Last night I went to an *informal* gathering of people from Hospitality Club and ran into - surprise, surprise - Ben, whom I had met in Tartu only days earlier... funny coincidence but in fact, not at all surprising as we were both headed to Riga around the same time. We shared beers (less than a Euro each!) with a few others, all of them women and mostly residents of Riga. Afterwards a couple of us went to Orange Bar, a *hip and trendy* kind of bar where we were exposed to what I can only assume to be two girls of Latvian ancestry (one blond, one brunnette so the boys can have their pick) belly-dancing on the bar! The woman I was with said it was the first time she'd seen belly-dancing (!) and I informed her that I had seen belly-dancing many times and THIS was not it...

Apart from the disappointing exposure to cultural appropriation (yes, indeed it is everywhere), the evening went smoothly. My CouchSurfing host and her boyfriend picked me up in his car and we drove back to their place which is what I can only describe as the suburbs of Riga.

After Tallinn and Tartu, Riga seems quite the metropolitan city and apparently it is sprawling at an alarming rate. Cafes (chains with names like "Coffee Nation" and "Double Coffee" apparently owned by those of Russian ancestry or so I've been told) and big name banks abound and I have gotten lost on more than one occassion. My legs hurt even days after the hiking trip that will never be again (!) so I'm not appreciating getting lost in a new city as I might be in some other instance. In any case, I have enjoyed my brief time in Riga and I will be getting on a bus to Vilnius tomorrow morning where I will stay with another CouchSurfing host...