We have Independence Day coming up here in Latvia on Tuesday, and not just any, but 90 years since the first independence. In case anyone didn't know, it began in '18 on November 18 and ended on August 5, 1940, with the annexation of Latvia by the Soviet Union, which is customarily called an occupation in Latvia.
From my point of view, all this is absolutely unimportant. When the crisis fucking hits, nobody will have time for that. But for now we're still holding on – so they're celebrating with some pomp.
In particular, the Staro Riga festival of light - “Riga shines” - is taking place these days. What better reason to go visit friends? Especially since they moved the working Monday to Saturday so there'd be 4 days off in a row. So I went. First I cleaned the apartment, and then I barely managed to throw some music and Philip Jose Farmer's audiobook “The God Business” onto my player, and by tradition almost missed the bus. But I didn't miss it, I even had time to pop into a kiosk to buy a battery. My player is dying, by the way, but that probably doesn't matter because I'm planning to buy a smartphone anyway, or rather, a communicator. There are plenty of candidates of all sorts, but there will be a separate post about them. As for the story “The God Business”, it's amusing, but nothing more. I wouldn't waste time on it in print.
“Riga shines” – is mostly just buildings and bridges illuminated by multicolored floodlights. The buildings look nice, but nothing more. The bridges and the Saules Akmens skyscraper turned out way cooler. I already showed you the railway one when I was flying to Crete, it's always illuminated. But the suspension bridge blinks and sparkles perfectly – the green flashes remind me of one of my favorite computer games – Flashback. The Raddison Hotel Latvia building was also interesting – like a mosaic, only dynamically changing.
As you can understand, all this needs to be seen in motion, so the photos show absolutely nothing. Photos are from Flickr, click for the original, as usual.
Then we went to an eatery called Vairak Saules, famous mainly for its pizzas. The prices there aren't particularly humane, but tolerable. I ate a French vegetable soup with seafood and a Siciliana pizza. The soup was okay, but somehow not very expressive. It makes sense – the ingredients were definitely frozen, not fresh, that's where the problem stems from. The pizza was wonderful – with “Mozzarella” cheese, red onions, black olives, gherkins and jalapeño peppers. I already mentioned the pepper in the report about the USA, and here it was butchered all sorts of ways in the menu; I still haven't figured out what the correct way is.
So if you're a pizza fan (which I am not) – feel free to go to Vairak Saules. It's located at Dzirnavu 60, which is relatively close to the train station or the cathedral, for that matter.
And since I've started writing in reverse chronological order, I'll tell you what we did in the morning . Namely - watched the motion picture Max Payne. Boring, if you ask me – Max walks around for too long doing nothing, the shooting is somehow sluggish, and the plot is completely absent, which could have been forgiven if not for the first point. The only thing I liked – the valkyrie visions, beautifully done. Unfortunately, there are no pictures of them on the net yet, and going to the cinema just to look at them isn't worth it.
That's roughly how unpretentiously we spent our time. Not counting learning all sorts of informative facts about organizing simple clusters on Linux using heartbeat, mysql replication and drbd. Just strictly general concepts – I have no need for the specifics on this, but it's interesting to listen to.
And yesterday, when I was leaving, I also popped into a premium-class deli in the mc2 shopping center. I've been wanting to go there for a long time, to see how the rich live. They live beautifully – the food packaging isn't garish, but on the contrary, austere, there are mountains of all sorts of exotic stuff. There's jamón - the famous cured pork legs hanging from the ceiling, I dream of trying it someday. There's also cured horse meat. I didn't buy it, got stingy – it costs 30 lats ($60) a kilo. But I did buy a chocolate bar with nougat and some tea. By the way, everything is sold over the counter, not like in a supermarket, the sellers are all polite, unobtrusive and give useful tips, like how green tea shouldn't be brewed with boiling water. The price of tea in mc2 is listed per 100 grams, and there's a little jasmine tea there with a 16 ls price tag, which I, not knowing this fact, almost bought.
True, I haven't resolved the question of whether the part of the wealthy people's world where groceries are bought actually looks like this, or if it's just some sort of facade. Maybe the rich usually eat out at restaurants – but they still have to eat something at home too, right? I'm obviously not talking about those with personal chefs, but just upper middle class or thereabouts.
And when I was leaving, I also did all sorts of things. First I bought some huge Azerbaijani pomegranates at the market - crazy expensive, damn, but worth every penny in taste. Then I popped into the xlpelmeni dumpling joint at the train station and had lunch. Ate some solyanka and meat pelmeni. The solyanka was – nothing special: too few spices, little variety in the fillings. The only thing redeeming it is that for 1.20 Ls you can independently pour yourself a huge, thick bowl, skipping the broth. The pelmeni were a bit better, but didn't make much of an impression – not nasty, but not very flavorful either. By the way, it's funny, but the chain's website has no Russian language, despite pelmeni being – a dish we all know whose it is. But they do pour vodka in the pelmeni joints, which some traditionalists would highly approve of.
Overall – it's okay to visit if you want to stuff your belly relatively cheaply – for 3 lats I got full to the brim. No real joy, though, because at home for 3 lats I would have had a truly wonderful dinner, even if I'd have lost about 50 minutes on cooking.
And also, right as I was finally leaving, I bought some milk chocolate at Emihls Gustavs. They don't have any without nuts – an annoying oversight, had I actually liked the chocolate. But it was pretty boring, so upon arriving I left it for my parents. In general, compared to dark chocolate, somehow fewer companies try to make milk chocolate well – Fazer and Lindt are tasty, but the rest are all average.
I got back quickly, because I was reading tech docs and listening to an audiobook again – The Picture. It's alright, but it'll only amuse today's children of the internet - after all, what's described in the story has sort of materialized in the form of Estonian wild boars and storks.
All in all – spent what they call quality time with friends.