 Summer evening in a Riga cafe / Jugendstil architecture |
It’s eleven at night, but who wants to sleep, anyway?
 Guantanamera gives way to Black Magic Woman, then Lay Lady Lay… then the acrobats. The buskers are hard at it again outside McDonalds on Kalku iela, Kalku Street, below my window.
Another long summer evening is underway in Riga, the metropolis of the Baltic, a city more than 800 years old. Across the bridge, Milda, Latvia's own statue of liberty, has triumphed over her arch-enemy, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who has been relegated to the scrapyards.
In the heart of Old Riga, the open-air cafes of Philharmonic Square, do a roaring trade, islands in the swirling human currents of the evening promenade.
Around the Central Market you enter a subtly different world, where Russian is the predominant language and the fashions are stuck somewhere in the Seventies. Fully half of Latvia's population is ethnic Russian, their presence a potent reminder of the recent past.
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