Song Festival

One week ago Ulla, Dagmara, Herve and I attended the gala final performance of the Latvian Song & Dance Festival. The event is held every 5 years, inspires Olympics-style excitement and fanfare, and is apparently the largest, loudest expression of Latvian national identity there is. It’s a massive event by any standard, with something like 15k each of singers and dancers taking part. I’m told tickets sold out in one or two hours. The crowd at the Mežaparks amphitheater was huge, international (many diaspora Latvians came for the festival), and by Latvian standards, quite jubilant. The forest around the purpose-built, Stalin-era amphitheater is tall and encircling, strung with lights and full of food stalls & people. A middle-aged American from Indiana, Mike, engaged us (“does anyone around here speak English?”) to translate his thanks to the elderly couple who’d sold him his seat. The seat was a birthday gift from his Latvian girlfriend, who had recently obtained her American citizenship and owns a small cleaning business in Indianapolis; they were only able to get one. Mike had attended many of the song & dance events throughout the week, and spoke about them as a connoisseur. 

At exactly 7pm, thousands of people from hundreds of choirs, in a panoply of traditional dress, mounted the amphitheater grandstands in orderly rows and patterns, evoking, from our distance, the shape of ancient Latvian runes. The choirs came from all over Latvia, and many from Latvian diaspora communities. The program was to span 5 hours, with two breaks during which the entire, thousands-strong choir emptied out of the stands and filed past the still-seated audience. The Latvian president spoke, and the German president was in attendance as a state guest. With each song came a new conductor or choirmaster, and one of these was an 100-year old diaspora Latvian who had lived half of his life following World War II in the United States. He conducted his way through the national anthem spryly and with feeling; he had come back to Latvia to die, he said, near “mirror-lakes and forests.” The effect of all those thousands of people singing together is something remarkable & moving, even if the first dozen or so songs on the program were a little downbeat. After the programmed part of the event wrapped up- around midnight- the audience and choirs mingled and drank and sang around the Mežaparks venue until 4am. We left much earlier than that, riding the atypically jam-packed tram back to where the car was parked, getting home just in time to catch Ulla’s and her mother’s favorite song on TV around midnight. Strangely but intriguingly, one of the participating choirs this year was from Japan. Their leader was a young Japanese fellow who had become interested in Latvian culture and song, and had organized a Latvian choir in his home country. In a television interview, he appeared to speak fluent Latvian.

                              

It’s been a month since I left the States! I arrived in Latvia at a very good time. Between Ligo, the Song festival, and the atypically balmy summer this year, I’ve been very lucky, and feel I’ve had a good introduction to the country and its culture. Dagmara is a sociologist and specialist in Latvian identity studies, so I’ve never had to look far for answers to my many questions!  Next time, I’ll talk about food.
(the last video is of Ulla's favorite song, and definitely worth a watch. It captures the spirit and atmosphere)

Culture Shock

One question I find myself asked at least several times a week  now, and in particular at a belated 4^th of July party conceived and thrown mostly by Ulla, is “what do you think of Latvia” or whether I have experienced culture shock. It’s a difficult question to answer, and on the whole I’ve felt disappointed in myself over the answers I’ve managed. I’ll usually say something like “I like it, it’s nice, it’s beautiful. Riga is a cool city” before saying something (which could be interpreted as) mildly disparaging about a Latvian idiosyncrasy I’d taken to be universally acknowledged, trying to be funny.

