The executive summary would be as follows:

	Iceland	Canada	U.S.A.
Flag
Currency	157 ISK = 1 €	1,38 CAD = 1 €	1,36 USD = 1 €
Toilet sign	Snyrtingar	Washroom	Restroom
Water smell	sulphur	chlorine	chlorine

I started to develop a faible for brutalist architecture and now I’m tempted to retro-blog the experience, if only to make sure I remember it better.

My iPod’s photo app claims we were here:

I had the opportunity to do that now. Not quite the big tour all the way around the island, but just a two-day stopover in Reykjavík for the time being, thanks to Icelandair offering such flights from Europe to North America with the option to enjoy a few days in their country. To us, the days in Reykjavík seemed worth the effort of doing the stopover. We stayed at 4th floor hotel near Hlemmur bus station (it looked bigger in the film) which has small rooms but was affordable and fine.

This very short stop in Iceland left a good impression. Everybody was friendly, helpful and totally used to the nuisance that are tourists. Somehow they manage to strike the right balance between being helpful and being blatantly commercial: You can buy pretty much any touristy attraction or convenience you may be interested in, but it doesn’t seem like anything is forced on you.

Downtown Reykjavík is conveniently small and easy to explore by foot. After just a day you start coming to streets, thinking “we’ve been here before”. So we looked at the city, the harbour, their new Harpa concert house, went up the concrete Hallgrímskirkja to enjoy the view on the city, peeked at the city hall, parliament, national library and took a short walk up a hill to Perlan a bunch of hot water tanks with a glass dome containing a cafeteria and restaurant on top.

Hot water is Iceland’s big source of energy. And there’s enough of it to heat pretty much everything to comfortable temperatures without a second thought. This leads to poorly insulated houses and quite a few buildings seeming to master everything without having chimneys. It also seems to result in a slightly sulphuric smell in the hot water, which takes some getting used to.

Before leaving, we indulged in a few hours of soaking in the Blue Lagoon spa which is fed by the wastewater of a power station. Luckily the power station is a geothermal one as well, so we’re just talking about a lot of hot water here – without a noticeable sulphuric smell even.

After that attraction we were dropped off at Keflavík airport again – offering a trip from your hotel to the airport with a spa-stop on the way just seems like a brilliant idea – and were comfortably tired for the flight to Toronto.

But before all that begins there are two days of stopover time in Reykjavík. Looking forward to that. Off to the train to the plane now …

Of course lack of time and resources also play roles here. But they get right down to the heart of the problem: Visualising data is a hard task. And its difficulty lies at so many different levels that it’s simply quite unlikely for a person to have all the necessary skills and the necessary information at his or her hands. The first issue seems to be data gathering. A lot of interesting information is hard to get hold of – both because of incompetence and because of institutions not being keen on that information being accessible. And for a bunch of technical reasons which in particular mean that data from different sources cannot be simply thrown together but will need some type of conversion or interpretation beforehand, in other words: a lot of work.

The next bunch of problems is related to data analysis which needs to be done to simplify the noisy pure data and distill information from them. Doing that requires at least technical skills. When you’re dealing with many records, those may need to be quite advanced. And in case your analysis is to be more sophisticated than counting, knowing some statistics could be helpful as well.

Finally, you want to visualise the information you just discovered, possibly even communicating the reason for your conclusion or some kind of narrative along with that. Doing that will require graphical skills and a reasonable sense of æsthetics. It’s rare that a single person unites all those skills and it also seems quite rare for persons with those different skills to team up. Furthermore, while there are great tools for both data analysis and graphical visualisation, there seem to be no good interfaces between those tools that allow a fluid and efficient workflow.

Anyway, I had read about see conference in Wiesbaden a while ago and decided to go and listen to the wide variety of talks on different aspects of visualisation promised there. With seven talks in the course of the day, and a focus on sustainability, there was plenty to note and think about. All that among hundreds of interested people in the pleasant atmosphere of Wiesbaden’s Lutherkirche.

