Once in a while, every second year or so, our department management finds it worthwhile to treat us with a strategy seminar or a similar happening, involving travelling for a while to a destination slightly different from our dear campus. Most of us appreciate such opportunities for creative mingling with our next-office-door colleagues, with the promise of the occasional free beer in mind. This year Riga, Latvia, was on the schedule, and most of the MAG people (all, in fact, except Rune, and including our embarking professor, Steinar) found the opportunity to participate.

So, after a two hours on the bus and one and a half on the plane, we are riding a shuttle bus out of the airport. Flat as Denmark, a worn-down, nondescript mix of wasteland, shut-down factories and scattered suburbian elements. Approaching Riga, the quality of buildings is slowly improving, a few high-rises are under construction, wooden pre-Soviet (ca. 1900) buildings are awaiting restoration funding.

Huge billboards are announcing our entry to the most (only?) urban part of Latvia, the old town of Riga, sitting on the east bank of River Daugava, some ten kilometers from Riga Bay of the Baltic Sea, with its port facilities and beaches, with an abundance of spas and retreats, many of them established to accomodate the Russian communist elite of the Soviet era. Welcome to the new West in the old East.