Was There Any Chance of Wolves?

Anonymity is a blessing in the short term. It’s true that it means you’re far from family and friends, but it also means never having to be anywhere at a particular time and doing exactly what you wish without consultation; it’s a bit like growing up and no longer being answerable to parents. Anonymity is a key component to the traveller’s freedom, the treasure of the road.

It was the first trip to Latvia, one week, and the day arrived for that fateful tour to Bauska. I’d taken up residence with newly met locals Dzintra and her daughters, Antra and Anta. Bauska was the plan for while they were busy with school, university and work.

The largely flat Latvian countryside has something in common with Bangladesh: there are a good number of palaces from the lord-and-peasant past, what in Bangladesh would be called a rajbari. Near Bauska is one such place, Rundales Pils, a baroque palace built for the Dukes of Courland from 1736. It was the goal.

Indeed the journey was completed easily and the palace was impressive. It was on the way home again to Riga when things went wrong.

With the blessing of anonymity there was nobody to ask whether it was a good idea to take a little walk in the countryside in the belief it would not be difficult to find a different way back to Bauska town for the bus. Besides, there was a footbridge over a small river made of oil drums tied together, floating and with planks on top, which really needed to be crossed.

Entirely without care I found myself of a picturesque stretch of dirt road, entirely straight, walking merrily. But it was a strange phenomenon for the road seemed to lengthen with each step. An hour passed, then two, and all the while there were open fields without a single house in sight. Could such a scene exist in a country as small as Latvia? More disturbingly, not a single car had passed by.

There are Latvian rivers with fishermen. I just didn't find any.

There comes that point when you wonder if turning back wouldn’t be more sensible, but the oil drum bridge already seemed distant and surely it wasn’t really possible to be lost in Latvia.

The road continued and so did I.

Early evening arrived and with the sun my confidence in direction gradually set. That point comes: ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ I started to contemplate sleeping in a field and waiting for morning. Was it dangerous to sleep in a Latvian field? It’s true the country was called the wild east back then, but surely that meant human society, in the cities. Was there any chance of wolves?

Okay: worst scenario, Latvian field, one night. I kept walking.

At about the stage where my legs felt they might refuse to go on, something exciting happened. I came to a road junction. There was no house or car, and only more fields, but for the first time in several hours I had a choice: left, right or straight ahead? On my first day in Latvia I’d made a choice for the left; this time I chose right. And I walked.

Lithuania wasn’t far to the south and with all that time for thinking I wondered how I would know if I accidentally crossed the border. Would unintelligible Latvian sound any different to unintelligible Lithuanian, in the event I met someone, somewhere?

There are houses in Latvian villages. I just didn't see any.

A few minutes later something more exciting happened. It was a sound: the oil and metal rumble of a car. Sure enough, it came along kicking up dust: a kind of red sports car. Normally it’d be courteous to stand to the side and politely flag down the vehicle, with acknowledgement it was a favour if they stopped. But the situation was not normal.

I stood road centre, hands out in a kind of ‘halt’, like a dacoit or a police officer. The car had no choice.

Inside was a couple. It was strange because when he decided to stop rather than run me down, she was rather angry about it. I’m not sure which language it was they spoke, but it sounded like Russian and there was clearly some kind of domestic dispute going on. ‘What are you stopping for you idiot!’ I imagined her yelling. She really was screaming at him.

‘What do you expect me to do, leave him here?’ I imagined him replying, marginally more calmly.

‘You never spend enough time with me! You are always with your wife!’ Or perhaps she was the wife. Whatever the specifics I was sure of one thing: I was getting in that car, whether the lady liked it or not. It’s not that I’m in the habit of interfering in other people’s domestic upheavals. It’s just that, at a minimum they could take me to a main road, wherever that might be, hopefully still in Latvia.  I could only say ‘Riga’.

Laugh if you will but after all that walking and after all her screaming the main road was but a few hundred yards further.  It was a very short ride indeed.  She was pleased I got out; the guy was nice about it. ‘Paldies,’ I said, Dzintra-taught, ‘Thanks.’

