Curious world of Rīga, Latvia’s Old Town

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(the article below accompanies this video)

Bad habits are funny things. Even when they get you into immediate and consistent trouble, it can be tough to find the presence of mind to identify them, vow to overcome them, and apply yourself to a new way of doing things.

Type 1 diabetics know this better than anyone. If blood sugars are often bad, you can either get used to it (unhelpful, but surprisingly easy) or change things in your daily routine to try to fix it. Or you can take a sort of center tack – wish they were better and chip away at ’em. Two steps forward, 1.9 steps back.

What follows is the story of Day 13 of me and Masayo’s Europe trip, which was our first full day in Rīga, the capital of Latvia. My blood sugars were pretty bad overall, and as often I tended to destroy the good ones with bad choices.

But consistent blood sugar checking is the cornerstone to good control, and I always check several times a day. Even when it’s high and I don’t want to know what it is, I really do need to know. Those high readings can be frustrating and enraging, but that just gives you something to fix. And all of today’s tale takes place against the backdrop of Rīga’s wondrous Old Town.

Grouchy but plucky ‘betic in paradise.

The morning

We awoke in our private room at Rīga Hostel at 9:30 for the free breakfast buffet. My blood sugar was 198. High, but psychologically a sub-200 reading is much easier to take. Glad it wasn’t two points higher.

Breakfast was typical for a hostel — filling and snacky. Two types of bread, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, several types of mysterious substances in containers to spread on the bread, two types of cereal, and milk. And of course, coffee.

I took my Humalog shot at the table, discreetly, and Masayo and I alternately talked to each other and chatted with other travelers — from Belgium and Japan. Hostel life has its own rhythm and it’s always pleasingly grungy and friendly.

Out in Rīga

We spent the morning taking it easy at the hostel before heading out. At 1:30, outside a park near the hostel, I checked and found that I had misjudged my breakfast shot, and/or something else had conspired against diabetes: BG now 290. I was furious and felt like throwing my OneTouch UltraMini to the pavement. A nearby statue only mocked me. I’m sure his BG was fine.

The wondrous cathedral

After mailing Masayo’s heavy mitten book from Estonia back to Japan at a post office we found ourselves at the magnificent Nativity of Christ Cathedral (Kristus Piedzimšanas pareizticīgo katedrāle). This great beast is a dense edifice standing boldly in a quiet park, gold spires sparkling in the bright sunshine and contrasting with the bold blue Latvian sky.

The temperature was 13ºC (55ºF) — I didn’t have my hat or my jacket with me, just five layers of shirts, my long underwear, and one pair of socks. And felt fine. Except for the irritating blood sugar.

Old Town

Old Town Rīga is great, a UNESCO World Heritage Site full of old stone buildings with colorful, new-looking paint jobs and all sorts of weird angles and striking decorative touches in unexpected places. But I was distracted; I just wanted to seek out a coffee shop so I could eat something and take a shot and get that 290 down. (I try not to take foodless Humalog shots if possible.)

So in a big café on the western edge of Old Town we found a table next to the big window on the roomy second floor so we could relax and watch people walk by. Perfect.

As long as I’m going to be taking a corrective shot and eating something, I might as well have something fun. So I got a thick caramel shortbread thing with chocolate on it. I took six units of Humalog, which seemed like a lot but the thing was thick and rich and I thought I could handle it.

I made sure that all the insulin got in — I rattled the pen a little while the needle was still in my leg, pulling it in and out a little before extracting it (all through my Bluff Works pants). And none dripped out, as it had on the bus in Tartu, Estonia.

We were refreshed and, theoretically, I was on my way to better BG, so we went and strode around Old Town at random. Rīga’s Old Town seemed smaller than Tallinn’s Old Town was. Maybe it was just my BG-clouded imagination.

There were some notable differences between the two Old Towns, even though both are broadly similar. Rīga’s Old Town features more upscale-looking and brand-name clothing stores, where Tallinn’s seemed to be more little curio shops. I also felt that Rīga was not quite as appealing as Tallinn’s. Tallinn envelops you, transports you to Hanseatic times, while Rīga is merely a pleasant thing you visit.

But the highlights of Rīga are indeed striking. I really liked the Powder Tower, and of course the churches were pure grandeur. The House of the Blackheads, with its colorful and expertly restored figures, was especially nice in the late afternoon sun, which was setting across the Daugava River, scattering pale golden hues onto the orange-pink bricks of the Hall.

It wasn’t evident from the pleasant atmosphere that this reconstruction is only twenty years old, the 14th century original having been bombed by Germany in World War II before being demolished completely by the Soviet Union after the war. I’ll say this about traveling in “unusual Europe” – you learn a lot about the violence of the past.

In the plaza in front of House of the Blackheads, a woman with a Ukrainian flag sticking out of her purse saw Masayo and I taking a selfie and offered to snap our photo. A Ukrainian woman taking a photo of an American and a Japanese person in Latvia. How international!

One dark spot on the day was that the cheap watch I’d bought at the Russian market before visiting Patarei Prison in Tallinn was now an hour behind – and the hands weren’t moving. I reset it and pushed the pin back in, and it started up again. It was ok the rest of the day, but it doesn’t bode well. I was hoping that for €5 the thing would last a month at least.

