Riga is quite small, so while it appeared that there was not a lot to see, in fact there are some interesting sights and the day and a half we spent here enabled us to visit pretty much everything without rushing. It’s a very pretty and clean place, and although a lot of the buildings are not original having been rebuilt after the war, they’ve kept the same designs so look good. There was no graffiti, and the people were well dressed to the point of formal. I saw a lot of men in suits and elegantly dressed women, so I wondered if there was something going on I didn’t know about.
I didn’t know anything about Riga before we came (and apparently it’s the city of culture 2014), and I found it to be vibrant and not as I imagined, which was a severe East European ex-Soviet city. There was no evidence of the huge square concrete buildings we saw in Romania, so either they didn’t build any in the city or they pulled them down as soon as they could.
The city looks prosperous, and they are the most recent country to take on the Euro (January 2014). We went into 3 reasonably sized shopping malls, all looked recently built and were full of people.
If you fancy somewhere off the beaten track a bit, I’d recommend Riga, but probably come a bit later when it’s warmer.