The day started off with the ‘keynote’ by sociologist Harald Welzer. He likes talking and spoke about the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, how they have largely been ignored for decades, and how the unsustainability of our lifestyle is cemented by that fact. The current situation in Fukushima was used as a current example. One whose direct effects are not immediate and which could do with both good visualisation and less stupid media. Referencing last year’s see conference – where apparently a bunch of speakers couldn’t come due flight paths being closed after the Eyjafjallajökull eruption – he pointed out that (a) the world didn’t end without planes [some truth in that, I guess, but not in the way he suggested it as this was for a very limited period of time, so mere delays and inconveniences were the consequence, rather than a change of lifestyle] and that furthermore (b) everybody keeps arguing that not having planes or roads would make us suffer from being less mobile while (c) nobody is supposed to note that having roads and planes also make us suffer from noise and death – so there’s at least a tacit tradeoff being made there which is rarely questioned. He also made some points on the popular topic of CO₂ emissions and rightly remarked that these also lack immediacy and people fail to communicate the real problems. He pointed out that the popular image of a ‘carbon footprint’ used for this topic is patently absurd as people can relate to neither carbon nor – living in a paved world – footprints.

The next speaker was Carlo Ratti from Senseable City Lab at MIT. He highlighted how more and more aspects of our world and daily lives are closely related to data these days. Sensors, communication and data processing have become cheap and will become even cheaper. A lot of data are collected and increasingly used. Possibly to improve our lives [he didn’t touch the topic of how those data are mainly used to create profits which may be bad for our lives: to me it seems that the ‘bad’ guys put more effort into extracting useful information from the data]. He then presented a bunch of interesting projects their group made: Using communication data in Rome to visualise what people are doing and how they flow through the city. During Italy’s football world championship win and in everyday life. Apparently it’s hard to tell pedestrians and people in cars apart in Rome when all you know is the speed they’re moving at. A vision he presented was to create a bus system where the buses know when they are needed and appear; Nothing practical seems to have come out of that idea, though. Other data collections were the tracking of rubbish by putting extra electronics in it and drawing the results on a map; Sweet idea, but one wonders to which extent this revealed information beyond which kind of rubbish dumps and recycling facilities are where. Other projects involved ‘crowd-sourcing’, i.e. analysing pictures on flickr to find out where in Span spring is or where parties in Barcelona are. Possibly the most interesting info-graphic shown was a film with a map of Singapore, which was distorted according to the time you’d need to reach places. Nice show of rush hours. All in all, plenty of fun ideas in there, but they mostly didn’t seem to reveal much beyond the obvious.

Food queues in the following bread were so long that I settled for cake instead (yay!) and looked at the exhibition of student works in the basement. Besides hipster stuff like a fancy display for Twitter messages, I saw a system using that XBox infrared motion tracker to let people play virtual instruments. Unfortunately the software didn’t like me when I wanted to try it out. Another, spooky, project consisted of long flexible tubes in a dark room with lights at their end. It turned out some proximity detection was going on there and the tubes started moving a little and ‘looked’ at you with their lights when you approached them. Sweet.

After the lunch break, Alexander Lehmann spoke. He became an overnight YouTube star a few years back when he made a film taking the piss of the then running ridiculous Du bist Deutschland campaign, renaming it Du bist Terrorist and showing the image of a state suspecting all citizens as terrorists and thus being fully justified to terminate privacy and logging all the data they can. A good idea, executed so well that it became popular and then rocketed in popularity even more after people threatened to sue him, the poor design student, which made Alexander the star of the media. Nice if stories work out like that. He sketched how he works and stressed the difference between (static) graphics or text and working with video which, having a linear timeline, gives the creator great control over the pace of the elements the viewer focuses on. The debtris video by Information is Beautiful served as an example for that. As a bonus, his fame even got him a job doing satirical clips for a TV show.

The following speaker was Brendan Dawes from Manchester. He spoke about his fun projects, the importance of enriching data with a human touch – data needs poetry – and pointed out plenty of curious and sweet projects like his analogue weather indicator, his love of laser cutters or ‘analysing’ films by making big posters using many of their frames [an idea that has both a charming geekery for being so technical taken off with sites like moviebarcode appearing]. The latter even got him into New York’s Museum of Modern Art, but I’m not really sure I can tell what the point of his talk was.

