Hire a bicycle and sample the city for
yourself… Dare to shop in the Russian Black Market… Marvel at Stalin’s Birthday
Cake… Navigate the labyrinth of cobbled streets… Catch a train to the seaside…
Ride the lift 48 floors to see the city from the eye in the sky… You will never
forget Riga.
These short and sharp fifty-four words sold me a
dream.
I was looking online for travel destinations and
Latvia struck me as somewhere that somebody like me would like to go. It’s in
Eastern Europe, it’s not famous for binge drinking Brits and it has a history
of Soviet and Nazi occupation – my two favourite megalomanic movements in
recent history.
I had been saving my wages up for a couple of
years. I didn’t really know what for because I couldn’t drive a car and I didn’t
have a girlfriend. My mother even cooked me an ample supper every night at
eight - so there was no real need to eat out either. The only time I spent any
money was at Bingo on Thursdays with Mum or online poker if I had the night off
work. It was my work pal Jamie who suggested that I spend some of my money and
go on holiday, so I told him about Riga in our next shift together.
The Arcade was empty so I called Jamie over to
the fruit machine I was playing.
‘Hey mate I wouldn’t play on that if I
were you,’ he said.
‘Why has somebody just won off it?’ I
asked.
‘No, but you know what Boss gets
like.’
He was right I could lose my job if I was caught
playing the machines while on duty but it was a slow night and I only had
enough change for a few spins.
‘I’ll risk it,’ I said coolly.
‘Yeah ‘cos that’s what you are… a risk taker!’ He was laughing like an
idiot.
‘You’re putting me off,’
‘You’re just pressing buttons, there’s
no skill involved its just luck,’
My last credit ran out and I was seriously
thinking about withholding Riga from him.
‘I’ve been considering what you said
Jamie,’
‘About you buying a prostitute?’
‘No of course not. About going away on
holiday,’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah and I’m actually quite excited
about it. I’ve been looking at fights to Riga and they are very affordable,’
‘Not really what I had in mind, but
I’m game – Russian girls are hot and young and easy – there must be loads of
them there just waiting for you and me,’ he nudged me in the arm and winked as
if this was a funny joke.
‘You’re game? You want to come with
me?’
‘Well yeah, its not really a holiday
if you go on your own is it. And they have cheap beer over there. One of our
English pounds is worth a Ford Mondeo, and a tenner gets you a mansion with
slaves,’
‘Are you just describing that,
grossly, misleading scene in the film Eurotrip where they visit Bratislava and
imply that the whole of Eastern Europe is a litter-strewn hell-hole?’
He didn’t answer me, but just walked away laughing and shaking his
head, as if I was the stupid one.
I booked our tickets and spent the following few weeks re-reading
‘Stalin’s Legacy’ in ‘The Penguin History of the Twentieth Century’.
It seemed that Jamie had other ideas about the trip. He was
hell-bent on ruining my cultural experience; he wanted to get drunk every night
we were there and ‘mix with the locals’. I knew what he meant by ‘mixing’ and I
didn’t approve. I planned to look and learn from the country, but all from a
safe distance. A safe distance that didn’t involve the confusion of inebriation
or the awkwardness of nakedness.
The night of our flight Jamie sent me a link to a website about
Riga:
Hey
Petey-Boy check this out – www.horrorstories/riga.com - if we’re lucky we’ll
meet a couple of blonde bombshells ourselves!
The website had a story from an aggrieved Englishman who had just
returned from Riga. He declared that a friend and he were seduced by two
stunning Latvian girls – ‘blonde, tan and leggy’ – who offered them sex, took
them to a bar, and then called upon four Russian Mafioso’s to beat them up and
steal their wallets.
There was another story about a Welshwoman, who was accosted in the
street by an angry mob who, she claims, mistook her for Monica Lewinsky. They
chanted ‘CIGAR GIRL, CIGAR GIRL’ and took her to a tobacco stand before giving
her scarring burns all over her arms and legs.
Another person told of a harrowing trip to Riga that resulted in an
illegal organ transplant leaving him with a deficient left kidney and a fear of
all mustached men in aprons. He couldn’t face French restaurants anymore.
