A very Latvian Christmas

Recently, every city I’ve been to has had an old town. And old towns have Christmas markets. Kitschy, overpriced and lame.

Yet, and begrudgingly, I was beginning to feel that creeping sensation of Christmas cheer. This was something I had wished to avoid, as in accepting this, it needed to be reconciled with the fact that for the first time I would be spending that most festive of days in a hostel. 

Snowman, Riga

Accordingly, it had taken some choosing to sort out where I wanted to stay—the cheapest, smallest hostel available—and lo, nestled above the McDonald’s near the bus station in Riga was my Christmas home.

After a long and boring bus ride from Tallinn, it was late and I had not much time to use the fading light of gloaming to quickly power around the city and come to terms with it. Back at the hostel I met Laurence, a recently single Kiwi man backpacking for the first time at the tender age of 28. He, along with the girls who ran the hostel, Dace and Daiga, along with two British gents, Ara and Doug, would be the core of my surrogate Christmas family.

Rather than spend Christmas Eve attempting to cultivate festive spirit by lounging around the hostel, it was the order of the day to try and see the city. So I headed out with Laurence to do the tour of the ghetto, which started at midday.

Christmas market, Riga

In the -12 weather it was an ambitious plan to try and endure a walking tour, and we arrived at the meeting point at 11am so that I had time to go up to the top of the church to get what was apparently quite a nice view of the old town. Sadly, the church was closed, and outside it was a lonely looking man spruiking the old town walking tour, which was meant to start presently.

We started chatting, and it became apparent that Toms was a hockey fan and he suggested we try to catch the 1pm game between the local powerhouse Riga Dinamo and some Russian scumbag team, but that we wouldn’t be able to if we did the ghetto tour. This was perhaps his attempt to get us to go on the old town tour with him, but we were unswayed in our determination to see the ghetto—mainly because it has an actual black market in it—and convinced him to take us on a special finish-before-the-hockey-game tour that encompassed the old town, the central market, the ghetto, and a brief history of architecture in Riga, all en route to the stadium.

Santa dog 

So it was that we ambled quite briskly in order to combat the chill, learning of Riga’s difficulty in establishing sovereignty as it spent the years being variously occupied due to its convenient position for trade. This was as we made our way to the central market, which is truly something to behold.

Formed in several old Zeppelin hangars and with enormous sections for various proteins, vegetables and miscellanea, we were treated to some variously pickled pickles—the garlic ones having enough power to burn eyes—and sampled some kvass. Kvass is a curious drink of fermented rye bread, mildly alcoholic, coca cola-coloured, carbonated, and malty, it is almost reminiscent of a Dr Pepper. Apparently it is so popular in the Baltics Coke started producing it, as it was outselling soft drinks in summer. 

Kvass with Laurence

There are still wooden houses in Riga, by-products of a time when it was a necessity to have the ability to burn shelter as you retreated from an impending invasion. We eyed some of these in the Russian quarter where we finally got to go to the much-anticipated black market. Like a sort of flea market for stolen goods, Toms remarked that as a kid, whenever he had his bike stolen he’d come down here the next day to buy it back.

Amidst the piles of ancient televisions, prehistoric tools, mobiles so old they aren’t even retro, and arcana from various occupations, there are no doubt bargains to be had, but I was quite content to leave them for the more ambitious, simply enjoying staring and fondling the mismatched bounty of unknown providence. Sadly, I couldn't find the person selling kidneys.

Black market

After some not entirely interesting information about architecture and neosomething-or-rather Russian Tsar facades, we made it to the hockey rink. Toms, as it turns out, was a player on the Latvian national team before he blew his knees out. Thus every hockey game he sees is bittersweet, supporting and watching his ex-team mates play out his passion. Sadly he was unable to join us today, as he had another tour to run, despite our entreaties for him to skip it and hang out.

The game itself was quite impressive if only because the crowd of 5600 was more raucous than some crowds I’ve been a part of that were five times the size. Replete with t-shirt cannons, American-style annoying music-bytes and drum-wielding passionate fans, it was a sensory experience. One only enhanced by the nasty mulled wine we sipped, watching the locals double fist beer and straight whisky. 

Di-na-mo

So it was Christmas, and waking late and having half of my surrogate family head out in search of breakfast—something that turned into a multiple hour odyssey—rendered the morning quite un-Christmas-y. Once they returned it was time for some grocery shopping, and so we decamped to the central market to source the requisite means to create some Latvian Christmas peas, sausage and sauerkraut, roast chicken and veg, mashed potato and mulled wine.