Speaker number five was Wesley Grubbs from Pitch Interactive in Madison, Wisconsin. His talk was the most interesting one of the day to me as he spoke about both sides of visualisation: going all the way from big data sets to appealing and insightful visualisations. In fact I may have seen some his works before as the programme said they were in the Science Express that toured Germany a while ago. He showed a few examples of his work and discussed the challenges in creating them. One was the difference between the funding of Obama’s and McCain’s election campaigns in 2008. All the official donations, 12 million of them, are public in the U.S. [great!], and with information about donors, their job, city and the amount of donation one can analyse and tell the (by now familiar) story that Obama got enough donations to buy the election but he did so by convincing many people to contribute a little rather than having a few huge donors contributing most of the money. Another story was about 311 calls – 311 apparently being the number you call in U.S. cities when there’s something non-dangerous you need help with, e.g. noisy neighbours or blocked driveways. For the hundred millionth call in New York they wanted to present the service, analysed the call records for a period of time and ended up with a diagram telling pretty much the life of the city by graphing the reasons for 311 calls throughout the day: When the ctiy tries and fails to sleep, when it sleeps, when people wake up, etc. A final example shown was a graph showing U.S. federal spending. Seeing it, it’s shocking – but not particularly surprising – that a huge chunk of the money is the defense budget. What turns this into a remarkable story, is to compare the fractions of the budget going into certain areas with the media coverage of the same areas. And there, a big disconnect becomes visible. One can understand that nobody wants to read about war all the time, but seeing that people appear to care a lot about education which gets a negligible fraction of the budget is sad.

After the next break – hmmm, ice cream! – Joshua Prince-Rasmus from REX architects in New York spoke. He put on a great show and had amazing projects to present. His point – which seems to be the working method of their office – being that architecture is ‘just’ another instance of turning information into design as well. After giving a short historical introduction, politely expressing his distaste for the practical outcomes of Bauhaus architectures and 1980s skyscrapers, he introduced their ‘method’ of working. It consists of a big first step of understanding the client’s needs. In particular, that step is not about how things are built or how they look. The result of that analysis, backed by data, is condensed into statements about the needs and goals of the project which the client signs – and only then architectural planning begins. [I suppose this kind of ‘method’ drives away ‘bad’ clients quite easily, so you’ll need some kind of reputation to get away with it.] The first example he gave and showed was the new public library in Seattle which looks a bit odd but the looks were derived from the varying needs of different parts of library work [I think the library also has a clever way of integrating DDC classification in the setup of everything, but that may be beyond the pure architecture and wasn’t mentioned in the talk which focused on the fact that libraries in the 20th century are at least as much about public services and people than they are about books]. The next example was the Dallas Theatre Center. They were in a shabby building and had become quite famous for their productions. Apparently because of the old building which nobody cared about so directors could be super flexible, have holes in the roof and whatever else they wanted. Thus the needs they determined from that lead to a building flexible for many different setups and taking that to an extreme where the theatre’s main area is an empty hall on ground level, most walls of which can be removed. The stage and seating areas can be moved where they should be within an hour from above and below. Sounds and looked very clever and refreshing to me. Another remarkable project was a development for Louisville university which was made for a site so crappy the university got it for free (between a concrete wall and a motorway, potentially flooded, consisting of three pieces). The building was meant to be rented out in part to pay for the bits the university wanted. And after analysing that problem to death, they came up with a solution. I find it fascinating when people think in such a structural way. I started wanting to work for them. Even more so when Prince-Rasmus said everybody starting to work there will cry at some stage because everybody goes on crashing their ideas while trying to find the best one.

The final speaker was Justin Manor from Boston. He’s into live video projects and showed a lot of the ‘Prime Numerics’ project they did during election campaigns in the U.K. and U.S.: Discussions were typed in as they happened (apparently a real challenge to keep up with the ridiculous speaking speed of British politicians) and then the words were analysed in many different ways, leading to all sorts of visualisations of things like word frequency, word and sentence length, pronoun usage and so on. All that packaged in slick looking animated text and graphs put onto the live television image. That’s pretty cool but also pretty useless as the data analysis done is quite ad-hoc and wouldn’t qualify as serious in any way – a fact that Manor also pointed out himself. So this presentation was mainly visually interesting but fell short on the ‘information’ part. What wasn’t so great was Manor trying to connect to the big topic of sustainability attached to the conference at the end. He just didn’t have anything significant to say on that, so that ended up being a bit weird.

And that was the conference for me. As I travelled on to Heidelberg, I had to miss the evening party and the short workshop sessions announced for Sunday (Wesley Grubbs said he’d give some insight in the data analysis techniques used, which sounded very interesting). Big thanks go to Scholz & Volkmer advertising agency for organising the event.

