City of Riga, capitol of Latvia. A neighbouring country to where I live.
It is an incredibly beautiful city, twices larger then my own, has remains of a medieval town and is home to many interesting festivals.
Yet it doesn't change the fact that the place it a total bore and dump......

- a bad pic of me.
The goal was to take part in an English competition among Russian schools. Being the most fluent English speaker in my school, I'm made captain of the team and I get to choose my crew. Logically, I had to choose those that possess a level of fluency close to mine. But that didn't stop me from bringing my good friend Ella with me to the trip.
Honestly, I would have rotted there if it weren't for her.

- me and Ella on the bus to Riga. Day 1. All pics were taken from her iPad.
She's a wonderful person. While we have very little in common and even think in different ways, we look after each other a lot. We both had dark times in the past and we usually helped each other out. Plus we're currently having a common problem: I found a girl, she found a guy. Me and my girl, she and her guy have TOO MUCH in common. You might think it's a good thing, but it actually makes things extremely complicated. So we help each other with this problem as well.
Oh, and she's hilarious and inadequate. The only thing we share is being psychotic.
But let's get back to Riga.
Why is it bad? It just feels that the people have lost hope for a better tommorow and stagnation is everywhere. Homeless people litter the streets and underground passages.
Honestly, Riga is like that really hot chick at the club, who is completely soulless and without interest. Beautiful cover, but empty inside. That's what Riga is.
But that didn't stop me and Ella from having our usual mishaps.
For example.

a canoe. A
**** canoe attached to a window! What the
**** are these people doing? I seriously don't know if it's a countr-thief meassure or they just had nothing to do, but it's a
**** canoe on a window xD
A funny thing we had on the second day: kiosks in Riga give away these small stickers when you buy something. You take a special paper, glue 25 such stickers and you get a free glass with a picture of a puppy on it.
One of our guys was chatting with a lady at the kiosk and apparently charmed her, because she gave him 18 stickers.
Next 2 hours were spent running from kiosk to kiosk asking for those bloody stickers. And in the end we got our glass.

the crew got their pointless glass. Seriously, there were 5 of us. There's only one glass. Why did we really bother with it? I guess we were that bored. Riga is a boring city in my humble opinion.
When we got the school, we were given tests that look like the state exams we have here in Estonia. Pretty much I just wrote my English exam a new. Except this was one hard test. Bunch of tricky questions and crap. English speakers would have a hard time with it, I guess.

- me and Ella at the school. We get these tests and I'm like "
**** just got serious".
The estimated ammount of time it takes to write this test is 2 hours.....I did it in 30 minutes. Ella was seated to a different seat. Was one really boring 1 hour.
Next day we had to do public speaking. I'm the only guy with proper training in this kind of this so I'm chosen to speak.
I'll be honest: this was my worst performance ever. I was just saying words that were not connected to each other. I didn't have a message to deilver. I repeated mysef a lot.
This thing made me really sad....but then Ella did her magic on me and we're back to our crazy selves.
2 hours later we return to the school for the award ceremony. I'm just sitting there, knowing clearly, that we didn't get anything, because I messed up my public speaking performance, so we're just sitting and listening.
Then I see on the screen, that we took 3rd place in the team nomination and we're like "WHAT THE FUUUU-?". Seriously, I didn't not except us to win anything. My bad performance plus the fact that all judge members were from local schools mean that we had little chance of getting anything. But we somehow did.
The prize was blueberry cake.
Was the trip worth the cake? Every
**** delicious bite of it. I don't even remember the last time I had a mouth-gasm xD
After sacrificing the cake to our stomaches, we went to our bus and drew back home.

- me and Ella on the bus. Day 2. We were quite tired after it.
So yeah, I had a good time this weekend. Problem is, my school grades have worsened during my trip, so I'm in a mess right now.
Eh...
**** it. The trip was worth it xD