Grand Hotel Kempinski Riga x The Baltic Bees
I’ve made a lot of bad decisions. When I was 15, I was caught borrowing my mother’s white Trans-Am while she and my dad vacationed in the Dominican Republic. I ordered my friend Gus to get rid of it, which he took to mean, drive it to Queens and leave it unlocked in the left lane of the Belt Parkway. About a year later, a few weeks into my first semester at a boarding school for under-achievers, I started a bonfire using love letters from my (now ex) girlfriend who, I had just learned, kissed a boy named Jimmy, who had a nicer house than I did and worked at Five Towns Mini Golf and Batting Cage.
These are called externalizing behaviors – outward projections of one’s inner turmoil. While I mostly no longer engage in such antisocial behavior, as I sat in the backseat of a demilitarized L-39 high performance jet engaged in a vulgar, high speed barrel-roll which forced me to squeeze my eyes tight and whimper like a tired baby, I wondered if somehow, without meaning to, I still was.
The plane ride, “an exclusive adventure with the Baltic Bees,” was sold as You Only Live Once, a curated selection of bucket list adventures being offered at Kempinski properties around the world. I could have been truffle-hunting in Istria, or sailing the Adriatic, but instead I found myself in Latvia, experiencing a collaboration between the country’s aerobatic jet team and the Grand Hotel Kempinski Riga for what was indeed a “thrill of a lifetime.”
As we made our first steep climb in the small and nimble L-39, I realized that this was a trip designed specifically for someone like me, a snobby tough guy with a low resting heart rate. Nikita, the jet’s handsome, 27-year-old pilot, pointed the plane’s nose straight in the air, at an obscene 90 degree angle to the horizon. This was followed by a vulgar, suicidal charge toward the earth, compelling the plane’s control panel to flash in a red caps repeatedly: TERRAIN ALERT, TERRAIN ALERT until Nikita decided, about 50 yards from the ground, to pull up to reverse the course he had initiated with crazed intention. In order to achieve this, he had to generate a force greater than the one gravity was exerting on us. This, I was told, was somewhere between five and six G. To put this into some context, this meant, in order to not die, in order to un-do the mathematical inevitability of the pilot’s actions, I had somewhere between 1000-1500 lbs of God’s punitive, disagreeable weight pushing down on my body, forcing the expulsion of water from several orifices, including literally squeezing the water from my eyeballs. As I struggled to lift my arm to reach for the vomit bag, I swore I would never do this again.
But that was the pee in my pants talking.
Once back on the ground and in control of my bodily functions, I realized that there was still more to experience. After the flight, I was chauffeured back to the hotel which, with its 141 rooms and suites, was undoubtedly grand. There I was scheduled to receive a 90 minute Latvian pirts (or sauna ritual) in the property’s spa, a gorgeous, cavernous affair, with at least half a dozen treatment rooms, including a Rasul mud room, several saunas, an ice plunge and an indulgent 16-meter swimming pool. My pirts session was administered by a tall, underdressed Hungarian Pirts-meistars (sauna master) in a private, oversized sauna suite. I was salted, scrubbed, and then encased in birch leaves before Arpad turned up the heat. I felt like a cheap cut of beef trying to be made delicious via some sort of mystical curing process that required the protective embrace and clandestine know-how of the long haired sauna-man. The session was hot in temperature and freaky in nature. When all was said and done, I was left feeling light and edible, but also slippery and fatigued. It was aggressively restorative. That night, as promised, I slept like a baby.
I spent the following morning exploring the churches of Riga. But while my tour guide shared the complicated history of the region, I couldn't stop thinking about how I was going to, without question, in the middle of the summer, have for lunch, my second serving of Tonkatsu Ramen at Stage 22, the hotel’s Michelin-recommended Asian-fusion restaurant. Although my itinerary included another decadent session at the spa, and a backstage tour of the Latvian National Opera House (where, for less than the cost of a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, you can enjoy a world class performance from the theatre's opulent presidential box seats), now, as I cartoonishly gobbled down my ramen, all I could think was that I had two more meals of this coming.
The collaboration between Kempinski and the Baltic Bees worked. I was here, and not somewhere else, like the gym, or the Amalfi Coast. Before this, I hadn’t spent any time in Eastern Europe, and I’m glad that I finally have. It wasn't just that Riga, being as old and as storied as it was, exemplified the best of what Europe has to offer. But rather, this trip left me with a story that I’ll have forever — one that most people wouldn't, which made me smile. And as I basked in the exclusivity of that childish notion, enjoying my third plate of Michelin-recommended sushi in as many days, I thought to myself, “Mission accomplished.”