I don’t think that I’ve experienced culture shock per se, whatever that is, but then it could be one of those things, like mental illness, where if you’re able to self-diagnose, you don’t really have it. I experienced some of the routine feelings of helplessness & frustration which are probably par for the course & a part of the necessary discomfort with which longer stays in fairly remote places will begin. I’ve been here 3 weeks now, and I believe that most of that has passed. I know the names and sequence of all the stations between Vaivari and Riga Central; I can find my way around pretty well on foot in Riga and Jurmala; I’ve bought a bike. I have a new Swedish bank account, which stands empty (pending my discovering how to cheaply transfer funds), and a new cell phone number (with a Danish company, Bite) with one digit more than my American number. This makes it exponentially harder to remember. I know to avoid places where mosquitoes congregate, although it hasn’t stopped or even slowed the evolution of a complex galaxy of bites up & down my legs.  On one of my first walks through Jurmala, I was lulled by a (foolish) feeling of footloose intrepidity to walk deep down a forest path which continues past the end of a street not far from the house. Ulla was in Riga for the day, and my self-confidence sprang I think from having walked enough to have gotten past the anxiety that the my solitude might be intruded upon by rural, uncomprehending, possibly hostile Latvian passerby (I needn’t have worried in the first place; Latvians generally keep to themselves, and are unlikely to stop you except to ask for a cigarette or maybe directions).  Down the forest path I encountered mosquitoes, but kept up a brisk pace. Whenever I stopped to take a picture of the trees, some strawberries, my hands quickly blackened with larger than average mosquitoes. I wanted to see where the path let out, so I kept on far longer than I should have, before finally giving it up and booking it back to the road. At the previously mentioned 4^th of July party, Ulla organized a simplified Pictionary game outside on the balcony. It was in the latter stages of the party, and the mosquitoes were in force. When I pointed this out to Ulla, she shrugged and said that was just Latvia. So, in sum, the silver lining for me to the long winter here is probably going to be the absence of mosquitoes.

Another practical matter to which I’ve naturally had to adjust is the local currency. Latvia is a member of the EU, but does not use the Euro (it’s slated to go into circulation next year), rather the Lats, and the smaller unit the Santims (both words are singular, though appearing plural; I plan to tackle that subject later in the post). The exchange is approximately 2 Dollars to the Lats, similar to the English pound. But unlike a pound coin, whose heft at least hints at its nontrivial value, the 1 Lats coin is small and light, no bigger than a nickel (a popular scam, I’m told, at parking meters). Though the same value as a U.S. dollar, the 50 santimi coin is even smaller: dime-sized. This dealing in small coins which are worth a fair amount is something alien; they tend more easily to be spent (by me) than the equivalent amount in U.S. paper money. It doesn’t seem like a big deal. The exchange rate also means that most things strike me at first blush as quite cheap or at least reasonably priced, until I remember to double the value, and then I begin to feel that Riga is an expensive city. It’s hard to get used to paying for things with coins, like a meal at a nice restaurant or a book, which I’m accustomed to breaking bills to pay for in the United States. Probably by the time I return to the U.S., I’ll have grown so used to thinking in Lats that I’ll never spend any money because prices will seem outrageously inflated, which can only be to the good; a not-unwelcome overcorrection.   

Size comparison

Some Latvian coins

 

A source of amusement for me turned to mystification is the Latvian tendency to “latvianize” the names of foreign places and people. The masculine ending for nouns in the Latvian language is an –s, giving the casual sign-reading visitor to the city center the false sense of there being many “Bārs” or “Restorāns,” when really there is only one there. This is totally fine, if slightly confusing; what I take exception to is what I see as the needless tampering with what should be fixed and immutable proper nouns. It makes it seem as though everyone and every place is Latvian. New York becomes Ņujorka, Los Angeles is Losandželosa. Even Birmingham gets made over as Birmingema. What is done to the names of people is even worse. Many Latvian masculine first names actually look a lot like English names with an –s tacked on the end; Roberts and Edgars are very common names. But when this treatment is given to the names of living or historical foreign figures, the result is inexplicably... almost irritating. Bobs Dilans is Bob Dylan; Abrahams Linkolns is Lincoln; there’s Vladimirs Putins. Charles de Gaulle is Šarls de Golls. I did a Wikipedia search to see if this rule extended to African dictators, and it does: Idi Amin is Idi Amins, and Robert Mugabe becomes Roberts Mugabe. Why this bothers me, I don’t exactly know. It’s strange to me to think that many Latvians know and think of these people by the Latvian names I’m sure they don’t realize they have. I don’t think it does much to aid in pronunciation, so I’m confused as to what’s the point. My name seems to be non-compatible with this localization. Ulla’s mother introduced me to a neighbor as Natans, which I actually like, but most people seem to manage Nat alright. 

Author's name clearly not Latvian in origin

 Now that I’ve got that out of my system, in the next post I hope to finally describe the Ligo celebration, and the incredible once in 5 years Song & Dance festival which I was lucky to attend this weekend. I also want to give my impressions of Latvian cuisine, snack food & beer, all of which I like a lot.
 

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!