This week we left Latvia and set sail back to Sweden and have spent a few days in Ystad.
What a great town Riga is. On our last day there we walked for hours round the Art Nouveau buildings starting in an area known as the “Quiet Quarter”. It’s amazing. There are street after street of extraordinary Art Nouveau houses from the end of the 19th century with gorgons, dragons, griffins, gorgeous decoration and weird facades. It goes on over a huge area beyond the beautiful park.
We also went back to the market to stock up and were so impressed by the quantity of fresh fruit and vegetables: cherries from Moldova, melons from Uzbekistan, strawberries from Poland besides stalls as far as the eye could see of Latvian produce. The fresh market is outside the covered market which consists of three old air hangars by the railway station and port. The hangars have more smoked and fresh fish than I’ve seen in any other market.
From there we headed to the coast and stopped for a few nights at Rumigen, North of Liepaja. More miles of golden sand and no one there!
The Baltic sea is amazing: the world’s youngest sea, once a lake and still mostly fresh water (barely saline), on average 30 times more shallow than the Mediterranean, the land continues to rise at 1mm a year which results in castles which were built by the sea now standing 4 kilometres inland.
We drove briefly into Lithuania, walked round Klaipeda before catching the overnight ferry to Sweden. We had a rather stressful time driving round the port area which goes on for miles with no signs to our ferry, we queued at the wrong ferry terminal, nearly missed the crossing, and then found we were on a container lorry ferry for lorry drivers who are not given much by way of comfort! In the distance we could see along the Corulian sand spit towards Kaliningrad, the isolated outpost of Russia which we visited nine years ago, not a happy place.
Ystad is far nicer and less touristy than we’d expected, a real place with a busy port, a fine square and church, charming narrow cobbled streets with one storey cottages, roses and hollyhocks. And although you can find the various places which feature in the Wallander TV series, there are no signs or advertising (the author, Henning Mankell insisted there should not be).
The churches here are beautiful, white and light with beautiful chandeliers and memorials. This one is in Kristiansand.
We visited the home of Charlotte Berlin, an extraordinary woman who invested well in the stock market on the basis of her own analysis, smoked cigars, climbed on her own roof in crinolines with cigar in hand with a hammer to fix the tiles, and left the house with its beautiful contents to the town as a museum. She allowed the public to visit while she was alive, locking herself in her bedroom while they visited the three other rooms!
And the art museum was impressive with two workrooms full of equipment for people and children to paint and draw. Brilliant! We really liked this painting of the Salvation Army gathering.
And finally, here’s the map. Off to Denmark tomorrow!