It was dark when I stood on the side of the highway.  There were cars but nobody was stopping; who could blame them?  So I walked a bit, and I’d been sure to get the sports car driver to indicate the Riga-direction of the road when he’d dropped me off.  After some time there was a bus shelter and I thought, ‘Would it be safe to stay one night in a Latvian bus shelter?’ It seemed unlikely anybody would stop before morning.  Personally I would’ve favoured the field with whatever risk of wolves there was.

Well fortunately there’s this little thing called public transport, and fortunately the international express services between Riga and Lithuania used that route.  They don’t officially stop except in major towns, except that, fortunately and like in Bangladesh, they do. They will pick up the odd stray like me for a small fee. A bus stopped and I was saved.  I was so relieved that I’d be making it back to the city that from my pocket I pulled out a few coins at random and proudly presented them to the driver.

This would have been a better road to get lost on, on account of the passerby and the house.

Latvia was using lats then, and it would have to have been one of the world’s strangest currencies, because the exchange rates gave it a huge value, with one lat worth more than one British pound I believe. The consequence was that travelling in Latvia was a tiny brown coin affair with everything seeming to cost umpteen centimes; with a whole lat it felt like you could purchase a small condominium, perhaps off the plan. 

The bus driver was a good fellow, for I hadn’t even counted what I’d dumped into his hand, so grateful I was at having been saved. There’d been a few too many tiny brown coins involved; he gave some back.

If the moss grows on the north side, Lithuania is to the south.

It was funny, that first week in Latvia. It was odd to be far from home, where I should have enjoyed the full benefit of anonymity, to have had that plaguing thought the whole time: Dzintra would be worried. By the time I reached the apartment it was approaching midnight. I rang the bell.

Well, the door swung open and there was an enormous hug. ‘I was so worried about you!’ she said, ‘If something happened… I don’t even know your surname! What would I tell your family and how would I find them?’ After that, I wrote my full name and address on a piece of paper. Needed. Multiple Lives. Latvia gets one.

Post Latvian apartment, you can take accommodation in a construction site, an Arctic cupboard or alternatively, set up your own guest house...


For the start of the Latvian story, you'll need to visit The Latvian National Academy of Science


Or follow the Baltic Way, along the sea on a trail of amber...

This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: Was There Any Chance of Wolves?

Potato and Toothpaste Travel

Amber is fossilised tree resin, a yellowish, pellucid gem washed ashore by the waves of the eastern Baltic Sea. Sometimes there are ancient insects within it, or parts of leaves to decorate it. Amber is a souvenir-laden Cretaceous traveller, and precious. Amber is said to be protective, happy-go-lucky and helpful in making the right choices. In Latvian, amber is called dzintars, from which the name Dzintra comes.

I’d nearly not stayed there but fate granted a second chance. As I’d walked away north on that day I’d randomly met Dzintra at the doors of the Science Academy in the Latvian capital, I thought to kick myself for turning down her offer to stay at her home and worse, for not getting any contact details. I knew enough to know I should know more.

It was in the days before mobile phones. My only hope might be to try to re-find her at the Academy, but I didn’t like the chances of dealing successfully with the German-speaking Russian receptionist. It was a very big building and we hadn’t even exchanged surnames.

Yet there was a sliver of hope: I was due to meet her daughter Antra on the following morning. Dzintra had said there was a castle not too far from Riga, that it was worth seeing and I could take the train there. Without any alternative plan it certainly sounded like a plan. She had to work, she said, but if her daughter was not busy with university she could meet me at the entrance to Riga station at 9 a.m. because her daughter would enjoy the trip too. Maybe.

‘How will she recognise me?’ I asked. It wasn’t as if I stood out in the Latvian crowd.

‘She can find you,’ Dzintra assured.

It wasn’t a meeting arrangement to inspire any confidence but there was only to wait and see. What did my intuition say? Unfortunately, it said nothing.

Anyway, there was a more immediate and pressing concern: would I really find the private apartment I’d left that morning, without really taking in properly where it was?

Eventually I did happen to happen upon the right street.

At 9 a.m. on the following day, at the busy Riga station, I thought it quite impossible anybody could find me in the crowd. But sure enough, as I stood waiting, a young woman approached, saying cautiously, ‘Excuse me, you are Andrew?’ It was Antra.

