17 timmar till Riga

I am in Riga now. I traveled from Stockholm by ferry yesterday and I woke up six thirty this morning to the sound of a Russian cartoon. Five hyperactive monkeys screaming and singing and their striving mother, a poor chimpanzee was trying to keep them all well fed and out of trouble. Actually not at all a bad way to wake up and really amusing even though I couldn't understand a word of what they were singing.

I don't think I'll ever get tired of loud and noisy cartoons. When I was a kid I used to get up seven in the morning and spend the whole morning in front of the cartoons on Sky Channel and Super Channel. That was how I learned to speak English, this morning kind of reminded me of that. Who knows, maybe I can learn some Russian.

The good thing about the ferry is the sauna. I stumbled down there this morning, with frozen limbs and Russian monkeys on speed climbing around in my head and It felt like a sanctuary to step inside the dark and steaming hot room. And of course the usual sauna talk. "Which do you prefer, the Russian or the Finnish sauna? Is life in Sweden better or worse now or before the European Union?"

In exchange of my opinion the Latvian businessman gives his version of the European Union. "I don't like it" he says, "And it's not only because the Danes bought our sugar plants and shut them down, just to sell us sugar at a higher price. They told us it would get cheaper, but instead the price went up. Every year the price for living goes up here, today the average Latvian worker pays half of his salary only to food and rent"

"We had the chance to become an independent nation after the fall of the Soviet union. We are a small country, and we haven't had time to figure out our national identity since the Soviet occupation. At least I think we should have tried to make it on our own. But the main reason I don't like the EU is that those who run the European union put the money before the people, and the people does not even come in second place."

He says he has been in Sweden on a business trip. One of his trucks that he rents out had an accident and he's bringing it home for repairs. I could have asked him how he would think it be possible for him to rent out trucks to Sweden if it weren't for the European Union, but I really don't want to get into that discussion so I let it be.

If the good thing about the ferry is the sauna and the Russian cartoons, the bad thing is almost everything else. The atmosphere is a strange mix between a sleazy cabaret show and a enormously over sized pick up van owned by a sexually neurotic teenager. You can smell old dried up puke and spilled liquor here and there, and most of the crew members have a look on their faces as if they had too much to drink last night and rather would be somewhere else right now.

The cheap food tastes like wallpaper, the shrimp salad looks like it would jump up and kill you just for looking at it and the beer on tap has a foul taste of jeast and badly cleaned pipes. The scene that really freaks me out before I go to sleep in my chair is the two passengers in the closed cafeteria, smoking cigarettes and watching soft porno movies on the cafeteria television. Both in complete absorbed silence as if they were watching something of grave importance and contemplating the ass and pussy of the world.