Mahinda’s Little World

Part III already, and I’ve not even got to Saturday!

So, Saturday morning. Wayne and Martin get up far too early and go for a wander - everyone ends up heading for "breakfast" at something like 3pm. I have no idea where, but it was all tasty enough.

Andi’s shoes had been put back inside the room, by the way.

Oh yeah. Actually, it was at this place with a vaguely nautical theme. Where Nayth managed to fall asleep in the toilet! The usual gorgeous waitresses were present, of course.

Market Hangars

Back to Frank’s, and all except Nayth headed to the old central market - five HUGE buildings, that were once WWI Zeppelin hangars, each of which had a different theme.

The fish one smelt really really bad. After that were the meaty one (complete with just about every imaginable part of the humble pig), the cheese and groceries one, and the veggie one. The fifth was more standard market-style clothes and stuff, with more similar stalls set up outside the hangars.

I bought something I’d never seen before - basically frankfurters, but as a string of beads rather than sausage shapes. Very snackable indeed. Unfortunately, they earnt the moniker "Mahinda’s anal beads". If you don’t know what those are, I’d recommend Google…but be careful!

I also picked up some excellent honey, after the stallholder insisted that I sample just about all her wares. There was also an alcoholic coffee shop and offie, from which Andi purchased some apple and rhubarb vodka. More about that later.

Poker and PuPu

Back to the hostel afterwards, and we had a little poker tournament. 5Ls in, with a rebuy. Unfortunately, I continued my run of going all in with a decent hand…and losing to what was (usually before the turn) a far worse hand. Grrrr!

Martin won (20Ls), followed by Pete (15Ls) and then Andi (5Ls). Out of the money were Theo, me and Wayne.

All in all, it was a pretty slow afternoon.

Several shots of the apple and rhubarb vodka later (extra measures for Nayth!), we headed over to PuPu Lounge once more around 7pm. It being early, the place was empty but for us and some very cute barmaids. As usual. The walls were covered with pictures of women, mostly topless…and Will Smith. Yes, Will Smith. For some reason, he’d just be there at random, every so often. Bizarre.

Believe it or not, it was a very classy joint.

The menu included a selection of cocktails, as well as this little list:

• Get one of the barmaids to dance for you - 200Ls
• Sack one of the staff - 5,000Ls
• Destroy the bar - 500,000Ls

We just had beer.

Saturday Night

After PuPu Lounge, we were famished, so headed to Salt ‘n’ Pepper for dinner. This place had been recommended by Eva, and we’d spotted it on the way back from the market.

It was a very chilled place indeed - in fact, the general vibe was very close to that of Solomon Grundy in Withington village. They even served "Cesu Old English Ale" in bottles - Cesu being one of the main brands of beer over there. This was basically a brown ale, which was fairly tasty.

The food was good, and large, but the service was just a tad slow. The place was notable for having a table in the corner that featured a handpump - apparently, you pay per hour and get to serve yourself beer. Happy days!

We then headed to one of the horrendously touristy joints, out on the main spine street through old town. Yes, it was touristy, but it was a nice place to have a cold beer and watch the world go by. As it happens, they had a selection of imported beers, including Leffe and Hoegaarden for less than 2Ls a half-litre!

It was approaching midnight, and Timm left us for Frank’s - the trip of the night was to La Rocca, the biggest nightclub in the Baltics. The rest of us didn’t really fancy it, after the Club Essential rubbishness. I was sorely tempted, as it was free and I’d not done the superclub thing…but I just couldn’t be bothered in the end.

Liga from Riga

Andi, Pete, etc. really fancied some poker by this point, so we went off in search of a casino. We had asked Frank already about which ones were likely to result in a good kneecapping, and one of the ones that’d come up as ’safe’ was the Olympic Voodoo Casino, in the basement of the Hotel Latvija.

So, back there we trekked (having earlier picked up our passports from Frank’s), and straight in we walked…to be greeted by a registration girl who was absolutely out of this world! It was all a bit of a jungle motif, with the female staff seemingly wearing different patterns according to status - the senior ones seemed to have black and cream stripes, while the juniors looked a bit like packets of Refreshers.

All were amazingly cute, of course.

