1000 Brussels

Onto a coach again for the journey from Rīga to Tallinn, this time by daylight so I can see a bit more of the countryside. It’s a great trip – seeing the towns and villages you pass through is one of the few benefits of coach travel – along the Via Baltica, the EU-funded road that runs from the Lithuanian/Polish border up to Tallinn. It’s two-lanes all the way, which makes the modern coaches swerve around quite a lot as they overtake Soviet-era trucks.

Scenery description after the jump.

Continue reading “Rīga to Tallinn”

The Guardian’s commitment to the environment has always stopped short of its Saturday Travel section (“Inside: Fly to China!, next week: Fly to the Pacific!”) but it now appears that its commitment to social justice and income equality stops there too.

An unwelcome recent arrival in the travel section is something called the “Business Travellers’ Diary”, written by one Max Levene. Mr Levene describes himself as a management consultant, and he’s either a very good one or has a private income, because every column so far (here’s one example) has reeked of luxury and smugness. Five star hotels, exclusive membership clubs, and of course all those thousands of miles farting CO2 into the atmosphere, lovingly detailed at the head of the column every week like a cross between Mr. Potter and Bridget Jones. Before writing this I spent twenty minutes trying to work out whether it was actually very convincing satire.

I don’t mind wealth porn existing, I just want it to stay where it belongs: in the pages of Hello magazine and the FT’s How to Spend It section – though given the profile of FT readers, perhaps the latter is more a wealth Kama Sutra. And yes, I know I could just turn the page and move on, but there’s something disheartening about this appearing in the Guardian without acknowledgement of how out of touch with most people’s reality it is, or the massive dissonance between this and the paper’s wider political positions.

I don’t object to Mr Levene having such a wonderful life, though I do object to his flying so much. I just don’t feel the need to hear about it, or for it to be held up as the sort of thing one should aspire to. We may be heading back to the Gilded Age in this country, and I don’t do too badly myself, thanks, but at least the Carnegies and Rockefellers took the train from time to time.

My favourite crass advice (source):

Downsizing? Cutting costs? Don’t be fooled, flying economy is a catastrophe. Fly business in Europe; and try to fly first for long haul.

Thanks, Max, I’m sure I can find that extra two grand or so just lying around behind the sofa.

A short stay in Rīga on my way to Tallinn, at the historic and central Metropole, across the road from the train and coach station.

On first sight, I’m really liking Rīga. It feels quite Scandinavian, even though the Latvians are Slavs. The old city centre has been thoroughly pedestrianised and is a great place for strolling around. Some spectacular mediaeval buildings, and a hideous Soviet monstrosity that now houses the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia.

A few random thoughts and things I’ve picked up:

• Latvian is a very odd looking language: I’ve not seen diacritics on ‘K’s before. Just because I worked out how to do it on Unicode, the sort of letters I’m talking about are the long ‘A’s and other vowels like in Rīga, the softened consonants like ḷ, ṇ and ḳ. I like that, it gives a script character.
• Fewer than half the population of the large cities are ethnically Latvian
• Because of that last, you hear a lot of Russian around on the streets, which is pretty much the only reminder of the fact that this used to be part of the Soviet Union (well, that and a grotesque monument to the Red Riflemen – some sort of pro-Communist militia – by the Town Hall)
• Latvia’s article on Wikipedia has a (short) Scottish language edition
• When Latvia was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, the leader of the time (one of the many Central/East European inter-war strongmen) didn’t even issue a diplomatic protest
• Rīga has loads of excellent cafés and some very plush-looking shops

I had dinner at a restaurant called Nostalǵija (those accents again) on Kaḷḳu iela, which served up a beer, a pot of tea (because I couldn’t pronounce the word for kasza correctly) and a local speciality which was essentially meat pierogi in rosół with mushrooms. Very tasty and an absolute steal at under a tenner.

On the way to Tallinn for a friend’s stag weekend, but going the long way round. Stayed in the Nord Hotel, a rather shabby two-star place right by the Gare du Nord. Not as plush as the neighbouring Hotel Terminus Nord, but fine for the half an hour I spent there awake. Wandered down to Maison Berthillon and had dinner at the Place d’Italie, a slightly soulless square on the southern side of the city, with a massive cinema.

Then a long train journey to Warsaw, made all the longer by a nasty cold, and a night in the plush and fairly reasonably priced Novotel Centrum, on Al. Jerozolimskie by the central station.

Finally, a long overnight coach via Eurolines from Warsaw’s tediously remote central bus station to Rīga, via Kaunas.