Riga, Stockholm, and the Things Between

The trip began on Friday around noon with shoveling out the car. We had had our first significant snowfall in a while the night before covering the Renault in a few inches of the white stuff. While some cleaned the windows others packed luggage or made. Always have to have your hot tea. Five of us rode in the car and three took the bus; the boys in the car the girls on the bus. It took about four hours to reach Stockholm but I'm not sure I kept drifting in and out of sleep. At one point we stopped to clean the windows again. The condensation on the inside of the windows had frozen too! My ears popped the further north we drove although it didn't seem like a significant change in elevation, then again I fell asleep. We drove through the downtown and got to see a slice of the capital. We pulled up to the port, trudged through the snow with our luggage, reached the terminal but the girls were not there. We waited and eventually called them. It turns out that they were waiting at the Tallinn cruise terminal. They ran over, we checked in and boarded the ship.

It was bigger and nicer than I had expected. I originally had an image of an old barely floating no-amenities boat that took poor college students to buy discount liquor. This was image was created buy the unbelievable cheap price of 60:- and the destination of eastern Europe. The ship is smaller than the big cruise liners I had been on before but not by much. It also had a deck dedicated to cars which I would have expected because how else would someone get their car from Scandinavia to the Baltic states? A long drive through central Europe or Finland.

We made it to our cabins which were on the 5th level like the majority of cabins and the boarding areas. There was some juggling about who was staying where but it all worked out. We went ot into the frigid to watch the boat pull out from the dock. The boat plowed through the ice covered easily. It's a strange sensation to watch a still surface while moving on a boat. It was almost like we were on a giant train crossing the Arctic. We made our way to a lounge where we played a card game and had a few drinks but then the ship broke through the edge of the ice. Once we hit the ice free part of the Baltic Sea the ship began to rock. We all started to feel sick not soon after. The three girls all got really sick by the end of the night and the guys weren't feeling well either. We all went to bed early which turned out to be a good thing because we did a lot of walking and running the next day. The running is a good story. A lot of the other passengers didn't seem to be bothered by the seas and had some loud crazy-sounding parties.

The boat arrived about 9:30 in the morning and we all woke feeling much better. The harbor was equally as frozen as Stockholm's so the ship was still. We got off the boat without any passport control thanks to the European Union and walked through the city passing by the mix of contemporary, Soviet, and older buildings. It was interesting to see all those periods sitting next to each other especially in the States we seem to tear most buildings down within forty years. Sweden has a similar mix of old and new but it was firmly in the prosperous west during the cold war so the buildings from that period aren't as stark. I also saw the combination of communist and capitalist system in the cars people drove. Most cars are modern but I did see, but mostly here, old Cold War cars rumbling down the road. Some of the trams looked like relics and others were the same as those in Sweden. The local currency, the lats, was surprisingly strong. One dollar only bought two lati. It's still a fairly cheap country though.

We grabbed tea and coffee at McDonald's, I can't seem to escape it, and started touring the old city. We wondered through the narrow snow covered streets to the city's large old Church. The view from the Church tower is beautiful but also puts you right in the middle of Arctic winds. We bought some souvenirs from a street vendor and stopped at one of those stores that sells local trinkets and random stuff that seem to be in every tourist town. We wondered around some more and saw the presidential residence, the old King's castle, parliament, and some statues. We all started getting tired and hungry and decided to get a late lunch.

It took us a while to decide where and what to eat as it does with any large group of people especially one as diverse as ours. We were four Poles, two Brazilians, a Burundi born Belgian, and me the American. We eventually went to a Latvia buffet style fast food restaurant. I tried a dish very similar to Polish pirogies, a fried cheese bread (which is exactly what it sounds likes), and bread sop for desert. The first two were very good the dessert was not so tasty. That's when the debate about when the boat was leaving started. Some thought it was leaving 4:30 Swedish (central European) time others thought it was was 4:30 Latvian (eastern European) time. We debated it one the way to the grocery and liquor stores. While we were getting groceries one of the girls remembered she had taken a picture of the schedule which said the boat was leaving at the earlier tie so we quickly payed for our things and began walking back to the harbor. The closer we got the more panicked we became the minute hand kept ticking towards 30. When the boat was in sight we started to run. We even ran through a field covered in snow up to our knees. We kept running, becoming more and more spread out along the route. One of the Poles was first to reach the terminal, I wan't far behind, and we ran though its empty seating area up the gangway to the ship. The crew was already starting to pull the gangway away from the ship but stopped when got there out of breath. I was about a foot from the ship and a couple burly sailors grabbed our arms and helped on the ship. It sounds more exciting and dangerous than it was. It was mostly just tiring. Eventually everyone got on board and the guess n they were able finishing closing the doors. They didn't check our ID's or boarding passes. I geuss they figured if we'd tried that hard we were passengers.

