AKPosted: Thu, Aug 28 2008Value:
4.2Landmarks and attractive features in the hotel area.
The area now is the most prestigious and prosperous in the great city of Riga. It is full of excellent Art Nouveau buildings, most of them beautifully renovated, some of the best ones occupied by embassies.
Nearby is the great semicircle of parks with beautiful landscaping and particularly noteworthy flower gardens.
Two minutes walk from the hotel is the ``Vincent'' restaurant, reputed to be the best in Riga. Our meal there was certainly memorable. The restaurant in the hotel, while not exactly at the same level, is excellent too. There is also a plethora of less formal places offering
simpler and less expensive food, and, most interestingly, glimpses into the local social scene. Particularly remarkable and touching for a visiting Russian speaker are companies of young evidently prosperous Riga Russians (65% of the city population are Russian speakers), relaxed and dignified, real Europeans in the best sense of the word,
lacking any traces of vulgarity and self-consciousness, which are noticeable even among the best specimens of that kind in Moscow.