I was mortified by these revelations, and the dozens of others like
them. They instilled a profound fear within me that threatened to ruin my trip.
* * *
We arrived in Riga at ten in the morning local time. Jamie slept
during our one-hour taxi drive from the airport to the hostel whilst I surveyed
the new landscape for dangers. Every person that we passed on the street seemed
dangerous, they eyed me with fear and envy as if I had done each of them a
personal wrong. Every building looked as if it was harboring a secret Soviet
crime syndicate; the jagged mismatching architecture that I had originally
fallen in love with on Google Images had become the signifier of unfamiliarity
and deceit.
The streets were long and straight and even from within the taxi I
could feel the chilling tingle of the Baltic wind as it surged through me. The
taxi driver seemed friendly enough but he kept on trying to speak to me about
Latvia, he pointed out all the historic monuments as we passed. I recognized
some of them from the travel guide and some of them were new to me but I
couldn’t concentrate on anything apart from his aggressive accent and
disconcerting twitchy eyes, as he turned to address me grinning wildly each
time.
When we got to our room in the hostel I began unpacking my folded
clothes into the drawers provided while Jamie shouted ‘Get ya hole out’ to the
potential evil seductresses on the street below us.
‘Will you stop that please Jamie, I
don’t want any of those Russian girls knowing that we’re here,’
‘Oh come off it mate. I’m single and obviously you’re single, so lets get
some dirt-cheap booze down us and do what all normal people do on holiday and
have a good time. Boys will be boys remember!’ I hate it when he uses idiotic
clichés to try and persuade me to do idiotic things.
‘But girls will be girls Jamie, and
here in Latvia that probably means that they will take you to the butchers to
get your testicles cut off and sold on the black market as Armenian soup,’
‘God where’s your sense of adventure.
I’m bored of the room now, lets go and find a restaurant, I feel like a ten
course meal – maybe roasted hog or heart of lion and sautéed caviar,’
‘For one that would be disgusting and
secondly-’
‘-Oh don’t even bother ruining
something else for me. Lets just go and do whatever it is that you want to do.’
I wanted to emulate the dreamy paragraph that first inspired me to
visit Riga. So we started by going on a bike ride. We hired two peculiar
looking bikes and to Jamie’s delight his one had a bell and mine didn’t. Every
time he overtook me he smiled like an imbecile and rang the bell repeatedly,
this was bearable until about thirty minutes into the journey when both of my
legs cramped up and he was stupid enough to carry on going as I stopped to
stretch out.
I was in the middle of a city park, sitting on a bench overlooking a
small pond that was populated by mallards. My forehead was sweaty and my
trousers had ripped at the bottom from getting caught in the chain so many
times. This wasn’t playing out like it had in my mind. I realized that Jamie
was long gone and probably sitting on a park bench himself: telling a young
Latvian girl how he was the Prince of Wales or something. I decided to try and
find my way back to the bike shop via the freedom monument, without Jamie and
his juvenility I could try and take in some of the cultural magnificence.
As I approached the plaza I saw two men in army uniform walking
towards me with rifles in each arm. I tried to swerve out of their way, I
thought they were going to shoot me and ended up crashing into an elderly man
with small metal badges all over his bomber jacket. He shouted and spat at me
in Latvian, but my mind was frozen with fear and I couldn’t get any words out.
He got up and walked away in disgust. From my vulnerable position on the ground
I saw the two men with guns walk from one side of the plaza to the other, just
as Wikipedia said they would: they were the Guards of Honor.
I spent the night recovering in the room with a complimentary ‘Zelta’
beer that was given to me by the over-friendly hostel barman, in an attempt to
get me to join in the karaoke.
The next morning I was surprised to find myself alone in the dorm. I
hadn’t seen Jamie since he sped away from me in the park – maybe he had found a
Russian girl? I felt strangely smug as I imagined him walking through the door
and breaking down into tears, admitting that I was right to be cautious and
apologizing for being so dismissive before. This bubble of righteousness was
broken though as he busted in with a big grin on his face.
‘My oh my! Look what the cat dragged
in,’ he said gleefully.