‘How did you recognise me?’ I asked, quite shocked.

‘You look like a foreigner,’ she said, ‘a bit lost.’

The day at the castle was like a meandering flute melody, made easier by Antra’s English skills. The offer to stay was repeated by the daughter. This time I accepted. I fetched my luggage from somewhere North Riga and returned the house keys to the apartment’s owner. By evening I’d been whisked over the Daugava River and up that flight of stairs in the middle block of three.

Events in the Stalin-era apartment were amusing. There was quite a bit of fussing that went on, unexpectedly, over Dzintra’s dinner.

‘Did you eat?’ I heard her school-going younger daughter Anta, ask.

‘I had my dinner,’ Dzintra replied.

‘What did you eat?’ the daughter pressed.

‘Oh, you know…’ the mother said.

‘What about your dinner?’ her older daughter Antra also asked, upon coming home again later.

‘Yes, I ate.’

‘It wasn’t only potatoes, was it?’

‘No,’ Dzintra said, calling me as a witness.

It brought a smile to see the two daughters questioning their mother in the way a mother might normally question a busy daughter. It wasn’t that Dzintra suffered any horrible malady; hers was rather a wonderful disorder: she was a nomad at heart, a jajabor and it was this affliction that encouraged her to save.

About the potatoes: they were cheap and plentiful, a ready match for the generally modest public salaries of Latvia. Well back into the Soviet era potatoes had allowed Dzintra to put a few roubles aside, as she could, as a travel fund. And what did it matter if dinner meant potatoes, now and then, if one could dream of a pending destination? That was the pay-off.

I agreed to help Dzintra with her English: she was nervous although she shouldn’t have been. With the world’s most delightful accent she could have, frankly, gotten away with anything. And she did.

‘Latvians eat much potatoes,’ she told me once.

‘Many,’ I corrected. ‘Many potatoes. Potatoes are countable.’

‘Not in Latvia!’ she said.

If I’d been more observant I could have seen that jajabor sparkle in her eyes when we’d first met, but it was the potato-talk that confirmed her status. Travel hadn’t been easy in the Soviet era but she’d managed to join tours to various places across the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc. Later, she’d visited a relative in Melbourne and her apartment featured Australian souvenirs as evidence. The extended trip was also there in Anta’s English accent: it seemed so out of place in Riga to be hearing the Australian sounding English she’d been young enough to absorb.

‘Most Australians had never heard of Latvia,’ she said, ‘So I would explain where it was.’

But it was her tour to Poland that took my fancy. ‘Toothpaste was always more expensive in Poland,’ Dzintra said, so she’d stocked up and seen Warsaw and Krakow on a finance of Soviet toothpaste, stopping off at a Polish market between sites to pay for the trip.

Passion for anything is rare in this world and I admired hers. It was clear we were predestined to get along. It’s perhaps the reason why every minute we’d spent together felt as a month.

She spoke of her daughters, Antra and Anta, explaining that the elder Antra was supposed to be Anta except that Antra’s grandmother was fond of the letter ‘r’ and changed her name; so Anta was born later. 

She spoke of the other family member, the cat called Puncis which in Latvian means stomach; an accurate name for the robust feline that lounged about. 

We spoke of Australia and many other things besides, as the hours meant years.

And of course more than anything we spoke of travel. It’s a well-known fact that the next best thing for any traveller is to receive another traveller in their home city. It brings with it as close as can be the feeling of travelling, without going anywhere.

‘You can’t leave Latvia without seeing a Latvian forest,’ Dzintra said and I could hardly disagree.  I had no experience with Latvian forests.

‘I have a small car,’ she said, ‘It has some mechanical problems, so if I take a day off work, and it might not get us all the way there and back again without breaking down, but would you like to take the chance?’

We left in the little grey Ford that whistled along to every gear change for the length of the chat and laughter that was the way to the Latvian forest and back again.  I’d say the whistling Ford enjoyed the day out too; it didn’t break down.  And there was another trip to Jurmala and the Baltic Sea, so I could see a Latvian beach.

The days of my planned week in Latvia passed quickly in the way only enjoyable days can. Everything went well, more than well and without complaint until... Well I wasn’t to know how it would be, taking myself off for a day, independently, on that fateful tour to Bauska… It seemed such a simple idea.

