Mahinda’s Little World

Friday morning. This was to be, IMHO, the definitive day of the weekend…

Most people awake to Andi’s phone alarm going off every five minutes, at silly o’clock. I don’t even hear it. We eventually stumble out of bed(s) around midday, to find that Andi’s shoes have been placed back inside the room.

Out we went, and found a sort of local eatery for "breakfast" - basically, there were loads of things behind a counter, which you pointed to. Between adding each dish, the plate was weighed, with everything priced by the 100g (or so)…yes, even the rice, mash, and so on. There were lots of meaty things, various sauces, etc. and we all had pretty filling meals for about a quid each (mine came up to 2Ls, including BIG bottle of Fanta). Not the tastiest we had over the weekend, but definitely the cheapest.

We then checked out Dickens, a British theme pub, to find that it was raining at Edgbaston. Yay! As there was no cricket, we congregated in the bar/café opposite for more Latvian beer, served by amazingly attractive waitresses wearing cute miniskirted uniforms. Lovely. I’m not entirely sure, but I think it was the poetically-named Spalvas pa Gaisu, or "Feathers in the Air". There were a few other places with fantastic names, such as Pulkvedim Neviens Neraksta, "Nobody Writes to the Colonel".

Pete drank very very slowly indeed. This was to become a feature of the day.

Once Pete finally finished his beer, we headed up the spire of St. Peter’s church - pretty high up, with a rickety Soviet-installed 1970s lift to take you up to the viewing level. From there, we got a fantastic view of the city, which was very handy for general orientation.

At this point, my knee was still hurting - not as bad as the previous evening, but bad enough.

Assault by Battery

Once down from the spire, we decided that more high-level stuff was required, so headed for the Hotel Latvija and its 26th floor Skyline bar. It was quite a trek - at least 28 (sh)Andi miles* - but we got there eventually, via the Russian Orthodox cathedral. I encouraged people to go in and have a look, as it would be quite unlike any churches they’d seen in Western Europe. And indeed it was - gilt/gold everywhere, complete with some neon lettering, hundreds of candles and generally lavish decorations. It was decreed "the church of bling" and we left, satisfied.

* Andi doesn’t do walking. 1 normal mile is equivalent to about 20 shAndi miles, and it’s a logarithmic scale!

Skyline did indeed have fantastic views, and the beer was much cheaper than we expected of a posh hotel bar - only 1.70Ls for my chosen brew, a 7% porter called Bocmanis. Well, it had a cheeky sea-dog on the label!

While Pete took (again!) about three hours to finish his drink, some of us headed on to the cocktails. Mojitos with whole handfuls of fresh mint, and berry-laden concoctions featured largely - I had a variation on the mojito, with sparkling wine instead of soda, and reckon that it’s the BEST cocktail I’ve ever had. Seriously. Worth the 4Ls, even.

At this point, Tim came back from the bar with a particularly poncey looking cocktail - it turned out to be the "Local Battery", combining Red Bull, Rigan Black Balzam (more about this later), peach liqueur and cream. NOT a good combination. It was congealing nicely, and we ended up paying 2Ls each for him to down it in one. Tim managed the "14Ls challenge" nicely, and - amazingly - didn’t throw up there and then!

We could see the rain rolling in by now, and discovered another feature of the place - next to the urinals in the gent’s was a full floor-to-ceiling window looking out on to the streets below. Seriously. You could urinate and look onto one of the city’s main thoroughfares at the same time. A bit disconcerting, really.

The rain let up a bit, and back we went.

On the way back, we stopped off at the worst bar/restaurant of the whole weekend - a bit poncey, with the beer costing a whopping 2.50Ls. I’m not surprised that it was almost empty all weekend (it was around the corner from the hostel, so we walked past it plenty of times), and it contained just us, a group of Asian Brummies (Indian, I think), and two fairly exhibitionist Latvian girls.

The Brummies were on a stag party, and were typically of the many drunken louts in the town. It turned out that they’d already fallen foul of the champagne scam, and had also been forced to pay a shedload for a cab ride when the driver pulled out a gun and shot it into the air. Eeek!

Anyway, back to Frank’s.

Watched some cricket. England were piling up the runs. I was considerably less than impressed.

Dodgy Knees

At some point during the afternoon, my left knee stopped hurting. It went from serious pain, to nothing at all. A miracle!

Something probably clicked into place or something. Either that, or it was the cocktails at Skyline!

Dodgy Directions

We asked one of Frank’s gorgeous girls (the lovely Eva, I believe) for restaurant recommendations…she suggested Rozengrals and Salt & Pepper, marking both on my map. So, out to Rozengrals we went.

