Day Twenty - Rest Day in Liepāja
This rest day was very much needed. My body was telling me. I could feel the muscles in my legs in repair mode when I was laying on the bed. This is the first time I pushed my body this hard.
The rest day also allowed me to spend some time walking around Liepāja and familiarizing myself more with Latvia. There is a different energy here. You can feel and see the residue of history here. The infrastructure is in a profoundly mixed state of disrepair and modernization. This is the only place so far on the trip where I have seen things written in Russian. I did not see this in Lithuania.
The city has some tram streets, similar to what I saw in Poland when I lived there. I really like these.
Windows with sunburst shaped steel rods are classic from the Soviet era, where brutalism was prominent.
There were also the classic old buildings on streets paved with rocks. The rocks are slippery, loud, and bumpy as hell for anyone traveling on them.
The church in town was quite photogenic, and gothic.
You could see that expression, and an underlying discontent is present here too. I am super curious about this, and learned a bit about this through anecdotes. I’m not comfortable writing about it here. If you are curious, let’s talk next time I see you.
There was a big market where the locals went in the morning to buy essentials, like meat, fish, and bread. It’s difficult to shoot photos in these places, as they are the sacred mundane for these people. I’m in their space, and being respectful is paramount.
In the afternoon I went to the Karosta Prison Museum. This was a military prison used by the USSR to punish soldiers. No photos were allowed of the inside, except one spot where you could hold an AK-47 and get a selfie with it. No thanks. In any case, this place was morbid. There was Nazi paraphernalia with swastikas on it, torture devices, amputation tools, a regal office of the commander complete with bottles of vodka and shot glasses. There is so much that could be written about this, so to sum it up I will share that this was a site of rulers, abuse of power, and oppression. Very little to celebrate here. I did learn about some of the more recent socio-political matters happening in Latvia while talking with the tour guide. Latvia expelled around 100 people after Russia started the war in Ukraine in 2022. These people did not speak Latvian, only Russian, and the government had more reason to have them in a list of expulsion. This was a big move for Latvia, and I get the sense that things are rapidly changing here in a socio-political context. Here are a few photos of the grounds outside the prison, with Soviet-era vehicles, and so forth.
The above photo of that bomb reminds me of when I was living in Wrocław, Poland and could not go to work one day because they discovered one of these buried under the street in front of the school and had to excavate it carefully while the are was evacuated.
This region of the world fascinates me. There is so much natural beauty, combined with friction between past and present, on so many levels. The complicated socio-political dynamic is evolving in real-time. There is a much different thing happening behind the facade in Latvia, creating a sense of mystery unlike I have ever experienced before. The place is cold, beautiful, friendly, weathered, and refreshed all at the same time. I never expected Latvia to be so paradoxical like this, and I love it.
