Me and three of my mates went to Riga on a jolly up about 7 years ago.
Hard to describe the exact location, but somewhere in Riga is a small athletics track with a single grandstand. Right next to it is a small clubhouse type building. You go through the doors, immediately walk down a flight of concrete stairs & wander into a very long & narrow room, which was freezing cold & dimly lit. It was like a small underground bomb shelter.
This is the Riga shooting range. Odd, eerie little place, ran by a man & wife who must be in their 70’s. They were unable to speak Much English, but they were very friendly seemed hospitable.
The health and safety aspect of this gun range wasn’t like what I’d seen before in the Western World. Instead of sound proofing the walls, they had simply nailed a load of empty egg cartons to the wall. The training they gave you, was a like a bad game of charades, which centred around two key elements: Point at target. Pull here. Safety goggles & ear defenders were seen by them as an admission of homosexuality.
After an hour or so of playing with their wide selection of three guns - an AK47, pump-action shotgun & a Glock - the guy insisted we take some photos with the weapons, and then surprisingly wandered off somewhere, to leave us to our own childish devices.
After a few minutes & some Rambo-inspired pics, the little old man came running back, yelling “no, no”, to my friend who was wielding the Glock. He grabbed the gun from him & in the only bit of good English I recall him speaking he said “gun in waist like real gangster”, and proceeded to shove the gun into my mates waistband, before stepping back, putting both thumbs up, grinning inanely & encouraging the photo to be taken
An uneasy feeling set in amoung us shortly after that, and it dawned on us, that we were in the middle of nowhere, in a dark underground bunker, with these - albeit friendly - but possibly unhinged locals & their guns.
We said our goodbyes & asked if they’d phone us a taxi, as we had no real idea where we were, but that seemed to get lost in translation. So much so, that the old boy and his missus started a very fiery argument with each other, right in front of us. It seemed to get resolved fairly quickly & the old boy beckoned for us to follow him. We walked outside & around the corner to a carpark, where he instructed us to get into to a car that looked like it was on loan from a museum.
As it turned out, their argument was about us asking for a taxi. They thought that we were asking THEM to drive us. The old woman was keen to be a good host, aswel as earn an extra couple of quid, so she demanded that her husband comply with our “request” and that he subsequently took us back to town.
All-in-all, a strange couple of hours, but would definitely recommend.