But the amber wasn’t with me then.

The story continues here: Was There Any Chance of Wolves?


The first part of the Latvian story is here: The Latvian National Academy of Science.


Follow the Baltic Way, along the sea on a trail of amber...




Or something different? Head for Bangladesh!

This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: Potato and Toothpaste Travel

The Latvian National Academy of Science

Be free. Align yourself with the rhythm of the world to go far. Be as the jajabor, the nomad. Arrive somewhere from the soul, due to the appealing curl of its name or because it feels right or because we know nothing. Go because the time has arrived, sense it.

The Baltic States beckoned in such a way. I went because the idea surfaced. I went because it was there. Other than that, the reason for the journey was left to present itself as a revelation of yes – that must be why I came. Intuition would make the arrangements.

Due to the circumstances that had led to the meeting of a Latvian folk musician on an Estonian road, I had a private apartment in Riga, the Latvian capital, from the first evening. My pocket had keys. It gave perhaps a stronger sense that the brand new city was mine to explore; but it wasn’t the being somewhere new that brought meaning – it was a basic decision between old and older.

On that first morning, I’d locked the door of the apartment I was unexpectedly borrowing. I set off on foot down the busy street that judging by the traffic must lead somewhere; and it wasn’t long until the distinctive roofs and church towers caught sight of me. The famed old town was away to the mercantile right. Yet to the left a different type of building caught my eye: a stark, stalwart tower in brown, which seemed the very essence of the Soviet Union days. It was intriguing.

I knew I would see both pasts. I had the time. The question was which to go to first and on the thought that at the top of the tower I could take photographs over the old town I was inclined towards the left. In this way the communists won the moment. Yet, as it turned out, it was a decision that would bring me right to my sentimental Latvia.

I heaved those enormous doors, of the heavy wooden kind, and inside was an enormous Spartan lobby with proletariat looking lifts to the front, and to the left was a functional-looking booth with a sign that read ‘Enquiries Counter.’ In it was an equally functional-looking Russian woman, elderly and overweight. It was as though I had walked into one of those Hollywood films designed to promote a view of life in the Soviet Union that made one pleased to live in the ‘free world’. It was behind-the-iron-curtain in a clichéd way and I was excited.

I imagined Soviet citizens in the film, stooping to speak through the slot at the window of the booth, to make enquiries that ended in an inevitably firm ‘Nyet!’ I thought to try it out.

‘Excuse me, what is this building?’ I asked as prelude to my planned request to reach the roof.

‘Sprechen Zie Deutsch?’ she said, do you speak German?

‘Nein,’ I replied, in German, and for some unknown reason tried again in English.

‘Sprechen Zie Deutsch?’

‘Still Nein.’

We stood smiling at each other, at a loss, and she certainly seemed too friendly to play the role of Soviet receptionist in the movie. She would have been very helpful to a German.

With a dash of disappointment I headed back across the lobby to those gargantuan doors. I heaved one of them open again, wondering if the inevitable door-people in the Soviet era had developed shoulder injuries from the task. I was thinking I might never know what that building was, when a woman came in the door I’d just opened. On the off chance…

‘Excuse me, do you speak English?’

‘A little,’ she said in an accent delightful enough to flavour ice cream. ‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

‘Australia.’

‘It’s my favourite country,’ she said, ‘I lived in Melbourne for six months!’

We stood chatting in the doorway for a minute or two. The building was the Latvian National Academy of Science, her name was Dzintra and she worked there as secretary to a senior official.

I didn’t know then about the strength of her intuition. Nor was it clear I had met a Latvian jajabor; and yet the initial connection seemed unusually strong.

‘I finish work at seven,’ she said, ‘I want to show you some nice buildings in Riga that you won’t find on your own. Come back then.’

We must have spoken seven sentences but it felt as though we’d known each other for seven months. Latvian time was speedy, I was learning, Dzintra was teaching me. She continued into the building and I went out; and as I walked up the street I felt certain it was for that moment in the doorway that life’s course had brought me to the Baltic. I’d come to meet her.

