Originally built in for 1736 for the Duke of Courland, Rundāle Palace sure had its ups and downs. From the opulent halls once filled with aristocrats conversing in room after room of sitting rooms, great balls full of dancing and frivolities, to being used as a bunker for allied forces in WWII. It was painstakingly restored between 1972 and 2015, and now open to the public for us all to see how to see how our betters lived in the 18th century.

The bus ride was just under two hours from Riga, and I could hear few English voices on the bus, so I knew there’d be a handful of us going here. For some reason you can buy reserved seating online, which I did as well as two elderly English ladies. However you can just buy tickets when getting on the bus and sit anywhere. And so another lady was sitting in the seat of the older ladies, and they were basically told to bugger off and sit anywhere.

Needlessly to say the prim English ladies where aghast by this, and I swear that’s all they talked about for half the journey. I don’t blame though, why have seating at all if you can also sit anywhere.

There are two tickets for the Palace, and they’re not exactly cheap. One covers the Palace itself, while the second grants access to the Royal Gardens. It’s worth the price if the garden ticket just to see the beautifully tended garden. The main garden arrangement leading to the palace entry was modelled on the Palace of Versailles, and you can tell that’s what they were going for, despite not having the same degree of grandeur. It’s still eye opening and you have to respect and appreciate the skill needed to create and maintain this.

The Palace ground floor is mostly closed to the public, except for the kitchen galley. This worried me initially, as I was now sceptical how much of the Palace we could see. But climb the marble stairs to the second floor and almost every room is open.

Each room is decked out in antique furnishings, paintings, clocks, and cupboards. There’s a red room, a blue room, a white room, and a green room, just in case you felt like one of those colours that day. Its good to have choices when you’re wealthy.

And let’s not forget a nobleman of the time needed his hunting and billiards room. One adorned with paintings of dead birds, the other filled with a giant billiards table and hand crafted chess boards, black gammon, cards, and an assortment of other games.

A private tour guide was just in front of me most of the time. The guide was speaking English, which I wasn’t really play attention to, and his pax was a single blubbery red faced man that kept giving me death stares. I’m pretty sure he thought I was following them and getting a free tour at his expense.

There was also the obligatory school group, about 30 of the critters had headphones on as the guide talked to them through a mic. I had to almost run past them a couple of times to avoid being trapped.

I had some extra time to kill before the next bus back to Riga would arrive. There’s a cafe outside the Palace which was busy when I initially walked past, and after deciding to go back and sip a coffee there to fill in the time, all the people on the outdoor tables were mysteriously gone. Perfect, I thought, I have the place to myself!

Yeah no. Inside told the tale why everyone else had left. The bus people had arrived. Tourist groups had descended like locusts and had taken over. They rudely shouted orders at the couple of young staff while shovelling food into there faces, and it wasn’t until a good 30mins had passed when they finally left did I get served. So I got a beer instead.

I was checking the time and thought I might be able to get a small beer in (all the beers are either 500ml or 300ml). In front of me a man entered and I overheard the waiter asking him how big his tour group was. Oh no – cheque please!