One topic which unfortunately wasn’t really discussed at the conference is that of truth. Sure, a few speakers implicitly referred to it (e.g. Alexander Lehmann making satirical films which are by definition about truth, or the lack thereof, in politics or Joshua Prince-Rasmus mentioning that they couldn’t really plan a ‘zero-carbon-footprint’ building which was supposed to be built 20km out of the city centre as things have to happen inside cities to keep them energetically efficient), but the actual point was not made: Visual information can easily lie.

Less blatantly: We are quite visual by nature and we are inclined to believe things we see. A graph or image just sticks more easily than a big table of numbers which we have to read, understand and possibly analyse. As a consequence it is easy to create visualisations which are suggestive in the wrong way. Which means that creating such graphics brings great power and great responsibility with it. Both because people want to mislead the recipient of the information (I am sure all the advertising people who were there would have a thing or two to tell about that) and because they accidentally mislead due to wrong analysis or not thinking the perception of the visualisation through sufficiently.

Even simple, quotidian visualisations like bar graphs in newspapers are routinely ‘adjusted’ for display by cutting off their axes. When doing this there must be a line somewhere between cutting off the axes in a way that significant information becomes more visible and cutting off the axes in a way that makes a trivial change look dramatic. Where exactly that line is crossed will depend on the data used, the facts they describe, the people the graph is made for and the agenda of the people creating the graph. To me this issue looks like a pretty slippery slope. One that would be interesting to discuss. For the benefit of both the people who want to create ‘correct’ graphs and those who want to mislead.

Bonus links: Video streams, photos.

In addition to that, it’s super-easy to get along in the region as pretty much everyone seems to speak Italian, German, which are local languages, as well as English for the tourists. People seem very friendly and many of them strive to take good care of their guests and make your stay enjoyable. Things are expensive – which seems to be ‘necessary’ for ski holidays, but not as pricey as in Austria or Switzerland. Even a lunch in a refugio on the pistes can be reasonably good and with good service and not just a plain rip-off if you are lucky which may be one in three or so.

I took a ski course once again, and our maestro, Hans, super-patiently – possibly even a bit too patiently – tried to bring us around the curves and up-to-speed on the pistes, so we could go on some longer trip the last day of the course and I could comfortably do the ‘Sella Ronda’ ride around the Sella group with my friends on the last day of our stay – no panic required. Naturally, now I want more…

Going in March seemed a bit risky at first as the weather has been quite warm recently, so we wondered how the snow situation would be. We learned that, yes, it had been warm in Italy as well – and indeed it was lovely and sunny throughout our stay –, but they make an effort to create enough ‘artificial’ snow early in winter to last all the way to the end of April. That, together with all the lifts they have shows how much business/dedication is going on there and makes you wonder how much of the landscape they destroyed by having such extensive skiing facilities (even though friends said the region is beautiful for hiking in summer as well). The whole lift thing is fascinating and I’ll have to read up a bit on how they make the steel ropes, how much power is used and so on. Probably Wikipedia will help; perhaps companies like Leitner and Doppelmayr who seem to build most of the lifts have interesting sites as well, including this script on ropeway technology with more information that you wanted. A small Schlepplift seems to use 60kW of power, a larger and longer chairlift 250kW.

A topic that crossed our way a few times was the question of fascism. Incidentally, Kulturzeit ran a report on right wing Italian movements during our stay. Accidentally my friend spotted a presumably ‘fun’ wine bottle with Hitler’s face on in the pizzeria next door – is this just a sign that people are stupid in the way people reading The Sun or Bild are? or is this worse? – And, well, amusingly the Dolomiti Superski Logo could be considered being a bit too close to the SS-Logo for comfort.

An unexpected highlight of the trip for me was the Vasamuseet. While it it praised in the guides, I didn’t expect to enjoy it too much as I’m just not sufficiently into history. Yet, I found the whole absurd story about the boastful boat sinking after a hundred metres, the effort needed to get hold of it again, and the way it was presented in the museum fascinating.

People are right to recommend strolling around Södermalm. Just like Prenzlauer Berg it’s fun and interesting to visit and look at – but it feels a bit too ‘quirky’ at times. An great thing to visit for the photo geek was Fotografiska which, among other things had a an interesting exhibition of Andy Warhol cross-dressing along with Velvet Underground videos going on. Their top-floor café is also very pleasant.