Thus began the festivities and the snowballing of Christmas spirit, the cooking a challenge given the tiny kitchen and insufficient number of pans. Nonetheless we soldiered on, my impulse decision to try to cook a traditional Latvian Christmas dish of peas without ever having seen or tasted it surprisingly successful, and the frenzy of creation seeing only one finger sliced—not mine.  

Laurence, Dace, Doug, Ara

With only four hot plates on the stove-top, space was prioritised and highly sought after. Appropriately, the mulled wine was the only untouchable. Speaking of which, it was also a tour de force. Already 15%, the special mulled-wine wine was emboldened with chunks of orange and apple, dried cranberries, more dried fruit and nuts, cinnamon sugar, cloves, and then boosted with a slosh of rum. By the third batch, the slosh had turned into about 1/3 of a bottle, and boy was it delicious.

Eventually we gorged on all the food we had prepared. The family was fortified by a trio of Columbians, Dace and Daiga’s friend, as well as a Dutch guy Ara and Doug had met at a bar. The gifts we had bought for Secret Friend—Latvian Secret Santa—were distributed via lottery and we settled down to drinking and eating the day away, my Australian-homage summer pudding for dessert.

After this very Latvian Christmas is was a tediously long bus to Kaunas, Lithuania. It was here I discovered my plan to catch a bus to Warsaw for the 29^th to meet up with the person I was to be couchsurfing with was in jeopardy given all the buses had been booked-out. So it was a flustered attempt to secure transport that consumed my evening, settling on a silly train trip that involved changing at the border as the soviet railway of Lithuania is a different gauge to that of Poland.

Christmas dinner

The next day I met up with Kristina, a local who had offered to hang out with me through couchsurfing. After wandering around the old town by myself in the morning, her local knowledge was utilised as we went slightly off track to a monastery about 20 minutes out of town, before eating apple pie at the yachting club that is no doubt much more pleasant in summer.

Indeed, that was the theme of her guided tour of Kaunas as we navigated slippery footpaths of black ice and slushy puddles that saw my boots sodden and toes turning pink. So we escaped the inclement conditions by hiding in a couple of bars, drinking a bit too much and admiring the ridiculously ugly ex-soviet factory turned church that looms over the city, illuminated for all to see. 

Big ass Christmas tree, Kaunas 

What is irritating about Kaunas, however, only became apparent on the morning of my departure. The place has no exchange offices. If you want to change your Lithuanian Lits into a more useful currency you have to go to a bank and join the enormous queue of geriatrics that moves as glacially as their walking-frame-supported shuffle. So with time a-dwindling, frustrated at the chunk of potential euros still in my wallet, I jumped on the wrong bus and ended up going basically the opposite direction from the train station.

Realising this, it was time to catch a cab in order to not miss my train. So I guess the leftover currency wasn’t too useless. But that is secondary to the true tale here.

I have had many cabbies in my travels and indeed, back home. Some have been creepy old men, telling me of their plans to import Estonian brides, or maintained lascivious streams of filth at passing women. One bragged of having slept with Lebron James’ mother, and one even made my sister cry. Some have smelled, some have been mid-beer when I got in, but all of them have been able to take me to the train station.

Ghetto hoopin'

Some might not have understood my English, but they did understand my choo-choo motion. Or were able to identify where I wanted to go after examining where I’d point on a map.

Not this one.

Even after I slowly and loudly—while pointing at it on a fuck-off-huge-A3 map of the city in which he makes his cab-driverly living—read the name of the streets that make the intersection where the train station sits, large and obvious.

To better understand this incompetence, keep in mind that Kaunas is not big. It is a city of 350,000. Hardly a maze-like metropolis. Moreover, going to and from the old town there are two roads, each running in one direction. 

Monastery

Even if he understood only the gist of the map, I had pointed in the direction away from the old town, indeed, at where the train station was located. Yet my cabbie decided to turn onto the one way road towards the old town.

The complete opposite direction to that in which I wished to go.

What the fuck.

Finally we pulled over and after an extensive conference were on the same page. “Ahhhh,” he exclaimed, “chka-chka chka-chka,” miming a train.

9 long and boring hours later I was in Warsaw.