‘Don’t talk about yourself in the
third-person Jamie, its crass and its, its ostentatious,’ I replied.
‘Guess who got some poontang last
night?’
‘I don’t know, Johnny Depp?’
‘No you buffoon it was me. I met this
girl called Shell on my bike ride, we were both stood in this big open square
laughing at two army men walking back and forward in front of a big phallic
statue,’
‘The memorial statue!’ I didn’t
mention my altercation there.
‘Yeah that’s it, I asked her if she
was going to ‘remember any more statues’ from her stay in Riga,’
‘Oh, spare me the sordid details and
tell me she wasn’t Russian,’
‘Nah, she was an Aussie,’
‘Well that’s something,’
‘Oh stop acting like you’re not
jealous.’
I persuaded Jamie to come with me by foot to explore the labyrinth of cobbled streets with the
aim of finding Stalin’s Birthday cake. But this romantic notion of rambling
around the quaint avenues and alleyways, appreciating the historical relevance
of the city was ruined by Jamie’s impatience and inelegance. He wanted to drink
at every bar we walked past and eat at every restaurant without any thought for
our safety.
‘Nobody mugs you in the day, that
would be wrong, that would be like… daylight robbery,’ he said not knowing how
stupid he sounded.
‘We’re in the Russian quarter now
Jamie, and I don’t think the Russians care what time of day it is.’
Jamie wasn’t the only thing detracting from my experience though;
the sporadic street signs were very unhelpful and didn’t correspond with my
travel map, I couldn’t ask anybody for help because that would give me away as
a tourist and leave me vulnerable to potential Mafioso’s. Instead, we trudged
along the mazy streets arguing about who would get the window seat on the way
home.
That night as I lay in bed waiting for Jamie to come home drunk, I
thought of how Jamie had ruined each day for me so far, ruined each potentially
enlightening experience with his whimsical ways. Resentment grew inside me, to
the point that when he came in and attempted to boast about his near-death
encounter with a bouncer, I managed to blank him out completely.
In the morning Jamie was surprisingly amiable and even stole me a
croissant from the communal fridge in the hostel kitchen, I didn’t approve of
theft but I appreciated the gesture all the same.
Together we set off for the Russian black market; Jamie was as
excited as I was frightened, but I kept on telling myself that if the travel
site recommended it then it had to be safe. We found the market surprisingly
easily and decided to enter. It looked like any other outdoor market I had been
to with stalls of goods and little paper price tags; the difference was that
everything on sale was clearly stolen. There were single car stereo speakers,
half scart leads, muddy garden spades and pitchforks, old leather jackets,
tubes of Colgate toothpaste, scrap pieces of metal, car number plates, oily
spanners and wrenches, mobile phones and even counterfeit Britney Spears CD’s.
The people stood behind each stall looked fierce and evasive, the majority of
them had high and prominent cheekbones that made their eyes look sharp and
sour. Jamie was looking at some Soviet metal badges, like the ones I had seen
at the Freedom Monument, he looked to be communicating affably until he got his
camera out and took a picture of the stall-keeper. This triggered an outburst
of horribly aggressive shouting. I felt a bead of sweat run down my armpit.
Jamie came over in fits of laughter.
‘Did you see that? He’s obviously not
very snappy-happy hey?’ He said.
‘Yes I did see, and I think we should
leave, look Jamie, he’s pointing at us to his mate. We’d best leave, that one
over there has a sharp garden cultivator in his hand and I’m not about to find
out why,’
‘Oh come on he’s probably trying to
sell us a bargain.’
At that moment a secondary wave of sweat spread all over my back and
forehead, I could feel my heart beating faster and faster as the harsh foreign
chatter surrounding me blended into one evil chant of malevolent design.
I ran straight out of the gate, pushing my way through crowds of
mothers and children jumping over greying beggars and knocking over their
diminutive change pots in the process. I didn’t stop running until I reached
the hostel. I wasn’t going at such a pace by the end but still, I was jumping
between steps and struggling enough to alarm anybody who saw me.
