The temperature in Riga was 20C at my arrival. Just perfect! Reinis, who I met in Couchsurfing.com offered to pick me up at the airport. We took the bus 22 to Old Riga where Jeivgenija, also from Couchsurfing accepted me to stay at her place for two nights. Her roommate, Beta, received me showing me the flat. I left my backpack there and I went walking with Reinis to the Bus Station to buy my ticket to Poland.

Ecolines is a company who offers very long routes in Europe having their travels from Riga to Kraków, Poland on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I decided to go directly to Kraków leaving Warsaw and Gdansk for a future travel in order to have more time with my friends in different cities of Germany and a possible visit to Prague.

That evening I went also with Reinis to meet other local Couchsurfers, having a beer in a very nice tiny bar. I returned early to Jaivenija’s apartment meeting her boyfriend and her roommate’s boyfriend, both of them living there too. That night I was really tired as a result of the Jet-lang but I spent some time online trying to find place to stay in Kraków.

Next morning, the window was left open and I woke up at 5:30 in the morning (local time) with the squawks of dozens of sea-gulls in the roofs of the buildings around. Later on, the nice sound of a flautist playing “Yesterday” from The Beatles was the musical background for the invasion of Russian and German tourist crowding the near by plaza.

Old Riga is a charming place with hundreds of cafes, bars, souvenir stores and narrow streets with balconies covered with blooming flowering plants and a very active night life. On my last night in Riga we went to a bar to try one of the local handcrafted beers returning back around midnight.

My friends decided to go back to sleep but finding many people in the streets late night in Old Riga I decided to walk around alone for a while in this one my last night in this wonderful city. I went to the area around the Freedom Monument finding a very old hunchbacked woman walking incredible slow with a cane. After a while when I returned back I found the same woman making her best effort to keep walking in the middle of a street crowded with people walking fast going to parties and bars. Instead of having another beer I decided to give her the money, just 5 Lats, but instead of putting it in the paper cup she was holding with the cane I held it next to the cup for her to take it because I did not want it to get lost. At this point something unexpected happened that got me by surprise. She made a noise I can not describe and she grabbed my hand so hard that I could not took it back, after a second I stopped pulling my hand back and what she did was something I never will forget in my life: she kissed my hand. I was so touch by this gesture of gratitude that I decided to just go back to the apartment being really hard to stop thinking in what happened that night.

Note: this is travel blog written fast in the road. Many details are not included and it may have several English misspellings.