Balttour 2011

Every February Riga is organizing international tourism exhibition Balttour - this year it was already 18th time. Although the winter is getting up at the moment here, the spring isn't over the hills anymore - and so people can start to plan their vacation trips. 2 halls (one for international, one for Latvian offers), more than 200 stands from 33 countries. One of the best presented was Estonia - huge amount of information materials about almost every larger town in our Northern neighbour country, Lithuanians were good too. But Norway and Denmark stands were just pity - I couldn't understand why they participated if they couldn't prepare even one normal booklet or small book about their countries or capitals, there were only some... hmm eve don't remember, some hotel brochures or smt like that. Then Slovakians were funny too - pracitcally all of their materials were in... Slovakian! Do they hope that we will take dictionaries and translate their booklets? No, thanks.

I grabbed the materials like crazy - almost every booklet, brochure or magazine which was about country, it's region or some city (I didn't took travel company booklets as I always planning my trips and going in them myself). In overall, I took 2 large bags full of these materials - I think it was at least some 15 kg in weight. I just wish I could have enough money to go to at least one abroad trip this year.

On the first picture you see international, on the second picture - Latvian pavillion. It's first stand is Latvia's and Live Riga stand. How do you like Latvia's new tourism slogan "Best enjoyed slowly?". It resembles "Apsara" tea :D, but in overall I think it's appropriate for Latvia because it's a country which can't offer fastest life pulse in the world, and it's nature requires attentive absorption - the ability to see beauty in small things as we don't have high mountains or huge waterfalls. Interestingly, the back of the man you see on the right side in picture belongs to Latvian Minister of environment - Raimonds Vējonis.