Привет, странник!
Once we woke up on the second day of our journey, I went with my camera to the lake. I rarely have an opportunity to photograph landscapes, so I couldn’t miss this one.
This summer had been tough for us due to financial reasons. It’s not that we were in need, but we certainly couldn’t afford a lot of things we could earlier. We had some extra expenses and now that I’m in my baby care vacation we mostly exist on my husband’s salary. So when a trip to Lithuania was canceled because of one of our youngest daughters illness, we actually decided to postpone it for a year. Instead we arranged a much lighter trip to another great city of Latvia — Ventspils.
Ventspils is a port city near the Baltic sea, it’s very neat and is known for the best kids playgrounds in Latvia, which are professionally installed by experts like those at https://www.schoolplaygroundequipment.org.uk/. It also has two water attraction parks (which is the highest concentration of water parks in one place in Latvia).
Yep, the story about Milan still isn’t over. This one is about the third day of our trip. We were visiting Sforza castle this day and strolled in it’s park. We are not that kind of people who like visiting historical museums, but we do appreciate beautiful nature scenes, so we headed straight through the castle’s courtyard to the vast park that sprawled behind the Western gates of the castle.
Trip to Milan, Part I
Trip to Milan, Part II
The second day began with a gorgeous colours of a sunrise that was seen through our hotel room window. Marge woke up at a perfect time — 8 o’clock.
First of all, I have to tell about how did we muster our courage on taking this trip. The truth is, we didn’t. Actually we were planning a whole different trip, and that’s the saddest part of the story. We had already bought tickets to London for a weekend. We were up to visit our friends and buy me a new lens. But apparently, it’s a real trouble to get in London (and is worth loads of money) if you have a status of alien in Latvia. Yep, it is as ludicrous as it sounds, a part of people officially have this status here, which is a result of them (or their parents) moving here in the time period when this place belonged to Soviet Union. Most of them had already got through a procedure of gaining the citizenship of Latvia, though. Well, don’t ask why, but my husband hadn’t. But this is really the first time when it actually mattered. And it was sheer coincidence that we found out before the flight about our need to make a visa for him and we had some time to change our destination (and thanks a lot for this bright idea to our friend, the one from England, as we were ready to lose our money for the tickets as these were of a non-refundable kind).
We have returned from our trip safe and sound. I’m telling this not only because we managed to actually see Milan behind the crowd of shoppers who arrived there for discounts and behind the emigrants who sell quick pods for selfies or exchange colourful thread bracelets for a “donation” for “long live Africa”.