Mar 31, 2009

For Sale to Highest Bidder : The Soul of Riga

I witnessed a rape on Sunday - not a physical rape by a person on another, but a slow, gradual rape, where the soul of a city has slowly been eroded and is disappearing at quite a pace. I first visited Riga in 2004 when the old city was still quaint, quiet, with a scattering of bars with a local feel about them. It was all in all a Latvian experience. The people we shared the hostel with were mostly passing through on longer trips. Sure, they were interested in going out for a beer or 3 when they were there but the main point of being in Riga for them was to see the city/rest of Latvia. There were a few hostels in town and a few more being set up and you could tell from this that the tourist flow was increasing. It still felt a bit like a corner of Europe which retains its identity, where people took pride in their Old Town and where you could discover things at your own pace. Since then, seemingly, the invasion has started. The occupying force is mostly British booze-tourists and their vehicle of invasion is the cheap Ryanair flight from London Stansted.

I was in Riga again on Sunday for a few hours on my way to the airport from Lithuania and was pretty shocked at what I saw - the amount of tourists cruising the streets were more reminiscent of the crowds on the day cruises from Tallinn than what I saw in 2004. Every bar I walked past in the Old Town had abandoned the feel I got 5 years ago in favour of an English style psuedo-modern look, the barstaff said hello in English rather than Latvian and the windows were adorned with Sky Sports stickers. Yes ! you, tourist, can come to Latvia and take advantage of the cheaper beers without even feeling like you've changed country ! I eventually found a bar without a Sky Sports sticker in the window and walked in, expecting to find an oasis in the unLatvian desert, only to be greeted in English by a bargirl under a big screen showing England playing against Slovakia.

My Latvian friend told me that people there are tired of the "staggers" getting trashed and representing their own proudly by doing things such as pissing on Latvia's independence monument but, she asked, what can we do about it ? The answer is not much, I suppose, and especially in an economic climate like this, the bars are doing the sensible thing by cashing in on the invasion - my beer in 2009 cost nearly 5 times more than it did in 2004.

It's a difficult situation I guess - tourism is an enormous money-spinner and in the same way that you can't blame a homeless man striking up a superficial friendship with a millionaire, central Riga's bar owners can either welcome to booze cruisers or sink into the abyss of bankruptcy as the drinkers head elsewhere. Latvia has the unfortunate situation of being close enough to London (and I don't want to be overly harsh on the Brits - boozers do come from other places, although the main culprits come from the UK), accessible with cheap flights, sell beer cheaply, and be populated by a large proportion of attractive women, which proves to be a good magnet for tourist money but a deadly cocktail when it comes to preserving the soul of any place. All in all it means that I'm less likely to go for a weekend in Riga when I have a few days off but, given that I don't spend a week's wages on beer during that time, I suppose I am less missed than others would be.

Mar 12, 2009

Exam

After 4 weeks and 3 days - I'm back ! You haven't missed anything - stuff is exactly as it was. The world is still rotating, I'm still working the same jobs, there's still snow on the ground, Finns still like beer, and the kitchen in our flat is still half covered in trash.

Saturday, however, heralds a bit of a change in my routine. Normally on Saturdays I like to perfect the art of slobbing, mainly because it's the only day of the week where I don't go to work (except for last week when I did). It's great because you can get up late and you also don't have that Sunday feeling where you know it's the last time you'll be getting up late until the next weekend, which results in you getting up a bit earlier because you want to make the most of the day, and then being utterly unfulfilled because you end up doing boring crap like food shopping, or going to do the laundry.

The change will be that I'll have to drag myself out of bed at the crack of dawn to go and have my second pop at the last university exam I'll ever have to do. Before then (and it's Thursday afternoon now) I'll have to read 4 books, plus do all of the things that people do when they're studying for an exam and they don't want to read the books. We've all done it - checking your emails once every millisecond, smoking more than you should, reading news stories so irrelevant and uninteresting that you'd never read them otherwise, smoking and checking your email again, wondering who you could send a constructive text message to, failing, sending a pointless one to someone anyway and then sitting watching your phone waiting for a response, which usually never comes. I failed the last crack I had at this exam because I was overenthusiastic - I stayed up on the Monday night until 3am reading this mind-numbing theoretical rubbish which is in most cases just an overly complicated ego boost for the author (after all, why write things in regular language when you can write it in a way that no one can understand and realise how clever you are in the process ?). This led to me being a complete wreck for the rest of the week, not being able to take anything in and making an absolute hash of the exam when it came around. This time, I just can't focus on anything. I've smoked, checked my emails, watched the Simpsons, read about last night's football, eaten an entire bunch of bananas because it allowed me to take the skins to the trash and even checked the use-by dates on food in the fridge to see what should be eaten tonight. And I NEVER do that.

As it is now, the exam is 40 hours away and I have another 3 books to read. And as you can tell from the fact that this post is full of long sentences and inane twitter, I'm just using it as yet another "something to do" while my books just sit idly on the table, waiting for me to fall asleep on them when I finally manage to peel the covers back and see what bland speculation lies within. I don't get drunk very regularly at all these days but the day I graduate, I've promised myself that I will. And once Sunday comes around I'll liberate my brain, observe the world again and who knows, maybe even have something to write about.

180 days until the grand departure.