Arrival

Ulla napping in the Parc de Bruxelles during our layover

I arrived in Latvia last Tuesday. Ulla and I flew from Newark to Brussels with Jet Airways (an Indian airline: vegetarian curry & naan for inflight meal, wide selection of Bollywood movies available, courteous flight attendants), somnambulated our way through a 12-hour layover there, and then took AirBaltic (Latvian flag carrier), arriving at Riga’s tiny airport sometime around midnight. We had champagne with Ulla’s mother and her husband, a Frenchman named Herve, until around 2am, still very tired

Ulla's friends welcomed us at the airport with these balloons

I felt a little nervous boarding the plane in Brussels. Everyone else on the flight was speaking Latvian, which is completely bereft of cognates or any familiar elements, and it gave me the feeling of travelling somewhere unheard of, to the back of beyond. Actually there was one black lady from the U.S. on the flight, but it turned out she was heading to Riga for an international convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Mid-flight, I could still see by the late-night sun the flatness of the coastline below, and by the time we approached Riga, it was dark and there didn't seem to be any lights below the plane in the place where Ulla said Jurmala was.

Ulla’s mother, Dagmara, explained on the first of several driving tours that neighborhoods in Latvia do not generally contain only people of the same or similar class and/or income level, as in the United States. That is, you find big nouveau riche houses with columns and fountains next door to lots holding farmhouses with maybe a tumbledown shed. The neighborhood of Jurmala where I’m staying, Vaivari, has unpaved roads running perpendicular to the beach (parallel are paved). During the summer’s day, old women quietly tend vegetable patches in many yards. Every house has a fence or wall surrounding its property, which Ulla says is in lieu of and much  preferable to the  American-style gun-owning way, and many of these fences have a small placard with the image of a Doberman head, bearing  the words “Nikns Suns” or “vicious/angry dog.” There’s a dog-training school next door to the house where I'm living (Herve has dubbed the house “domicile amour”) where many of these nikns dogs come on Saturday mornings.  The domicile’s back yard backs up to some train tracks, where the Pasažieru Vilciens, the commuter train running through Jurmala to Riga Central Station passes several times an hour until after midnight. As a kid travelling often by train in Europe with my family, often with my face pressed against the window, I recall thinking & wondering a lot about the lives of the people whose houses and yards lined the tracks in places I'd never stop. It’s exciting now to be on the other side of this equation, watching from a balcony the people in the illuminated train car go by at night.

Vaivari Station 

Forest sauvage

The house from across the tracks

A common sight: the train passing by the backyard

Jurmala is essentially Riga’s beach. Long, narrow, like a sausage hugging the coast, it’s about 25 km from Riga. Jurmala means something akin to “seaside” in Latvian; it’s famed for its distinctive colorful wooden building style, which to me looks sort of Victorian with more color and a Scandinavian-Russian hybrid sensibility. The town is plenty popular with Russian tourists, and in Majori, the central district, Russian is the primary language heard on the streets. In years past, Brezhnev & Khruschchev were among these tourists. 

Beach at Majori

Jomas iela - Majori's main drag

The names of the string of formerly separate fishing villages which comprise modern Jurmala are preserved in the train station names along the Riga route; names sounding vaguely like star clusters in some pop science fiction galaxy: Asari, Bulduri, Dubulti, Dzintari, etc. One of the most striking things is how little developed the beach is. Popular spas, hotels and restaurants in Majori are two or three blocks off the beach, and there are few high-rises. There is a beautiful strip of mossy coastal forest covering the dunes before the beach, with trails for walking, running, and Nordic skiing in the winter. The water is quite warm, and stays shallow for quite a long ways out. You can walk between submerged sand bars til very far out, and the underwater sand is finely ridged like the roof of a mouth. Between the fairy tale architecture, the dark & light forests, the long, bright beach, the daylight persisting until 10 or 11 o'clock, and the spirit of the local Latvians & tourist Russians celebrating their short summer to the max, Jurmala (in summer at least) is a "magic" place not quite like anywhere I've been before. 

On my first solitary walk around the neighborhood I stumbled across and photographed Ulla's grandmother's house without realizing what I was looking at (it turns out her grandmother lives two houses down, and her father just a couple streets on the other side of the tracks). Apparently the wall, and the house itself, is a local curiosity and known around the neighborhood as "the artist's house" (Ulla's grandparents were  artists). The house is verging on dilapidated, but has some nice stained glass windows.

In the next post, I'm sure I'll talk about Ligo/Jani, the Latvian midsummer solstice celebration, about mosquitoes, white nights, the food, and Riga. 

The wall of Ulla's grandmother's house - she built this!