Around 4:00 pm, I finally checked my blood sugar again, hoping for good news. I got it: 103.

Meandering through Kronvalda Park, between the hostel and Old Town, we found an exquisite part of Rīga that was perfect in the late afternoon. The park is built around a canal; ducks swim around in the canal and in small ponds while stone bridges stretch over the water, leaves cover the lawns, and people sit on benches talking and kissing. A guy played traditional folk music on an accordion for tips (despite our frugality, even we gave him €2). Though rather small it’s probably the nicest park we’ve seen so far on this trip.

And, though perhaps a curious diabetic decision, I ate a Mars bar “just in case” – that 103 actually seemed a little lower than I was expecting.

Nearby was the Monument to Freedom, the scene of a big rally in 1987 against the Soviet Union that was one of many events in the run-up to the dissolution of the Union. (Latvia declared independence in August 1991.) It made me reflect on “freedom”, in the diabetic sense. Having bad blood sugars clouds your thinking and dulls your senses. You may travel (like I’m doing now) with a free spirit, but having diabetes in acceptable control is what leads to real freedom of mood.

We stopped in a store called Tiger, some Danish brand that Masayo says also has a store in Osaka (I’ve never heard of it). They had a big wall of reading glasses for ancient geriatrics, and for fun I tried on a pair. Lo and behold, it was a miracle – I could read small print again! I’ve never needed glasses but I guess my eyes are aging right before my… um, eyes.

I didn’t buy them, but it’s nice to know they’re out there, for a couple of measly euros. I wish I could see perfectly and naturally like I used to. But time marches on.

Like hunger…

Fast food kebab dinner

Our only idea for dinner, as Rīga descended into darkness and the traffic continued unabated in the wide streets under towering buildings in the area of our hostel, was an Armenian restaurant down the street. But when we got there it was closed down – dark and shut tight, with a sign explaining in grammatically perfect but confusing English that the building was closed for technical reasons, but that the restaurant was still open and you could call a number. We didn’t know what that meant, but the restaurant was clearly not happening tonight.

So we went to a fast food kebab place across the street called Kebab Fix (popular here in Rīga, apparently, as there are two right near us). The menu was all in Latvian, and “kebab” seems to mean different things to different people so I had no idea what we were ordering. (I was hoping for a big pile of meat with sauce like I’d had after climbing around a Russian fortress in Mariehamn a few days ago.)

It turned out that the girl behind the counter spoke English but I’d already ordered something, chosen at random, in Latvian: “Cūkgaļas!” I’d said, pronounced something like “TSOOK gall yoss”. (Masayo, smart and practical as ever, kept it linguistically simple and ordered “mix”.)

Cūkgaļas turns out to be “pork”. It was good. Each kebab was in a little flour-based pouch or something. They came with french fries, and we drank hot tea with it. For my Humalog shot, I had to guess at the carb content of this food, and factor in the walking around all day and the Mars bar I’d had on top of the low-seeming 103 earlier. And again I made sure none dripped out by not withdrawing the needle so fast.

I shot up at the table and we ate in the harshly-lit green and yellow fast food kebab joint in downtown Rīga, cheerfully downing our salty and fatty foods after a day of cobblestones, sunshine, and reminders of Latvia’s proud but uneasy past.

Doughnut and beer: Some diabetics never learn

The meal was good but not huge, and I wanted dessert. We stopped at a Rimi supermarket and I got a big doughnut and, as a treat, a beer. (I had talked myself out of buying one, for budgetary reasons, but I liked the label of the Valmiermuiža beer bottle so much that I talked myself back into it. €1.50 – hey, breakfast and lunch were cheap today!

Back at Rīga Hostel I shot up for the doughnut and beer. Both were tasty. I congratulated myself for my masterful insulin choices this evening, wiping sugar from the corners of my mouth and feeling the thick beer swishing in my sated belly.

In the hostel’s kitchen a guy from Guangzhou, China had a small portable tea set with real Chinese tea grown by his father. He offered us some. I drink tea sometimes but have no real taste for it; it just tastes like hot water to me. The flavors are too subtle for an uncultured American like me. But even I thought this fresh Chinese tea was really good. It was as good as the stuff we’d had deep in the mountains of southern China a few years ago. I think I can see the appeal of tea!

Afterwards I thought my BG must be pretty good thanks to my expert handling of the kebab and then the beer and doughnut. I was congratulating myself until I actually checked — 337. I was in disbelief. But I could feel that it was true. Humorlessly I took three units of Humalog to sleep on.

I reflected on this terrible BG reading. Were my insulin doses that far off? Is my insulin going bad, perhaps? What will I do here in Europe if all the 40+ insulin pens I packed are going bad? I’m sure I could buy some replacements somehow, but the expense would be crippling.

I hope the insulin is fine and the problem is me. I’ll keep checking and monitoring it all closely.

Final thoughts on Rīga

We have enjoyed Rīga, though our time here was short. Tomorrow we are planning on going to the awesomely-named town of Daugavpils in the Latgale region of southern Latvia. They speak Russian more than Latvian there and I found some simple Russian lessons online that I’m trying to get through. I’ve learned maybe three words so far. I’ll keep working on it. Привет!

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