The very first event on Friday night was a bit of a bonus: A concert by Rainald Grebe at Admiralspalast. Rainald Grebe’s music is fun stuff, chock-full of clever observations about the world, life, and the people around him. The event, however, wasn’t too exciting. Not only was the ‘orchestra’ that was with him mostly superfluous and sillily dressed, in addition Admiralspalast has horribly narrow and uncomfortable seats and and audience that isn’t my cup of tea.

On Saturday I started off with a visit to Bauhaus Archiv which aside from its permanent exhibition features a special exhibition on the graphical work of Hajo Rose at the moment. Both the permanent and the special exhibitions are of a comfortable size and very nice. I can recommend going there. However, be prepared to bring along a lot of either discipline or money as their gift shop is full of tempting stuff.

Afterwards we went to C/O Berlin to look at some photos there. Their main exhibition features photos of fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh at the moment. Like with most fashion photographers I wasn’t overly impressed. Many of the photos seemed rather bland to me. They were nice and huge, though (at least 2 metres), coming in pretty wooden frames. With most of the photos coming from 35mm negatives, that size didn’t do them a big favour, though: You see a lot of grain in there.

The small exhibition of photos by Fred Herzog they have was very nice though. And it fits in very well with the exhibition we saw at NRW Forum in Düsseldorf a fortnight ago. The run down Postfuhramt building that C/O Berlin resides in, is very cool by the way. So, if you haven’t done so yet, try and get a look before they are kicked out there by the investors who can imagine better ways to use such a nice property.

In the evening we went to Neukölln for dinner, trying the Föllerei restaurant. A pleasantly small one-page menu full of conservative food. Dinner was nice. And Neuköllners beware, gentrification is coming your way!

The rest of the night we walked around checking out several events of the Nacht und Nebel happening which featured dozens of places open to the public at night with art, music, commerce and whatnot. Nothing overly remarkable, but reasonably fun.

After extensive breakfast on Sunday, I rushed to the Welt aus Schrift exhibition which featured two huge rooms full of typographically oriented posters and art from the 20th century. A really great exhibition, particularly the room for the first half of the century which hightlights how much people created and invented back then already and how disciplined their work looks compared to the more modern stuff. Definitely an exhibition to visit, and possibly one you’d love to have around all the time if you feel the need for inspiration or nicking some good ideas.

Afterwards, I headed to the Martin-Gropius-Bau for their Moholy-Nagy exhibition. They showed some of his photos, plenty of his experimentation with objects on photo paper and some collages. This stuff doesn’t look too exciting these days where everybody can get more exciting effects in Photoshop. But coming up with the ideas and experimenting with them seems remarkable.

After another coffee, the weekend was over already: I headed to Hauptbahnhof and went back home.

Highlights of the visit were the breakfast at À midi, a sweet French-style café with a lovely atmosphere; The Der Rote Bulli exhibition at NRW Forum with photos from the Düsseldorf-school of Bernd and Hilla Becher as well as photos by Stephen Shore, trying to highlight the similarities of their approaches. Bonus points for NRW Forum making one of the rare reasonable efforts of having a useful web page, iOS app and providing their audio guide as a podcast.

Afterwards we visited the Nam June Paik exhibition at Museum Kunstpalast next door. I can’t help it, but I’m not terribly impressed by that. Whenever I see video-art type things I can’t help thinking that the artists aren’t particularly good at it on a technical level. I mean everybody has funny and new ideas all day but I thought the deal about artists is that they are very good at making them real. Those video artists mainly aren’t. A few nice ideas there, plenty of lame ones, and very little technical sophistication.

Dinner at Parlin was a bit fancyish but good and the Timid Tiger gig was fun, particularly as a bunch of us had seen them ages ago when they were young and lovely.

Before leaving on Sunday we took a walk along the Rhine and a trip up Rheinturm which luckily must have been in the only sunny hour of the day, giving us a great view around. After sipping a quick espresso at a bar in the nearby Gehry buildings the weekend was over already!

