Easter in the Baltics – Riga day 1 | alison richards

I left London for Riga on the Wednesday before Easter. I had an exciting adventure planned – two days in Riga, a bus tour drive to Estonia and two days in Tallinn. I didn't really have an expectations about what either would be like but I must say that I was really pleasantly surprised by both.

Riga was absolutely the place for architecture nerds (as you'll see in subsequent posts), as it had a huge Art Nouveau area of buildings. Most of the buildings had some form of ornamentation, it was beautiful. We had snow in between Riga and Tallinn, which was so exciting and made everything look pretty, and in Tallinn it also snowed (and was bloody cold). Tallinn had this amazing old town on top of a hill with a big Russian Orthodox church which was fascinating.

So, with that said, lets get stuck in to Riga!

I arrived in Riga in the night time, so had just enough time to find my hotel and crash into bed. The next day, I woke up early, ate breakfast and went out to explore! The first stop was the so-called Three Brothers, a collection of three houses which make up the oldest complex in Riga. The oldest is the white one from the late 15th century, the middle is from the mid-17th century, and the little green one on the end is from the late 17th century.

Down one of the little side streets in the Old Town

An abandoned former government building. There were a lot of seemingly abandoned places in Riga

From there, I did a wiggly walk through the little narrow cobbled lanes, getting lost a lot of times, but finding lots of pretty little buildings along the way. I ended up at the Riga Cathedral, where I went inside and had a look around. It was nearing 12pm, so I walked to another church, St Peter's, where a free walking tour started.

The beautiful 1221 Restaurant, so named because it was built in that year on the first street of the city, Jauniela

Amber was very big in Riga, with loads of jewellery shops using it. Nothing was really modern enough for me, it was all a bit too kitsch.

In this decorated city, even the bollards had faces!

The menacing-looking gate on the Cathedral!

As is usual, I took only a few photos on the walking tour, which interestingly took us outside of the Old Town. The tour guide said that he did this because most tourists only ever see that area of Riga, and I really appreciated the different areas he took us to. This included the Russian Orthodox church, the 24 hour flower market, the Latvian Academy of Sciences building and some of the cool old wooden buildings around. After the tour I had lunch in a very cool place called Lido, where you fill a plate with Latvian food, salads and so on, then pay for it in weight at the counter. The clientele seemed mostly Latvian, which was cool, and it was really tasty. There's a few around the city. I walked off the food by visiting some of the places on the tour that sounded interesting. The Russian church was so absolutely beautiful inside but I don't think it was polite to take photos, so I kept my camera firmly out of sight.

The Latvian Academy of Science building was different to most other buildings I have seen, being representative of Stalinist architecture

Inside the foyer of the church. I put my camera away after this photos

The Academy of Science building again. It was built between 1951 and 1961.

Wooden houses were mostly in the so-called Moscow District

The front of St Peter’s church – this is the one you see in photos of Riga with the twisty spire. Being Easter, it was closed most of the time

After wandering around a bit more, I headed back to my hotel and got ready to go out for dinner. I decided to spoil myself a little and went to this lovely restaurant called Domini Canes. You know the great thing about Latvia? Even though I went to a really nice restaurant, it was still really decently priced. If that's not a huge incentive to go, well I don't know what is!