Ideas above our station

Do you ever get a feeling like you don't belong?

We thought that we might like to go somewhere Scandinavian this year, perhaps we were leaning more towards Sweden, but there were no reasonable flights when we wanted to go, there were cheap flights to Denmark though, we could go there? Oh but as it turns out it's incredibly expensive when you get there. So we changed our minds and booked Riga in Latvia instead.

This trip started badly, everything seeming to conspire against us on the day we were setting off. I awoke early on this day in order to be sick, before spending the morning drinking ginger beer and attempting to do some last minute tasks.

Because I thought it would make our lives easier, I booked a form of airport parking where they meet you  at the airport, which didn't arrive on time meaning we had to drive around for 1/2 an hour waiting for someone to show up and take the car of our hands.

On arriving in Riga, we approached our transfer provider who advised us that the printout we had been sent did not entitle us to travel meaning we had to pay for it again (so probably don't bother using looking4transfers for this kind of thing, it appears they do nothing).

When we arrived at our hotel... we were welcomed, given our room keys and basic information and allowed upstairs. It was mildly surprising, part of me expected something to go wrong there too, if the same thing happened it would have been much more annoying, rooms tend to cost more than taxi's.

Riga's a nice city, there are lots of nice buildings, some statues, the odd park and... a cannon. There's probably a story behind the cannon, let's assume it's pirate related.

It's a fairly small city so everything's quite easy to get  to, most things seem to be either a 20 minute walk, 5 or 6 bus stops or less than €5 in a taxi away. From our experience. We didn't need to go very far though.

Day 1 took us on a walk around the old town, on a 10 minute 5d film tour of the city and up to an art installation named 'Benches'.

This is what I am choosing to share with you in picture form

Introducing the new animated segment of the blog, including 'The amazing walking Rachael' and 'The many directions of James' (4)

As you may be aware (which you probably are, because let's face it, if you are reading this, you are probably Rachael), back in January we played one of the room escape games in Warrington with Titch and Mundry, we... did not win, but we found there were a handful of them in Riga, so we decided to go on one, we found one called Mysteria, with a scientist theme to it, this time... We won.

That line would have worked better if we failed to do this one too, the brief moment of pretend suspense could be followed by the anticlimactic reveal of subsequent failure, but no, unfortunately for the quality of the blog (but fortunately for us) this time we were successful. 55minutes.

While we were here, we decided to see a show at the National Opera, they had tickets to a show called Igudesman and Joo, a mix of classical music and comedy, we arrived a little bit early for the show and this is the part of the story where we felt as though we did not belong, the part alluded to in the question right at the top of the post, which for some reason I started with even though I had no intention of writing about it yet. 
We sat in the bar beforehand in our jeans, trainers and hoodies, surrounded by men in suits, women in ball gowns and staff in waistcoats and bow-ties (possibly, didn't really pay attention). It was like we had developed ideas above our station and had our true place in society revealed to us quite quickly. The show was good though.

The following day we thought it would be good to do another room escape game, so we found another one, this was called findexit and had a Sherlock Holmes theme, unfortunately we failed at the very first puzzle. Could not find it. At all.

We walked up and down the street, asked neighbouring businesses and taxi drivers and attempted to enable roaming internet on Rachael's phone, when none of this worked, tired and annoyed we found a cafe with wifi and yes, it was far too late by then to go back, so we found another one somewhere else for a few hours later. Before this one, we had time to get something to eat.

Not only did we manage to find a restaurant we didn't seem to belong in, but one that no-one else felt like they belonged in either, it was as though the place was closed, but they decided to feed us to avoid any embarrassment.

Then we went to play our game, but not before doughnuts.

The 2nd days game was called Quest Lab and had a kind of sea captain theme, after our previous days victory, we were quite hopeful of a 2nd win and... yes, we won again, sorry about that.