Day 2 of my Latvian adventure began early, of course! This post is the first of two for the day, mainly because a) I love architecture and b) I took so many photos of said architecture. It absolutely made up the personality of the city - Art Nouveau mixed with Soviet-era architecture, mixed with crumbly old warehouse-looking houses and newer shiny buildings... it was such a mishmash of stuff that reflected all the different changes that had occurred in Latvia.
I started off by having a look around some of the old and crumbly buildings in the Old Town near to my hotel. There's something really romantic about crumbly abandoned buildings... maybe it's just me but I really like them.
The next destination was the Freedom Monument. We'd walked past it yesterday on the walking tour and heard about the sculptures around the base of the monument, but it was nice to revisit it to see it in the quiet of the morning. It was built in 1935 to honour soldiers killed during the Latvian War of Independence between 1918 and 1920. It was almost destroyed during Latvia's Soviet era, but thankfully was saved. The Soviets probably didn't want the Latvians to be reminded of their independence...
From there, I struck out in the direction of the Art Nouveau area. I didn't really know this about Riga before I went but it absolutely has the best area of Art Nouveau buildings I've ever seen. Yes Budapest had lots too, but they weren't as concentrated as in Riga. Seriously, almost every building was adorned with decoration. It was truly lovely. There is even an Art Nouveau museum, which was gorgeous.
After absorbing all the beauty in the museum, it was definitely time for lunch. I stopped off at this cute cafe called Mr Fox - definitely my kind of place. They had takeaway sandwiches, a little like Pret, but you could also sit down and have table service. Everything was fresh and I had a delicious low-carb salad with chicken and satay sauce. Yum.