About an hour later Jamie came home with a Soviet military map of
Riga that he called a ‘memento’ of when I ‘lost the plot and went AWOL’. I
planned to steal this memento of his and put it up in front of my computer
desk. It was too late to go to the beach so the only other option was to find
the eye in the sky. I hoped the city
would seem more safe and satisfying from a hundred metres high but when we got
to the hotel, the lift had a sign across its door reading: ‘OUT OF ORDER’.
Jamie wanted me to run up the forty-eight flights of stairs with him
but I still wasn’t recovered from the run earlier so unfortunately I had to
decline. I went to the Hotel’s casino instead.
A strange sensation rushed through my body as I walked into the
casino. I marveled at the slot machines, the craps table and the roulette
wheel. A neatly dressed porter with a reassuringly good English accent took my
coat and hung it up in a locker. I changed up some cash for chips – about a
hundred pounds worth – and started on the slots as a warm up. The bright
flashing lights and primary colours seduced me like a toddler in a toyshop. I
became accustomed to the ‘bring, bring, bring’ of the reels spinning-in exotic
and inventive symbols, symbols that exponentially outclassed those of the
machines I work on at Harrisons Amusements. I found myself about fifty quid up,
if my calculations were correct, and moved on to the blackjack table. I admired
the professionalism and accuracy of the dealer as he dealt me blackjack six
times over half an hour. I was beginning to make some serious money here. I
noticed my face in the reflection from the silver table lining and to my
surprise I was profusely smiling. A waiter approached me with a cocktail of
some kind.
‘Compliments of the house sir.’ He
uttered coolly as he handed me the glass.
I drank the cocktail and it tasted sweet like the nectar earned by a
hardworking bee.
I started placing bigger and bigger bets and they handed me bigger
and bigger cocktails. For the first time in my life I felt like I belonged
somewhere, like I was wanted. I moved between craps, baccarat and poker, slowly
building up more and more money – I was on the up like the Soviet Union under
Stalin.
I felt wonderful, I was in Riga and it was wonderful. A slim blonde
girl with a lot of makeup sat next to me at the roulette table. She put her
chips onto the same spaces as mine three spins in a row, and on the third spin
she clinked her glass against mine since ‘red seven’ came in and we had both
won a lot of money. I didn’t place any chips down for the next spin but she
pointedly leaned over me, rubbing her breasts against my side, to place one
chip on ‘black two’. As she did this I could see her black thong rising above
her tight jeans and for the first time in my life I thought to myself ‘what
would Jamie do?’ – Jamie would probably grope her ass and ask her to go to the
toilet for a quickie.
‘Do you want to cash in some of those
chips and take me for a drink at the bar?’ She asked in an incredibly sexy
Eastern European accent.
‘Champagne and blueberries?’ I replied
flirtatiously.
‘No. Balsam!’ She insisted and led me
away from the table by my hand.
‘Champagne and blueberries – I’ve never had champagne and
blueberries in my life – where the hell did that come from.
She took me to a private bar in the back and opened a bottle of
Balsam. I remembered this drink from a travel site that described it as a
‘creosote-like potion’ so I knew I was in for a rough ride. She poured me a
handful of shots and urged me to down them one-by-one. The bitter spirit caused
my mind to start playing tricks on me. My vision was blurry and the room was whirling
like a spinning top finally losing its balance and toppling over. I thought I
could see four enormous guys in tailored suits enter the room and walk towards
me. I thought I could feel them reach into my pocket and extract my wallet. I
thought I could see the blonde girl give them the cash from my casino chips and
laugh as they handed me a hand-written bill of two thousand Lats. I thought I
was writing down my pin number and account details as one of the guys held a
baseball bat to my head. I thought I felt an earthquake in my skull before…
nothing.
* * *
I woke up in the street with a searing headache and the taste of
iron in my gums. Jamie was bent over me gently clapping at my cheeks.
‘Are you alright man? I mean, you
don’t look alright and your wallet and keys have gone, but are you… okay?’ He
asked me sounding genuinely concerned. ‘I guess you were right about being
cautious,’
‘Hate… to… say… it… Jamie… but… I told
you so.’ I mumbled before falling back to sleep.
