When I first visited it, the Moon Safari club was stupendously vulgar. Coarse beyond belief. Up until the moment I set foot in this amazingly terrible and terribly amazing club, the most vulgar club I'd ever been to was a strip club in Las Vegas.
The key part is I said 'was'.
The Moon Safari is nasty. It's rough around the edges, the centre and the core. It's like a street worker that doesn't shower but wears Chanel N°5. This is the professional stuff. This is the Rolls-Royce of vulgarity.
The walls are painted black. The drinks are expensive but they're made with cheap alcohol. They want you drunk. The bouncer is a scary-looking dude. He's 6'5'' and 250 pounds. He's like Reacher.
But the reason why men put up with the bouncer and the ugly decor and the horrific drinks is this club is in Riga, Latvia, which is the capital city of female beauty.
Latvia girls are striking. If they did World Cup for hot girls, Latvia would make it to the quarter-finals.
Out of the three Baltic Republics Latvia surely is the one where Soviet Union residues are tangible. It's in the air. It's like a permanent division between Soviet's heavy communism and the EU's lightweight socialism.
Still, Riga is a nice place to be.
On paper, you've got everything any capital city needs and more.
There's a river, the Daugava, with benches and people and couples on either side of it. There are souvenir shops where you can buy fridge magnets. There are cat- and rooster-shaped souvenirs. Apparently, both are a symbol of Riga and you can find them in every possible and conceivable material, design, shape, size and price you think of.
You've got wooden souvenirs, and metal and porcelain ones. And souvenirs made of cloth.
You also have an amazing selection of night clubs.
Riga's old town looks like it was designed by a man who'd been told what Prague looked like over the phone. It's less refined. And some people would say that's a good thing.
And then of course there are churches.
Sveta Petera Evangeliski luteriska baznica. Or as it is known to people who speak only English, St. Peter’s Church.
It is a Lutheran church in Riga, the “first stone” was laid in 1209 and it has been completed and then expanded and then twice rebuilt ever since.
If you visit Riga next year it will have changed. Hopefully the one thing that won't have changed are the “bite-the-back-of-your-hand” pretty waitress at Ribs & Rock Restaurant in central Riga.
I went there in 2013 and still, to this day, I sill don’t know a single person that’s been to Riga. Not one. And that alone is a good enough reason to go and visit.
That, and the food, and the women, and the river, and the churches, and the old town, and the weird frog-shaped monument near Kalku Iela.
And the bridge that looks like it belongs to Stoke-on-Trent, but it doesn't. It's in Riga-on-Daugava.
