Thanks to some pro advice from the owner of the hostel in Tartu, I eschewed the crack of dawn bus to Riga, and opted for the leisurely morning train there instead. Cheaper and at a reasonable time, but with the added hitch of having to make a switch at the border.

Finding the train at Tartu's station was easy enough; the station was completely deserted, except for a clean and warm waiting room carved into a corner of the abandoned station building, and then there was only one real platform to expect the train at. No problems onboard but the switch at the town of Valga was not as obvious to me as it should've been, and I figured it out and hopped aboard with just seconds to spare. The rest of the ride was a slow but peaceful trip through a bunch of provincial towns with a light snowstorm and strong winds outside. Once we entered the heat island of the capital though, the snow melted away, and the storm passed us by.

My first site of Riga after getting off was hilarious; a Narvesen convenience store chain, the kind that are ubiquitous in Norway, but non-existant in any other country, except, apparently, Latvia. At least for me, it's really funny to suddenly see these stores again.

Anyway, Riga.

Riga reminded me of Stockholm and Copenhagen immediately, and was a real change of pace from Helsinki, Tallin, and Tartu. The city was once a major port in the Hanseatic League, once the largest port in the empire of Sweden, and once one of the Russian empire's proudest cities, so it got the kind of architectural attention that the Danish and Swedish capitals did. I've only strolled around the old town and the immediate center, but one interesting detail is that all of the soviet era buildings have been torn down, save one. In what must be a peculiar expression of Latvian humor, the one building left is the 'Museum of the Occupation of Latvia 1944-1990', and it's located directly next to the building photographed here; The Blackheads House, which is Riga's most photogenic building, beating out Riga's metric ton of art nouveau structures.

It's even more deliberate than that too; The Blackheads House was the equivalent to a college fraternity for unmarried merchants in the Hanseatic days. It was ruined by German bombardment and finished off by Soviet demolition. Amazingly, the exact blueprints survived, and newly independent Latvia immediately rebuilt the thing. It's a crazy building.

Enough for today. Goal for the rest of my time in Europe is to avoid being so predictable. The blue twilighty sky and the brightly lit building is something I've done several times before, I think.