latvia roundup
dear friends, i strongly recommend against the usage of hostels, hotels, and the like compared with the immeasurable advantages gleaned from penning with a local. our wonderful host renars took us all around latvia, whose countryside would probably interest you much more than riga itself, braving the daytime tours and staying up late into the night while we slept to see to his own affairs. amazing!
we traveled to an abandoned soviet spa, 15 years in the building and 2 years in usage before being forsaken by the dying empire and looted by locals...
this was by far the biggest abandoned complex i have ever seen - 15 stories and 2 giant buildings complete with blackened basements, absolutely everything looted..
also::: giant swamp / pure red water, strangely almost no animal life outside of the insects...
tiny sticky flowers, attractive to the eye.. flies will be stuck to the center and devoured extremely slowly by the little red teeth.
a sulfurous spring:::
in former times much benutzt by the locals for minor aches and pains despite the tremendous stench...... now, however, mostly avoided with the influx of cheap western medication.
of course we also saw quite a bit of riga as well, which was filled with these spinning metal representations of the latvian flag, sending refracted light all over the sidewalks.
every year latvia picks some symbol for itself and conducts a massive public art project, placing examples of the symbol all over the capital and other major cities in the tiny country.
also, as a member city of the hanseatic league built mostly by germans, there were many relics of my adopted homeland to be found... my favorite was this statue of the bremer stadtmusikanten, near the presidents house..
Michael and Renars....
way to be rad!
Photos
we traveled to an abandoned soviet spa, 15 years in the building and 2 years in usage before being forsaken by the dying empire and looted by locals...
this was by far the biggest abandoned complex i have ever seen - 15 stories and 2 giant buildings complete with blackened basements, absolutely everything looted..
also::: giant swamp / pure red water, strangely almost no animal life outside of the insects...
tiny sticky flowers, attractive to the eye.. flies will be stuck to the center and devoured extremely slowly by the little red teeth.
a sulfurous spring:::
in former times much benutzt by the locals for minor aches and pains despite the tremendous stench...... now, however, mostly avoided with the influx of cheap western medication.
of course we also saw quite a bit of riga as well, which was filled with these spinning metal representations of the latvian flag, sending refracted light all over the sidewalks.
every year latvia picks some symbol for itself and conducts a massive public art project, placing examples of the symbol all over the capital and other major cities in the tiny country.
also, as a member city of the hanseatic league built mostly by germans, there were many relics of my adopted homeland to be found... my favorite was this statue of the bremer stadtmusikanten, near the presidents house..
Michael and Renars....
way to be rad!
Photos