On the Daugava River not long before it reaches the sea, the Latvian capital is the big city of the Baltic States. Of course its old town is well-endowed with cobblestone squares, churches and secret laneways; with faces, with golden roosters four floors up watching the sky; and a black cat, back arched in protest at being left out there on the peak of a roof. Of course there are streams through parks and on the railings of the little bridges are the permanent padlocks the Russians affix as a symbol of binding love; there’s a small castle and crowds on the streets, hopping on and off the sky blue trams that cross the Daugava bridge like scuttling insects. 

After a few hours with the usual trappings of Rigan life, wandering around, I made my way back towards the Academy. I was early by two hours and thought it’d be a bit boring to wait, although there was the Soviet-style market to look through, on the left side of things, where they still sold milk scooped up by apron wearing women, with ladles from big metallic urns. Nor was I entirely sure where my apartment was, so to go and wait there would have been a gamble. I only hoped I’d find it later. I had the keys.

I met Dzintra before I got to the Academy, under the railway bridge. ‘I left work early,’ she said. I suppose she’d felt I was on my way, I can say now. It was our second chance meeting.

True to her word she showed me beautiful streets of grand old buildings that I wouldn’t have found, up around Elizabetes iela to the north of the old town.

Now, when she tells people how we met they say, ‘You shouldn’t have done that! It might be dangerous!’ I’ve told her I agree and she shouldn’t do it again. But what people don’t properly imagine is how well we knew each other by then. If the first seven sentences were seven months, by the time we’d seen the best of the buildings at least three years had passed in speedy Latvian time. We were not strangers when she issued the invitation to stay at her house, as long as I didn’t mind if it was small and Soviet and featured a marginally malfunctioning bathroom.

It was a tempting offer but I had keys in my pocket and it’s not every day a private apartment for ‘whenever you are in Riga’ finds you. It was not something I wanted to quit, so I said ‘No’.

But of course, if you let it the world has ways to correct the decisions you get wrong. Wilful interference of the human-brain kind can only destroy the far better plans. Especially in Latvia, let the season take you by the hand.

This story continues here: Potato and Toothpaste Travel




The meeting at the Latvian National Academy of Science can be a nice precursor to finding memories in a waterfall, sort of eating dog due to a lack of fishing net casting skills, or meeting the Chittagonian whistler.



This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Latvian National Academy of Science

Turning from the East; Turning to the West

The Lady of Riga

There’s a kind of folk wisdom in her, that lady high up who holds aloft the three stars: she knows the power of songs that brought the end of the Soviet Union to Latvia; she lasted through every changing season.  Even in winter when nature says it’s not possible she’s standing in a forest of flowers with her sanctity guarded night and day.  I saw that on my second trip to Latvia in 2002.

Once, in the Soviet season it was illegal to look at her, I was told, the independence monument in the middle of the plaza beside Riga’s old town.  It was because she remembers the first independent Latvia of 1918 - 1940.  The three stars she holds are for the three regions of the first Latvia: Vidzeme, Kurzeme and Latgale.

A few streets away another lady, older and shorter, is adorned in a red jumper, red gloves and a silly red hat.  She stands by her ghetto blaster, which blasts golden oldies as she dances in obscure movements to entertain the passers by with her high speed yoga.  Those pedestrians are on their way to the retail sector which spreads across the city like a blanket of snow, and Christmas Street is crowded with customers.  Latvia by then was racing, restored and energetic, towards the European Union.  It was strange for the city where only a few short years before primary school children had been jealous of Anta’s Australian-purchased barbie dolls.  Barbie dolls were not available in Latvia in Soviet days.

Christmas Street, old Riga

Five and a half years after the first time there was a phone call placed from Vilnius, Lithuania to the offices of the Latvian National Academy of Science.  I wanted to catch up with my old friends; and although it’d been vaguely arranged I’d decided to come a little earlier.  There’d been letters but I hadn’t spoken to Dzintra in many years and in my mind her Latvian accent had been lost; on the phone it came rushing back and made me smile. 

‘Are you sure it’s okay if I come and visit you?’ I asked.  She sounds as excited as me.  

‘When?’

‘How about the day after tomorrow?’

