Day 7 - We’re going all the way, ‘till the wheels fall off and burn

Distance travelled: Vilnius to Riga, 295 km Soundtrack: Bob Dylan "Knocked Out Loaded", "Empire Burlesque", "The Bootleg Series Vol. 1", Pink Floyd "Dark Side of the Moon" Easy-paced trip. They don't really do motorways in this part of the world, and the speed limit in Latvia is actually 90 km/h. It's 130 in Lithuania, but that was only half the trip. For the most part I was travelling between towns behind trucks on single-carriage roads, biding my time. I found the shitty part of Vilinius, too! There's obviously a left-bank/right-bank thing going on with the river. The Old Town is on one side and the Financial District on the other, and that gives way to commercial/industrial areas, and then horrible, horrible, Soviet-era blocks of flats as far as the eye can see. Yeuch. Riga is very very nice, though. It's really interesting that these cities seem so Mediterannean, somehow. It's not as though it's warm at the moment - sort of 18-20 degrees - but it doesn't feel like a cold-climate city. You sort of have the idea that these places will be a bit grim, or at least grey an imposing, being that they're ex-Soviet. But they're actually very, very pretty and quite Riviera-esque. Riga is perhaps not quite so Monaco as Vilnius, but it's still very young and hip - and of the two I think I might prefer it here, it seems more genuine. What's interesting is the amount of English that gets spoken, though. You'd think that the Baltics would be all speaking Russian to each other, or would find some sort of other common language, given that they used to be the same country not so long ago. But it was explained to me that the three languages, Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian, are actually very different from each other and no one really wants to learn Russian universally for loads of different reasons, so English it is - and it's not just because of tourism. My Estonian friends that I met last night were doing everything in English with the locals. Lots of thinking and talking about Russian influences, Russia versus Germany, cultural and national identity and how that works in my tiny little Australian mind last night. This stuff is sooooooo difficult to wrap my head around. The cultural and historical legacy of being taken over by empires left right and centre throughout your history, and not even having your own country until 1990 really is a bit of a headfuck. As I explained last night, I guess the only thing I can think of from my context is our Aboriginal story, and the idea that what was theirs became ours, and was changed forever under their feet. Onto Estonia today, where I'll probably have a few days off. Will be glad for that; being in the saddle all the time is definitely a bit tiring.