Lakeside Retreat

A friend at the Embassy invited your correspondents along for a trip out to the countryside with a bunch of his Latvian friends this past weekend. The Latvian countryside is very pretty. It is not particularly varied, but what can you do with such a small bit of land? You get gently rolling meadows, or gently rolling woodland, and sometimes, lakes. But it's all pretty in the long evenings and one can see why it has long been a Latvian tradition to have a country cabin for summer enjoyment. (We hear, in unproven speculation, that the Soviets were also big fans of having a dacha outside the city because it kept people from just hanging around together in Riga and talking about how crappy communism is during lazy summer evenings. Authoritative research surely forthcoming.)

Anyway, we were whisked off to a lakeside cabin in far eastern Latvia, where the primary activities were waterskiing, dashing from the sauna to swim in the lake and then back again, drinking vodka, and driving whatever you call the paddle-boat-with-a-slide-on-back thing that the Lovely Katherine is captaining in the photo above. While not every country house has a paddle-boat-with-a-slide thing, apparently it is obligatory to have a sauna, which your correspondent has never been a fan of, but could get used to if there were always a picturesque swimming hole adjacent for post-sauna swimming.