Riga with Elder and Sister Berry

On Tuesday, we met up with some old friends in Latvia. Darrell Berry was my partner at our hospital in Pleasant Grove. He and his wife, Katherine, have been serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Latvia for several months. It sounds like they stay quite busy here. They took some time away from their missionary responsibilities to show us around a little.

We spent half a day with them at Mezapark. This was perfect for our kids.

Margaret was all about fitting in with the locals

Later that evening, we went to dinner with the Berrys and then visited at their apartment for a bit.

The next day (today), we spent the morning with them exploring a little of the old town. We stepped into a restarount that was started in 1290. It was pretty neat. It was below street level and lit only by candles. There was a well at one end of the restaurant. We didn’t eat there, but I did check out the menu. The “soup with chicken gizzards prepared in the way of tradition” did sound pretty good.

Then we said goodbye and hopped on a bus to Estonia. Well sort of hopped on. More like nearly missed. We use rideshare apps a lot for travel. There is no UberXL here and technically a taxi is supposed to take a max of 4 passengers. The driver who picked us up wouldn’t budge on this and we had to take a second car. That was fine except that Ashley didn’t have the app installed on her phone and I had to wait until they arrived a the bus station to use the app to call another ride. But we made it Ashley now has the app on her phone

Same bus situation as before. The kids love it. 4 hours of whatever they want to watch.

Our Air BNB in Estonia is another nice one. I’m hoping these two more recent accommodations are more representative of what we can expect while we are here than the one we stayed at in Lithuania. That one was just plain gross.

Maybe my next post will have a little more about the history of these Baltic countries. They sit in a pretty precarious place on the globe between Russia and Finland to the east and west, and Poland to the south. Historically they have occupied this small space (an area roughly 3/4 the size of Utah) between three vast empires–Sweden to the west, Russia to the East, and Germany/Poland to the South. They have been absorbed into or occupied by one of these powers for much of their history. It is amazing they have maintained their national identities for all these centuries.