A TripAdvisorâ„¢ TripWow slideshow of a travel blog to Riga, Latvia by TravelPod blogger Captaindort titled "Let down and hanging around" Captaindort's travel blog entry: "It feels like my eastern european trip, the 'baltic blast' I was planning, has backfired. The audience it attracts is similar to Thailand - lots of young men, drawn in by cheap beer, crazy nightlife and tall blonde girls everywhere. This wasn't something I was searching for, and found myself down-in-the-dumps for a large part of it. But I still feel like it was worthwhile coming here - at least for the perk of being in former soviet states! While Estonia retained some of the feel of a cheaper, slightly-soviet northern european country, Latvia seemed particularly russian. In fact, in Riga, 55 per cent of the population are russian - making Latvians a minority in their own capital! So that was interesting. The reason for this is quite brutal, as I found out at the Museum of Occupations - from the first occupation in 1939, and again in the second, post-nazi occupation, the USSR would round up Latvians in the middle of the night, give families an hour to pack, and send them off in cattle trucks all over Russia, forbidden to ever return - their property was now given to russians. Thousands perished on this long journey - the same things happened in Lithuania. The nazis, on the other hand, called for volunteers to help with the german war machine - but overall, they were less brutal than the red army, the ...