Latvia

Monday 8 March was International Women’s Day. I arrived in Riga off the night train from Tallinn, expecting to find great festivities in progress. However, the streets were deserted; celebrations were presumably taking place in the comfort of the home, perhaps with a bottle of Bal-ƶāms, the heady liqueur made in Riga from herbs and bottled in tall thin earthenware containers. It was icy and windy, the town desolate and bare with its combination of little pockets of perfectly preserved seventeenth-century merchants’ houses, massive art deco buildings supported by caryatids, and large areas of wasteland, bombed during the last war.