It was afternoon when the bus from Vilnius arrived in Riga, after rattling through somewhere not too far from Bauska along the way.  It was late November, the fields icy, leafless and grey.  The bus station in Riga is by the train station by the Latvian National Academy of Science.  The doors were still heavy and there was still an old lady in a glass booth, as there’d been the first time, and she still didn’t speak English; but it hardly mattered because I had a name.  The enquiries lady directed me to a random other lady by the lifts who knew Dzintra and figured out which floor she was on.

Turning

The first moments belonged to just looking at each other again; remembering that decades-long week, half a decade before.  She hadn’t changed.

‘Well, looks like work is finished for today,’ she said.  It was 3.00 p.m. and highly unlikely work had actually finished but we went home anyway.

Her daughters had grown: Antra had become a Chevrolet-driving accountant; Anta had become something of a fully-fledged person and was studying nursing.  Antra had spent time in the States but Anta who’d inherited an Australian accent from her childhood months in Melbourne still readily pronounced all the twenty-seven odd syllables in the word ‘home’, just the way Australians do.  At her workplace they called her ‘Skippy,’ she said.

I was leaving for the local shop on that first day of the second time and I said, ‘okay, thanks, see you in another five years,’ as I walked out of the apartment.  Dzintra choked me with my scarf: in late November, Latvia dons scarves. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no!’ she said.  It was nice to be all twenty-seven odd syllables of home in Riga again.  Just as before, each hour was a year together.

Antra found herself inclined to offer a Chevrolet tour to Latvia’s mid-west, to an now icy sculpture garden really made for summer.  We headed out along the freeways on Riga’s southern edge; cause to remember Belarusian and his rusty lorry.

It’d been towards the end of the first trip, when I’d decided that as much as I enjoyed staying at Dzintra’s place I should see a bit more of Latvia so, as well as not to outdo my welcome, I said I’d be heading west for a few days.  They’d suggested a picturesque little village called Pavilosta I believe; to get there first I’d check out Liepaja the Port City.

There’s not much to tell of those few days; it was indeed very first part, the trip to Liepaja which was most remarkable.  It was difficult to get cars to stop on the freeways out of Riga, and I’d decided to hitch-hike as a more sociable means of A to B despite that with a few tiny brown coins I could’ve bought a bus ticket.  I’d thought of giving up when eventually a rusty old truck had stopped.

‘Liepaja?’ I’d asked.  That town was far away, for Latvia; yet strangely that truck was headed all the way there, to the port.  The journey was hideously slow and the worst part was I couldn’t speak to the driver.  We did however exchange cigarettes: I was smoking Camels and he had this heavy Russian brand he thought I couldn’t handle.  Somehow I worked out that the driver was a Belarusian; the first I’d ever met.

Just when the long journey mostly in silence seemed as if it couldn’t get any worse, the driver decided to be a Samaritan and stopped beside another truck, broken down, to see if he could help.  The other driver I understood was also Belarusian.  As they talked and worked at fixing the other truck, so they had a little food: some bread and a chunk of white substance they said was called salo. 

I’m not sure how I understood it, maybe the other driver spoke a little English, but the salo was a block of salted pig fat that was a traditional Belarusian specialty and my truck driver’s grandmother had made it for him especially, in her Belarusian village.

The middle-aged truck driver had a round enough figure and when he bent to check out the mechanics of the broken down truck so it happened he had a split in the back of his pants all the way down the seam; perhaps his village grandmother didn’t sew.  The other truck driver laughed at him and so did I.  As there were so few words to share I said not much more than, ‘salo,’ meaning eating too much makes you fat and splits your pants!  They caught the gist of it and thought it hilarious.  Later when we’d eventually arrived in Liepaja the driver didn’t let me leave immediately; not before he’d rustled around to find the rest of the chunk of his grandmother’s home made salo as a parting gift. 

I walked off down the road, towards the centre of Liepaja to find a hotel, with my luggage in one hand and a small plastic bag of Belarusian home-made village salted pig fat in the other.  I can’t say such a scenario has happened to me anywhere apart from Liepaja.

After some hours Antra’s Chevrolet arrived in the pretty hills at the sculpture garden.  The sculptures were modern and interesting - a bridge with colourfully painted toilet doors on either end, wooden koalas holding Latvian flags in the trees, and upside down tree fixed into the ground. And there were some real wild deer.

