Notes from Latvia

Some observations from a few weeks back in Riga:

• Traffic is much worse. 5 years ago, I could get home without traffic jams easily. Not any more.
  
• Same about (intercity) buses and trains. In July, Aleks had a post on how he spent 3 hours standing on overfull bus from Riga to Ventspils. I thought "he had an extraordinarily bad experience". No, I now have to think carefully which bus to take... so that I don't end up with a similar experience myself.
• Everyone is complaining about inflation being at 11%... but it seems that people are spending more rather than less. They are driving more, travelling more and so on...
  
• It looks like Riga has substantially more small children than a few years ago. In a future post with numbers, I'll discuss what is happening to Latvian birthrates...

And our political disputes and scandals are getting really bad, but I don't even feel like talking about them... I will write about that, but not today.