Getting There

Travelling to Baltic countries used to be a bit tricky in decades past, with few flights being available, plane changes being required and prices being high. These days, however, many airlines, including some on the affordable side, fly to Rīga. For example, Ryanair offer a few flights a week from Bremen. But eventually we picked a flight with Air Baltic from Hamburg. It turned out that booking with Air Baltic was pretty much as annoying and full-of-upselling – including extra charges for checked-in luggage – as buying flights with Ryanair is, but apart from that, things were a bit more civilised (a tamer colour scheme, the plane not being plastered with ads on the inside and the ability to pick seats during the online check-in).

After a short stop in Hamburg on the way to look at the ugly-ish (I’d say uninspired, serving architect-vanity at best, and without doubt expensive) new buildings in Hafen-City along with the new Elbphilharmonie concert hall they are building there, we were off from Hamburg Airport which I haven’t used in ages. Despite Hamburg being a big city, it seems to be a quiet airport. It’s conveniently connected to the city by S-Bahn, seems quite spacious, and the inevitable queues for ‘security’ checks were so short that the ordeal took but a few minutes. Once you enter the boarding area, they provide a number of restaurants on a balcony in the top floor in what looks like a nice setup for an airport.

Air Baltic’s performance wasn’t perfect. Their staff seemed mostly disinterested in their work and annoyed about having to work longer because the plane arrived half an hour late. The flight, however, was fine and uneventful, as was the arrival at Rīga airport, thanks to everything being in the Schengen area.

At Rīga airport, it also became apparent that Air Baltic really make an effort to get the most profit possible from their customers as they operate both shuttle buses and taxis from the airport to town. While probably being a bit more expensive than their public transport or regular taxi equivalents, that turned out to be a nice service as they offer fixed rate (9LVL) taxi rides with people at the airport making sure you get on a cab with a driver knowing the place you want to go to and no need to discuss the rates, potential detours &c in the middle of the night.

Albert Hotel

Just as for flights, the internet is a great resource when shopping for hotel stays. I quite like using Kayak for this as they seem to compare offers from a wide range of airline and hotel sites and let you compare options and prices with not perfect but reasonable ease. [For fun’s sake, they also have an iPhone app; I didn’t quite understand how they make money, though, as they seem to refer you to other hotel booking sites, rather than performing the actual booking for you.]

It seems that a reasonably nice room with breakfast in Rīga costs around €40 a night (of course you can choose to spend less for hostel-style accommodation or significantly more if you’re into bigger luxuries and brand names). Leaving out the choices with poor reviews (the internet is an evil bitch) about Soviet-style unrenovated bathrooms and keeping an eye on a new-ish look and free WiFi on web sites, we ended up with the Albert Hotel. It’s a modern-ish building in Dzirnavu street, not in the old-town but next road to those with the main Art Nouveau area.

The hotel’s name is a reference to Albert Einstein and it is fully themed in that way. While that’s as tacky as you expect it to be when designers try to turn science into marketing, the styling is done in a refreshingly thorough way with the hotel font being used on all signs, each level having a board with a ‘formula’ on it and many parts of the hotel being equipped with an ‘atom’ logo: e.g. as the pattern on the carpet or etched on glass in the bathrooms.

The room wasn’t particularly big but came with everything that’s needed, ranging from a bathroom with a walk-in shower, to a LCD-telly with a number of international channels and, invisibly, a working wireless network. Given how difficult it is to create good wireless network coverage, and how frequently people fail to provide it at all, let along at no extra cost, I was delighted to find such a good signal right in the room – even strong enough for the notoriously poor reception of the iPod touch.

Food and drinks were nice as well. That was true for the complimentary self-service breakfast which offered food on the nice side of hotel breakfasts, including particularly nice fried tomatoes, as well as for the 11th floor bar which offered a nice view over the city from its balcony. Staff were friendly and the hotel had no problems storing our luggage in their luggage room on our departure day. All in all the hotel may not the cheapest or most ‘authentic’ (whatever that would mean) stay you can book, but it seemed like a really good choice while we stayed there.

Sights

Of course a bit of sightseeing is obligatory when visiting a city like Rīga. While they have no world-famous Eiffel-tower like attractions, there is plenty of stuff to see nonetheless. Starting from the city itself with its nice and green park around the car-free old town with many old houses and a number of churches from different eras. The St. Peter’s-church has a lift going up into its tower and offers a great view of the city from there, the cathedral is quite plain and has nice cloisters attached to it, containing plenty of interesting historical exhibits.

