There are many ways in which I know Meredith loves me. Yet one more obvious (yet judgmentally questionable) instance is that she decided to plan all around me and my post-food-poisoning-illness needs instead of going off on her own and seeing potentially more exciting stuff. She decided she would rather spend slower touring time with me in the immediate environs of Riga than be by herself doing/seeing other things. I married up.

I managed to eat a fairly decent amount of breakfast, but then had to come upstairs and lie down for ten or fifteen minutes before Meredith finished her breakfast and joined me. Even though it was “her day” today, she said she wanted to collaborate based on what I felt I could do. I told her I really wanted to see the Art Nouveau buildings she had seen yesterday, so we set off toward the most concentrated blocks of them in the city at a pace that would challenge the heartiest ninety-year-old. Happily, it was a perfect weather day with tons of sun and cool temperatures.

It’s not a short walk. From out hotel, it’s over a mile, but we took several scenic detours that got us closer to as much as three miles away, all at a shuffle. En route, Mer showed me several of the places she had seen on her tour yesterday, including pointing out a square that had “wavy” themes because a river used to flow there, a secluded alley area that a hotel bought up and made into one hotel made of several buildings, the “powder tower” that was renovated by people collecting and selling pigeon poop as fertilizer, and more.

All along the way, we were seeing Art Nouveau buildings, of course. Riga hit a major building boom around 1900 just as Art Nouveau came into fashion, so now some forty percent of Riga’s buildings have some Art Nouveau influence on them. Art Nouveau, so Mer tells me, involves decorative elements using curves and nature motifs and faces and figures (often elongated with fantastic expressions). I love these details on and in buildings, so I was excited and impressed when we got to the best section of town to see Art Nouveau buildings. There are three or four blocks where buildings on both sides of the street are layered with ornamentation. Areas around windows, ironwork railings, figures on corners of buildings, faces looking down from the rooflines or from between stories, animals on or around doorways, and on and on. I was delighted.

We walked around the entire area marveling at the buildings. Not surprisingly, many embassies are in this part of town; ambassadors seem to like nice living. Mer pointed out what she learned from her tour – the Russian embassy is in this part of town, so Latvia officially changed the name of that street to something like “Ukrainian Freedom” so that all official correspondence to the Russian embassy has to go to “Ukrainian Freedom Street.” I’m not surprised that the Latvians are strongly in favor of Ukraine.

I have no idea why, but the Irish embassy had a statue of a cat proposing to another cat up on their second floor balcony. Leave it to the Irish to be whimsical.

Across the street from the Irish embassy was a building with a magnificent five-story spiral Art Nouveau staircase that Mer took me inside to see. The building also happened to house a museum with an apartment decked out as it would have been in the 1920s. The basement of the museum gave an overview of Riga and Art Nouveau as well as having some artifacts from the time, and an exhibit on Art Nouveau buildings in Holland. But the gem was the first-floor apartment. The decorations and furniture and even the woodwork were all in the Art Nouveau style. I loved loved loved it. So much class and style, in my book.

The building also had a museum of the apartment of a famous Latvian painter, Janis Rozentāls. His apartment was designed by the architect specifically to have a living space for Janis’ family on one floor and his studio on the top floor (although it also had one room for a close friend who was a writer who lived there). It was also a great chance to see another apartment in the building. Janis’ art was modern and impressionistic, and I liked it quite a bit. He seems to have done mostly portrait work.

After the museum, we finished off our tour of the Art-Nouveau-intensive neighborhoods and made our way back home. I was tired and needed a rest. Once we got back to the hotel, Mer and I both took short naps. That recharged me enough that we set out again around 3:00 to go find Jana Seta, a map store that also has a large collection of original Soviet maps. The clerk, who was really helpful, told me that it was the only remaining map store in the Baltics. He helped me find a Soviet tactical map of the southeast of England and the Calais area of France that I bought to give to a teacher at CVCA who teaches about the Cold War. Meredith amused herself by reading European tour books about the USA.

From the map store, we walked to a park to take a canal/river cruise. We had already been on the river on Tuesday, but I was getting tired again, so sitting-down tourism was an attraction. Plus, it was a pretty day, while Tuesday had been cold and cloudy, and we asked specifically if the boat would have commentary. The boat did end up having recorded commentary, but at a low enough volume that it was hard to catch everything. We chatted with the other people on the boat – a couple from Germany, two women from Finland, and two women from England. We were a little United Nations on the boat. We did learn from the commentary that the town’s market (before the blimp hangars) had been by the river and difficult to keep sanitary because of bugs and rats. We also learned that when Latvia’s president is at home, the presidential castle flies his flag, and when he’s gone, it’s lowered. That’s helpful for door-to-door salesmen to know. The commentary also mentioned that the river/Baltic Sea harbor area is about eleven miles long, which helped explain to us why we couldn’t see the sea from the city.

After the cruise, we had pizza for supper (it seemed safe). We then walked over to St. John’s Lutheran Church (of the pretty vaulted ceiling fame) to hear the Royal Holloway Founder’s Choir from London; it’s a university choir that is currently touring Latvia. The singers did five numbers with an organ, then an organ solo, then a long piece with the organ, and then an organ solo, and they finally finished the evening with four a cappella songs, which were my favorites (the notes just hung in the air of the church).

And so that finished up the day and our time in Latvia. We have a relaxed morning tomorrow with having to catch the airport bus around 10:00, and then we’re underway. Lord willing, we’ll be back in Toronto around 9:00 p.m. EST (4:00 a.m. Latvia time), where we’ll spend the night before heading home to kitties, family, and friends on Saturday. And maybe some safely prepared food, too.