Trip to Rīga, Latvia

August 10th–13th, 2011, Rīga, Latvia

We woke up at 5:30 to go to the Jackson Hole Airport. We then proceeded to fly to Minneapolis. The Minneapolis Airport is pretty much a mall. We went to a burger restaurant there that was pretty good. We then flew to Amsterdam. I watched Green Hornet on the plane. In Amsterdam we had a seven hour layover. We didn’t leave the airport for that. Finally we got on our plane to Rīga and arrived about 3 hours later.

Dad bought a SIM card for his phone, but it partly doesn’t work. We then rode a bus from the airport to the old town. There were a lot of street musicians performing on corners. Some people playing accordions, Two girls playing the cello and flute together, some other stuff. We walked about half an hour to the Albert Hotel.

The Albert Hotel is themed on Albert Einstein. I don’t really get how it’s themed after him, but it has quotes from him in our room, which works for me. Our room is really nice, we have special place you have to put your room key or the power goes off. It has a good view, and is on the ninth floor. It has a really good breakfast too. Huge selection, good food, all in all it’s an awesome hotel. We went to dinner with Stefan and Jure, two of Dad’s friends who work on Interchange. The restaurant was an outdoor restaurant with live musicians. After dinner me and Dad got lost on our way back to the hotel for a while, but got back on track.

We woke up at 8:30ish on Friday, and went to meet Stefan and Jure at their hotel. We went to the wrong one, because there are like four of the same one in town. Once we got there they started to work on their presentations for the conference. I got bored and walked around old town alone for a while. I saw some pretty cool stuff, but didn’t do much. Once I got back we went to lunch at an Armenian restaurant. It was really good. At night me and Dad went to an organ concert at the Rīga Cathedral.

The organ was the biggest organ in the world when it was first made. The cathedral had lots of cool stained glass windows, some cool statues, the tombs of a bunch of dead bishops, and some cool paintings. After that we went back to the hotel for the night.

I woke up at 9:00 on Saturday. We went on a free walking tour of the city. We saw some cool churches, the central market, the main train station, and what’s left of a synagogue that was burned down in World War II.

The tour lasted about three hours. After that we went to the train station to go to Jūrmala (means sea-side in Latvian, made up of a bunch of towns all spread along a long beach).

We got to swim and Dad ran four miles on the beach. After we got back, we went to the market and bought some food. We looked for a restaurant we had read about in a magazine but it was closed down or something. We couldn’t read the sign on the door because it was in Latvian. So far our visit has been awesome, and I’ll be posting again in a few days.

(Another church we saw:)