The beer was reasonably cheap, and they even had a live band on, playing proper bluesy jazzy stuff.

We’d been given 5Ls (or were the 10Ls?) vouchers on registration, which had to be used on one bet, matched with cash. Unfortunately, there was no proper poker, so a few of us settled down at a black jack table. The table was really very relaxed - with us were:

A bloke from Manc (I think), who was betting big with well over 100Ls in front of him…he got grumpier and grumpier as he basically threw his money away.

A very sassy middle-aged lady from deep New York, with the twang to prove it, who was happily chatting to the croupiers in Russian. She was with a man who I reckoned was her father, and they were clearly not short of a bit of cash.

The New Yorker was obviously a bit of a pro, and gave us lots of tips as to certain rules, e.g. "insurance" when the dealer draws an Ace, and "surrendering" your hand to only lose half your chips. There was plenty of banter.

Now, for much of the time our croupier was a statuesque blonde called Liga, supervised (there seemed to be a lot of training going on) by a chap about our age called Igor. Liga-from-Riga proved to be very lucky indeed for Andi - he went on an UNBELIEVABLY superb run of saying things like "Come on, give me a six"…and then getting them.

Liga-from-Riga was lucky for me, too, as my stack hit about 30-40Ls (having used 10Ls plus my voucher).

Unfortunately, she was later replaced by Igor himself, with another chap supervising. And that’s where my luck ran out - I was limping along with a continual stream of 14s, 15s and 16s, while the dealer kept getting 20s and 21s. Grrr!

Our last croupier was Ekaterina (pronounced with a super-soft ‘e’, i.e. pretty much just "Katerina" - yes, I asked!), who had a lovely smile. Unfortunately, she proved to be the death knell for Andi and I, although Nayth finished significantly quids up - that boy must be half Irish, as he amassed his initial fortune by winning at the roulette table - 4/1 three times in a row!

The non-Igor male croupier and Andi had a good chat about poker, the upshot of which was that there was a tournament the next evening at the Radisson’s casino…more about that later, I guess.

My run of bad luck was so…well…bad, that I even managed to break a poster in the gent’s! As I was washing my hands, I noticed, in the mirror, that one of the A4 glass-fronted-notice-things was tilting off the wall to my left. I moved to stop it, but my drunken reactions resulted in me smashing it with the side of my fist. That could have been REALLY nasty. I went to the bar and tried to explain, taking one of the security blokes in to see. Not sure whether they believed me

Hot Kebap!

Anyway, home we headed, via a kebab shop - Hot Kebap! - where we stumbled upon a very odd sight. We entered the eatery’s brightly coloured plastic world (much like a kebab version of McDonald’s) to find a girl seemingly passed out on one of the bench seats. There was also a hairy man in what we thought was a kilt. It turned out that the girl was an employee having a nap (she looked very disgruntled indeed when the other employee shook her awake), while the bloke was dressed in full Britney Spears schoolgirl get-up, complete with pigtailed wig. Nice.

She did keep checking Andi out, though - she CLEARLY fancied a piece of him

Decent kebabs were had, and the three of us headed back to Frank’s…where there was absolutely no sign of the others, who’d been to Skyline for cocktails and then gone back before us.

It turned out that they were chilling out and playing coin football in the lounge room. I grabbed a beer and joined in, to be seriously thrashed by Wayne - I’d seemingly lost all my table football skills! While I held my own (fnirk!) towards the end, it was too late, and Wayne took my 2Ls entry stake.

Also in the lounge was one of the hostel girls, who was trying to get some respite from the British tossers singing loudly in the bar area. We (especially Nayth) chatted to her for a while.

I sloped off to bed at 5.30am, to much derision from Wayne, Pete and Martin. Needless to say, they stumbled into the room about ten minutes later, with the sun streaming through the gaps between the curtains.

Andi’s shoes were placed outside the door. Again.

Dutch Girl…Again

During one of our trips back to Frank’s that evening, I bumped into the Dutch girl in the bar area. I think her name was Anya, but I’m really not sure. Either way, I have her a cheeky nudge-and-a-wink and asked whether she’d had a good time the previous night.

She blushed

It seems that just about the entire hostel knew about her escapades, as it happens.