Baltics - 12 June 2012 (4)

Chocolate Heaven in Riga

Although I wasn’t going to the opera, I walked back into town with May, Ian, Charlie, Sue, David, Dulcie and Flo.  It started spitting.  We sat down at the café outside the Opera House and started to order coffee, until Charlie asked how much a glass of champagne would cost.  At LVL2.50, everyone decided that they wanted one.

When the others went inside, I stayed behind to finish my champagne and write up my journal.  It had rained heavily when we were drinking our champagne but, luckily, Ian and David had managed to get the big umbrella up on our table.  It was a nice place to sit, with a good view of the gardens beside the canal.  The rain didn’t last too long, but the fountain nearby kept making me think it had started again.

Typically, when I emerged from the Opera House, having handed in my empty champagne glass, it was raining again.  I took shelter in Emīla Gustava šokolāde opposite and asked for a hot chocolate.  It cost LVL1.50, so I paid and sat down to wait.

The waiter brought me a glass of water and a tiny Greek coffee-sized cup of hot chocolate.  I tried not to feel disappointed that there was so little hot chocolate and drank half the glass of water to remove the taste of the not-so-wonderful champagne.  Then I put the tiny teaspoon in the chocolate and had a taste.  Ecstasy!  It was little more than melted dark chocolate.  There must have been something to stop it setting, but it was so chocolatey that I was in heaven.  I know I should have drunk it, but I had to make it last as long as possible and used the teaspoon to get tiny mouthfuls and just licked the spoon.  No one knew me, so it didn’t matter.

Unfortunately, happiness always has to end, although I scraped the last bits so much that it was a good thing there was no pattern inside the cup or that would have gone too.

Then I walked past a big queue of people, sheltering under a building overhang while waiting for a tram.  I went through an underpass to get to the shopping centre in search of the railway station.  I needed to negotiate a second underpass and then followed a line of determined people into the shopping centre, where I found the railway station in front of me.  I made notes of the times of the trains to Jūrmala for the next day.

Then I returned to the hotel, which was just across the main road, and went to bed.  I had been reading for a long while before May came back from the opera.  It seems to have been a good evening and an excellent production.

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