The Roland and Stadtmusikanten are fun things to see, particularly if you’re from Bremen, the Schwarzhäupterhaus is a historical must-see and plenty of other buildings like the National Opera, National Theatre, Three Brothers or the Freedom Monument are must-sees as well.

Another really-nice must-see are the numerous Art Nouveau buildings in town. There are plenty of them left, mostly in good shape, and the Rīgans claim that their town offers the highest density of those buildings. The Art Nouveau style seen in Rīga seems a bit heavier and more solid than what I saw before. Some of the buildings are highly decorated with the typical plant-like ornaments as well as with plenty of faces. A few buildings even featured odd ‘mechanic’-looking faces on them. I can recommend visiting the Art Nouveau Museum in Albert street which is a flat the city rented in one of the Art Nouveau buildings, trying to restore the original design and filling it with original furniture. Both the building is very cool and the museum guides gave an excellent tour (in German, even) and seemed to be very knowledgable about everything in the museum.

Passing the railway station, one arrives at the central market. It consists of five huge halls which have been repurposed from Zeppelin hangars, featuring separate halls for meat, fish, dairy and general stuff, while having a fruit and veg market outside. Certainly interesting, particularly the one with the fish, but not as cool as the market in Athens, I thought. Behind the market comes the Soviet-style Academy of Sciences (with a fun TV test-screen piece of art in front of it) and what seem to be Russian quarters, advertised for their old-fashioned houses which weren’t overly impressive.

A final treat we went for was the TV tower. It’s a bit (four bus stops and a twenty minute walk) outside the old town on an island in the Daugava river and looks like a spaceship built by a James Bond supervillain. Soviet architecture at its finest, coming with a 200 year warranty and a few centimetres taller than the Berlin TV tower in summer as its steel construction grows in the heat. Arriving at the TV tower it looked pretty much abandoned. But once we passed the foutain with a fun ‘satellite’ artwork and entered the impressive entrance hall, we met an employee or two, one of which sold tickets, went 100 metres up with us in a lift and gave us a tour. The whole building seemed a bit sad, having seen better times in the past, with fancy decorations and a restaurant up there, and now having a few visitors a day. The view would be better with clean windows as well. Our guide was a friendly lady who pointed out a few sights. She spoke German but no English, so we were in luck but this might be more ‘adventurous’ for others.

Jūrmala

A further treat in Rīga is that it is quite close to the Baltic sea. And while the Baltic sea isn’t as nice and blue as the Aegaean Sea, say, they do have nice long beaches in Jūrmala, a half-hour (and cheap) train ride outside the city. They also had beach-worthy weather with all-day-sun and temperatures above 30°C during our stay; something I hadn’t expected, given the location further up North than Germany is. We picked the beach in Dubulti because the walk from the station to the sea is just a few hundred metres there. The beach is conveniently split up into areas of active recreation and those of passive recreation and there are little bars which also sell snacks every few hundred metres. Quite inexplicably there seem to be a number of unused beach-side hotels as well.

History

Latvian history has been rough for a while. They seem to have been invaded by pretty much every country that had a remote opportunity, including Sweden and Poland. In the Occupation Museum they tell the history of the last few decades which saw them being occupied first by the Soviets, then briefly by Nazi-Germany and then – after the Second World War was lost – by the Soviets again. Quite ironically/tragically they first welcomed the Nazi occupation as it seemed like liberation from the Soviets. But it didn’t take long for the true face of Nazi-Germany to show.

In fact, I remain struck by the sheer speed and efficiency with which the Nazi and Soviet regimes fucked countries over. People usually need months or years to finish a tiny project. Yet, in the same timeframe, those regimes migrated/killed/replaced sizeable parts of the entire population. They established new control structures and moved some of their own population to the country, thus completely shifting the balance of power. As we overheard a guide in the museum say: unlike other people Latvians don’t go and protest in those situations, they usually start singing and hope the situation improves. In Soviet times, apparently many of them worked in the cultural sector.

A remarkable detail concerning the end of the Soviet rule in Latvia is that it only happened in 1991 under Jelzin. Gorbatchev, who’s generally considered a good guy in Germany for the role he played in opening up the East Block and helping with German reunification, was against Latvia’s independence, tried to enforce that with military power and killed a few Latvians in the process. Not a way to win friends.

