more time in Riga centre

Going for a latte in town gave me a vantage point across the pedestrianized street, to a woman who was, kind of, busking. She was in her sixties wearing a semi-traditional Russian costume, stood next to a little side table with table cloth and ghetto blaster, dancing to Western pop tunes. She only had one sequence which lasted about five seconds, She'd raise her left hand up and forward, throw her right arm behind her, look left, and with a certain sort nimbleness spin around and look to the right. She would repeat this over and over again, except when she was checking her pockets. Although it was both bizarre and simplistic, she conducted herself with such confidence that the performance was both funny and perplexing.

Aivis says she's Russian, Sarah says Latvians wouldn't never be that flamboyant. Aivis says that, for humour value, its best when children start joining in with her. Like me, the locals looked on with wry amusement. I left the coffee place, gave her a busker's tip and moved on, feeling troubled by the desire to burst out laughing, again. She was repeating the same performance, this time to 'Gimme, Gimme, Gimme a Man after Midnight' -- an ironic twist on the whole 'sex tourism' mess that the 'come to Latvia' industry is currently landed with. It was midday, so fortunately she wasn't going to be tormented by gangs of English, beer drinking, football chanting, sexually harrassing men; they weren't back outside yet.

I did notice, more positively, on the way home, that the civic poster sites around the centre all have adverts for the upcoming concerts by Sting and Simply Red: the marketing of Riga as a fully Western and European kind of destination is underway. The invitation to watch the 'Best Dancing Girls Show in the Baltic' in the same block as one of the swishiest hotels in the area shows how there will have to be more than a PR job done to change this capital's international appeal.