Christmas in old Riga

Afterwards we sat in the small town nearby, in the Chevrolet, eating home made jam with spoons from the jar, munching bread and drinking tea. The cold was such that I would be inclined to use the word 'very' to describe it.

Back in Riga, in the evening we went to the Christmas Tree House, a huge restaurant decorated for the festive season, with rabbits and deer made from lights, and a large Christmas tree. The cellar was the place to head for, a traditional Latvian cellar alehouse, where the honey beer is made on site. Anta was with us then, and we drove there in the same old, grey singing Ford that they’d had five and a half years before. It still sang with the gear changes.

Anta says she was surprised that I drank because I seemed so nice. I'm not sure what that means exactly, but I reminded her that last time I was here she was fifteen or whatever so I was hardly going to invite her to the pub.  Dzintra says, ‘may be she doesn't know that the first thing we did when we met was go out for a beer?’  It’s not true. We looked at old houses first. It was a good umpteen minutes before we drank beer.
 

The word for juice in Latvian, ‘sula’ is backwards for the word for beer, ‘alus’.

Sunday started unusually for me. We went to church.  Latvia shares its Protestantism with Estonia to the north, while Lithuania is Catholic.  The reverend looked like he wasn’t old enough to have completely finished with acne yet, but he spoke well.  I could tell by the sound of his voice and his eye contact though I had no idea what he said. I did my best singing hymns in Latvian that I didn’t know the tune for and Dzintra said I read the language well. There are lots of s-type sounds in Latvian in various forms.

Let the Musicians Play!

After church we walked to the old town to attend the private concert of the Latvian National Academy of Science at the House of the Black Heads, a very beautiful and recently reconstructed building that recalls Latvia’s colonial legacy: Latvia once had two colonies, at the mouth of the Gambia River in West Africa and on the island of Tobago in the Caribbean.  The decorations were really interesting because the style is strictly European but the models of the statues include many Africans. We sat in the Versailles-looking room at the top, a huge hall with about twenty chairs around the four walls. The side walls were more or less full; and Dzintra and I ended up at the far end in the place usually reserved for a king and queen. Let the musicians play!

The interesting thing was that the composer of the modern classical music, apparently famous around the world, was present and explained each piece before it was played on the piano, violin and flute. It was like we’d travelled back in time, were seated in Vienna and listening to the new music of a young Mozart. The flute player was especially good; her face moved with the music such that she was actually performing rather than simply playing.

Apparently that room has bad acoustics if it gets crowded, and also if there are only one or two people there. We had just the right number and it sounded magnificent. 

November

Third stop for the afternoon was the cemetery. The day was the Day of the Dead, I was told: when in Latvia people go to the cemetery to light candles to remember the deceased.  Hundreds of people and hundreds of candles decorated the acres of forested cemetery, and the scene was brilliant in the snowy evening.  The Latvians don’t only light candles for relatives, but by tradition also at the graves of famous actors and poets and other contributors to Latvia.  In the cemetery there was a war section and a section devoted to victims of the KGB.

We find the memorial to the first President of the first Latvia, before the Second World War. The memorial stands at the end of a long boulevard in a prominent position, except the Soviets planted a row of trees in front of the monument so it could no longer be seen from a distance. I guess they hoped the Latvians would forget.

In the evening I went with Anta to her local pub in a place I call Wahroonga, from Sydney geography, for its leafy streets and large houses on decent blocks. We drank a backwards juice or two in the loft upstairs. A black cat sat on my leg.
 

We returned to Jurmala where Anta studied then; no swimming in winter, no board shorts in tow.  Amongst the pine groves modern mansions were growing, being built to complement the mossy Soviet ones.  Latvia was changing.  Indeed the day before I’d arrived was the day the three Baltic States were invited to join NATO.  For many years the country had been turning, little by little, away from its East to face its West and people were really excited about the NATO invitation.

‘I’m so glad they took us,’ Dzintra said.

Travel?  It's about new thinking..., chance meeting...,  challenging the usual... and occasionally about interpreting artistic masterpieces...

Riga, Big City of the Baltics