there for five minutes. Then I got annoyed and forced the other side of the sleeping bags closed. Now we had a big sleeping bag, which was longer on the one side and which only had one of those head-things. Very soon after that I got very annoyed and took the warm clothes off piece by piece. The warmth under a sleeping bag is simply unbearable, especially with another person under it as well. Since our situation still excelled with brightly coloured flying banners in the total and continued absence and lack of any mosquito defiant at all I was forced to take a very grave decision. I exchanged mosquito infested, comfortably cool, breathable night air for warm, asphyxiating though undeniably insect-free sleeping bag air by pulling the head piece of the second bag completely over both our heads and thus sealing it against the outside. The heat had been unbearable already so which adjective is left to describe it? It was a little like jumping from the frying pan into the fire, literally. It was then that we decided to move closer to the beach. We took all our things and set off through a maze of paths to the beach. Someone had built a way made of wooden boards all the way to the beach. It was like an adventure. We were exploring the ruins of a long perished civilization, following the path of the forest deeper and deeper into the jungle, loosing our way in the dangerous network of confusing paths, inching our way to the greatest discovery, the biggest sensation since the invention of the light switch and glowing keyboards. We didn’t find any dragons and no angry spear-wielding natives, but eventually came to the beach. Well, not the actual beach, but a quiet little place hidden behind a row of trees and situated a little above the beach. There was a fresh breeze from the sea that promised a mosquito free night. Unfortunately it only took them approximately five minutes to find us any way. There was no wind on the ground and very soon I could hear the slight humming sound of a hungry bloodsucker approaching. Maja didn’t notice anything; how could she? I was requiring all the insects’ attention. Then we decided to move one last time – to the beach itself. To sleep next to the sea, on the sand. This time there wouldn’t be any insects, this time it would be fine. We were wrong. The sand was uncomfortable, there were mosquitoes and it didn’t get dark. Well, not really and not for long anyway. It took quite some time before I could fall asleep and in the meantime I watched the moon set, watched the fireworks fired from a ship far out on the sea and listened to the people passing by. This of course is the strange situation I was talking about earlier. You can’t but stare at the infinity of the sea in awe. I woke up again beneath a stunningly beautiful blue sky and a brightly shining morning sun surrounded by a clutter of sea birds. They were walking around us, eying their guests suspiciously. When I woke up the next time they had gone. Nowhere else the own ego has less meaning than next to infinity, only compared to the sheer endlessness oceans the self becomes a meaningless entity, a nothing, a hollow phrase that we carry around with us to create a nutshell, a boat in the river carrying us on and on through the cold void of time. It is a very sobering experience.

Summer 2005