Language

The consequences of these population moves are still very apparent today. More than a third of the population is of Russian origin, thus you see and hear a lot of Russian as well. Not that I’m terribly good at actually recognising and distinguishing the languages as I understand pretty much nothing in them.

For the Unicode-nerd, Latvian is a feast of diacritics featuring plenty of macrons, hačeks and cedillas in the writing. This includes the curious G with cedilla ‘Ģ’, which ingeniously puts the accent atop the small g because it has a descender: ‘ģ’. Rather tragically, however, these letters also mark a Unicode tragedy as they are named ‘cedilla’ – and can be created by using cedilla combining accents – but really should be ‘comma’ accents, which was only pointed out to the Unicode people after the standard had been set.

Food

Food was all right during the stay. Neither particularly bad, nor remarkably good. Ads at the airport suggests that Latvians are proud of their rye bread, but the bread I tried wasn’t overly remarkable beside the fact that it contained traces of caraway – as Latvian dishes seem wont to do.

What absolutely delighted me were the countless bakeries in town – pretty much one per block – all of which were stocked with amazing collections of small baked sweets (‘Teilchen’ as we say in Germany). It was hard to restrain myself to not eat myself to death-by-Teilchen there.

Returning Home

Looking at Google Maps for Rīga, I noticed that ferry lines to Lübeck are drawn in the water and so the idea to return by ferry was born. Unfortunately it turned out that those lines are a bit outdated and the previous ferry line has been shut down. Instead, Latvian Aveline seemed to operate to Travemünde now. Although they do have a web site, booking with them was a bit tricky as their booking form seems to do nothing, in particular not sending you a confirmation of your booking. It took a week and some phone calls to get that sorted. Strangely we weren’t charged for the tickets beforehand but we were told we’ll pay on check-in and we could pay by credit card. While basically right that turned out to be a bit of a rip-off as you can’t just pay by credit card but have to go to the ‘bank’ counter in the same building which accepts cash only. And which will point you to the cash machine outside the building to get said cash. Thus, despite explicitly asking beforehand, we were brought into a situation where we were ripped off by banks twice. Once to convert the amount on our booking confirmation from Euro into Lats and once more to convert it back from Lats into Euro when paying the credit card bill.

The whole setup wasn’t particularly convenient either. It seems that Aveline focuses mainly on freight and don’t care that much about passengers. Their schedule sounded like fun: Check in starting at three on Sunday morning would leave us with Saturday night in Rīga and then time to catch up on sleep on the ferry. Reality, however, looked more like them letting everybody sit in their check-in building in the freight harbour which is a bit outside town until four, then let everybody get on the ‘Baltic Amber’ ferry and then let people queue for two more hours to hand out cabin keys to passengers. All done rather slowly without much concern for our (or the other passengers’) comfort. That did give us the opportunity to watch the sunrise and see the departure of the ship after the last lorry had successfully reversed onto it, but it also meant there wasn’t much rest before seven in the morning.

We had a nicely situated cabin with a window out to the front. But generally, the ship wasn’t too attractive in terms of what you could do or where you could rest. Russian television was running everywhere, probably to please the majority of travellers who seemed to be Russian truck drivers (mostly dressed in shorts and Badeschlappen) and the dinner – while looking fairly priced – was so ridiculously bad and handed out by their impressively disinterested staff, who (partly) couldn’t even tell what they were serving, that I felt quite disgusted.

The ship itself seemed to be originally Italian and now featured labels in a mix of Latvian, Russian, Italian and English everywhere. Signage on ships may be an interesting topic to study as no metre of that boat managed to exist without emergency exit arrows and other signs on it. Frankly, after walking through a few metres of this, I felt completely disoriented and confused rather than having a good idea about the way to the next exit. What was quite amusing as well were the smoking regulations. Smoking was forbidden, except in the smoking areas. Of which they created around a dozen, marking them by painting the floor yellow. Which meant the outside of the ship was full of yellow colour and, given that there is wind, people mostly smoked where they could anyway.

There was slightly shaky sea during the first half of the trip with the horizon moving impressively (in what translated to a meagre 2° in angle or so) and with waves splashing all over the front-facing restaurant windows a few times. All in all things were quite uneventful, though. And thanks to not sleeping the night before, quite a bit of the 28 hour journey could be spent at rest. An interesting experience. But not nice enough to justify the added inconvenience over flying.