theatre of the absurd: Riga, part I

Saturday, 29 July 2017

Riga, part I - Prelude

Set back those clocks to the night before I was due to leave Tallinn.

I'd met this handsome Finn in the hostel, as well as a wonderful German girl called Rosa. I will talk about Rosa a little later, in my Lithuanian entries, because we met up again, in Vilnius. The Finn was called Mika and he was 5 years older than me, but Good Lord he was handsome in that icy Baltic way the Finns have - sandy hair and a strong jawline, and piercing, sea-grey eyes. The most incredible thing about this all was that I didn't even notice how handsome he was till our 5th meeting. He would lounge about the courtyard, passive-aggressively chain-smoking what seemed to be a never-ending supply of cheap Estonian cigarettes, and I found him to be very cultured and well spoken, plus I enjoyed our conversations because he was just one of those people you can have a real, proper conversation with. We talked a lot, but my heart wasn't particularly into it because I was still moping over XX at the time. People didn't talk much to him and he didn't talk much to people, but he talked to me. We both liked CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien and we talked about how Tolkien's works had been heavily influenced by Finnish legends and myths, particularly the Silmarillion.

It was my last night in Tallinn, and I'd gotten a lot of very cheap alcohol and was preparing to get very drunk - not obnoxious drunk, but just enough to get my mind humming. As you do. Mika was sitting there in the common room when I arrived with my phone and my armful of drinks, and we started talking. He told me there was a light festival by the sea that evening and what was I doing that night. Under normal circumstances I would have been rapturous, enamoured - A light festival in a sea fortress upon the Baltic blue!' - but I was too buzzed to think up wild romantic adjectives and feelings.

I grinned, and said I was going to wash my hair, which actually really had been something I'd been planning on doing. His eyebrows shot up and his amazingly opaque blue eyes were quizzical as he repeated, rather incredulously, 'You're going to wash your HAIR.' Yes, I said blithely, still too buzzed at the time to realise how ludicrous it sounded - almost as if I wasn't trying. - 'My hair feels horrible and so do I. '

Your hair looks fine and so do you,' he said. Neither of us moved, and we continued to sit there on the settee and talked and talked and talked, during which I ran out to get some more drinks from the convenience store next door, and then at about ten in the evening he said that he was going to the sea festival and there would be fireworks, and would I like to go with him. I was VERY zonked by this point and spent most of my energy trying to concentrate on walking straight and not ricocheting off the walls. The funny thing was that I distinctly remember us having a great conversation.

Snippets and always, snippets. The fireworks were nice but I barely remembered them, only that there were lots of pretty lights and I had to excuse myself because I needed the loo. I got home feeling even more ill from the drinks, and immediately got roped into yet another binge drinking session with a bunch of Estonians. As always, the best way to cure a hangover is to drink some more! In the midst of all this Finn slipped away without saying goodbye. It wasn't till I was well on my way to Riga that I realised I hadn't asked him for his contact info. I moped over him a couple days (XX having taken a back seat at this point) and decided that I actually quite liked him.

And it was with this in mind that I went to Riga.