After almost being stranded in Eastern Europe we all needed a shower and a nap which we all did. The seas on the way back were much calmer. The ice also extended really far out. The bay around Riga is pretty big so maybe it was shallower? We had dinner which mostly consisted of toast, cookies, and other junk food. The Polish had brought a travel toaster which was smart but probably against the rules. That night we bought liquor on the ship since we didn't have the chance in Riga. It wasn't as cheap as the city but still better than the Systembolaget. The store onboard was about as big as a typical ABC (state owned liquor monopoly in VA) with a big selection except for gin, my choice sin.

The night was fun, full of watching karaoke and drunk people generally making fools of themselves. A man proposed to his girlfriend in the middle of karaoke. Classy. I was exhausted after hour Baltic adventure and went to sleep around midnight which again was smart because we spent the next day walking, but not running luckily, all over Stockholm. We pulled into the city port about eh same time we had in Riga and went to the Renault to drop of some things and then caught the bus to our hostel. Of course the bus stop at which we got off was not really that close to the hostel so we had to walk though the snow covered streets with our luggage. My bag was on wheels so that made it doubly fun. The hostel was housed in a hundred year old building in the old city about a block from the royal palace. The palace is mostly a tourist attraction now but the King holds a couple ceremonial cabinet meetings a few times a year and maintains an office in the complex. After checking in we took a tour of the treasury and old royal apartments in the palace. After that we wondered around the narrow streets and alleys of the old city. We walked around other parts of the city saw the parliament building which was only built in the 1970's and a little of downtown. We made the free pasta provided by the hostel and then I went to bed. The heat in room went off at some point in the night and I woke up freezing. Of course I was too much of achicken to ask for a refund.

The next day, Monday, we visited the Royal Coin Museum which I really liked because I'm a bit of a novice coin collector. Then we walked to other side of the harbor to a wonderful museum about all about a ship that sand a few hundreds years ago in the Baltic Sea. The ship was found a few decades ago and raised fairly intact. The museum was built around the ship and you can see it form all angles. Next we walked back to the old city to have a quick meal before I and one of the girls had to leave. We ate a rather disappointing Mexican place near the hostel. Then she and I grabbed our bags from our friends' room and started walking to the central station. We passed by many of the buildings we'd seen including the palace, parliament, the foreign ministry, and others. The station was easy to find even though we didn't have our Polish guide. One of the guys had become our leader and map reader over the weekend. We had a Swedish course we couldn't miss so we had to leave a day earlier than everyone else. See, this isn't a total vacation? It's a large nice station located near downtown. We had a little trouble finding our gate because there were signs saying "1-8 this way" and "11-19 that way" which left ours out. It turned out ten was between those signs and behind the information desk. We boarded the train and got settled for our 3 hour ride. The train was stuck one stop from home for two hours because the tracks were frozen, but I guess that's life in Scandinavia. I highly recommend Stockholm. There's a lot of history and culture to see. but go in the warm months. It was miserable to that much in that cold of temperatures.

Once we made it to town we had to wait for our bus. We talked to a friend who had been on the same train; she was coming back from her own vacation. It was really nice to be back in familiar territory. It's strange how quickly my new dorm has started to feel like home. The town had gotten a lot of snow while were gone but being Sweden it was mostly already mostly plowed or shoveled. The dormies appear to have their own wild weekend. The common room was in a state I've never seen! Furniture was upturned, trash was everywhere, and we seem to be missing a couch... Also someone jumped out a window on to the igloo. Dorm life is never dull, I've missed it.

I'm off to Brussels and Bruges next! I'll bring my computer and do some blogging from there if my one small carry-on can hold it. These long after-the-fact entries are exhausting to write!