Now, as someone who quite happily assumes the responsibility of map-reading, I also get all the blame when it goes wrong. And this time, it did go wrong. I’m still a bit bitter over the Geneva trip, two years ago, where I took everyone to the wrong side of lake Geneva - you’re only as good as the directions you get, and I was getting information from a drunken bloke telling me to look for a carousel.

Anyway, this time, there was no sign of the restaurant on the marked square. It was raining, and the map disintegrated.

We ended up finding an alternative eatery, and had a lovely meal, including caviar (not the proper sturgeon sort, mind) for Andi and hemp butter (or "with cannabis" as the waitress described it). I had an okay (but not outstanding) beef carpaccio, followed by a tasty bit of steak.

I only found out the next day that the pretty hostel girl had in fact marked my map in completely the wrong place. D’oh!

After dinner, it was back to the hostel, and on to PuPu Lounge, for which we’d picked up various recommendations. Now, "pupu" is Latvian slang for "breasts"…and it’s basically a theme bar with that (or possibly "those") as the theme. NOT a strip joint or anything similarly dodgy, mind.

Unfortunately, we found that they wanted 10Ls - TEN QUID! - for entry, so we backtracked quickly, finding a club just around the corner called Nautilus. Andi, Tim and I were up for it, but others weren’t so keen - we headed away to find another bar for a few more drinks first. Which we did - a very airy, very blue, very stylish and very empty place, opposite Feathers in the Air (where we’d been earlier).

I think it may have been called Velvets, but I’m not sure. Either way, it served reasonably-priced beer (1.50Ls) and played a somewhat…eclectic…range of music. Much Euro-dance, but also some indie stuff - even Menswear! It’s widely believed that it was one of the Shine compilations, possibly Shine 3.

Not to everyone’s taste, we all pretty much enjoyed it there…especially Nayth.

Nayth first tried to get a bunch of lasses to come and join us in our corner, unsucessfully, and then chatted up a member of the bar staff for some half an hour or so. We actually had to give him a key as we left, but he joined us outside shortly afterwards, and we headed back to Nautilus.

The Little Nut Girl

I think it was when we were leaving Nautilus earlier that we first encountered the little nut girl. Basically, she was a little girl, about 12 years old, selling chocolate covered peanuts. At midnight.

I think there was a bit of banter, and we kept seeing her around - the area around Frank’s must have been her patch!

Nautilus

So, Nautilus. We got there and found that it was 8Ls in. A bit more than we’d bargained for, but we were there so in we went.

Inside, it was pretty odd - themed around Captain Nemo’s submarine, it was a bit like a dance version of the Crystal Maze’s Industrial Zone. Beer wasn’t cheap, at 3Ls for a bottle of Heineken (or was it Carlsberg? Probably) in the downstairs bar, and a whopping 4Ls upstairs.

However, we were already drunk enough to dance the night away. It turned out that the best DJ in Lithuania had been flown in specially, and he played what must have been a five-hour set of (apparently) hard trance. It was good, albeit not what I usually go for, and we all partied away on the dancefloor.

Unlike most other places, it was just full of locals, and it was a generally good vibe.

Andi, Wayne, Martin and I left at something like 4am…and got about 40 yards before being accosted by John Lemon’s, a rather fantastic little late night café. Needless to say, in we went. Andi and Wayne got their beers and left within about two minutes, while Martin and I stayed, chatting to a random Latvian chap who was studying in London. It was he who told us about the Nautilus DJ’s credentials.

A top-notch end to the night.

Back to the hostel around 5am, and the others joined us about half an hour later.

Pete, Tim and Nayth (I have no idea what happened to Theo) stayed in Nautilus until about 5.30am - the god-like DJ was replaced at 5am by another decent tunemeister, but most of the crowd saw this as their cue to leave. That left the three of them and two crazy dancing lasses (one a stunning tall blonde, and the other a shorter brunette with a Union Jack motif T-shirt). When the girls quit, so did our lads, as the last people on the dancefloor. They stepped out into the bright sunshine and headed back to Frank’s.

One last beer at Frank’s, surrounded by the legion of pissed-up British tossers (who continued "singing" until about 9am), and bedtime it was.

Andi’s shoes were placed outside the door.

Dutch Girl

Before bed, however, I moseyed upstairs to the computer room, passing (thanks to a wrong turn) the kitchen, where there were a few people having toast and pizza. We got chatting - it was a dutch girl who I’d chatted to earlier in the computer room, plus a couple of English backpackers. Once it was clear that I wasn’t one of the "British tossers", they even donated me some toast

Anyway, it all got a bit hazy, but the Dutch girl ended up dragging some bloke (not one of the two who’d been in the kitchen) into the Ladies’ toilets…presumably for a shag. Nice.