What to Wear to the Beach

Sometimes it's hard to point out the subtle cultural differences between the U.S. and Latvia without seeming insensitive. But try we must. And in this spirit, we present this picture of what two young women chose to wear to the beach in Jurmala one day not long ago. The short green overcoat actually covers a quite small denim dress. And by the time we captured this picture of her on the beach, she had taken off the precipitously high-heeled shoes she was wearing. Beach-goers wear swimsuits of varying degrees of skimpiness in both the U.S. and Latvia. But in general, Americans go to the beach to relax. Shorts and a t-shirt would be seen as pretty typical. The residents of Latvia go to the beach to be seen, which means tiger-striped mini-dresses and towering high heels and tiny dogs in outfits designed to match their owner's outfit. I'm not going to lie and say that the ladies pictured above were not quite attractive in their own way, but the fancy clothing that people wear to beaches, which I think most Americans consider pretty filthy places, boggles the mind.

What to Wear to a Country Music Festival

We wish the staff photographer had brought the big camera with the telephoto lens to capture the above gentleman in all his countrified glory. There were a few Latvians dressed in a country-concert style that would have made Waylon Jennings proud. Even clicking on it to see the full version doesn't reveal the details of the belt buckle and the black hat and the beer bottle than he managed to hide somewhere before entering the concert grounds. This display of true American country style was far overwhelmed by the people who just put on a "cowboy hat" - which basically meant any full-brim hat this side of a fedora.


Of course, in keeping with local custom, the women had to dress in a more alluring form of "country" clothing. I don't think it would blend in well at a country show in the U.S.


Well, maybe a Toby Keith concert, but other than that, I doubt it.

Kantrimuzika!

Your correspondents, with a special guest correspondent, stopped by the Bauskas Kantrimuzikas Festivals. If you're not good at recognizing cognates, that means the Bauska Country Music Festival. Bauska is a small town - population probably 15,000 or so - that for some reason hosts an annual country music concert. They have hosted some notable bands in the past - last year featured Asleep at the Wheel, who are at least popular enough that your correspondent (not exactly a devotee of contemporary country) has heard of them. We didn't actually go into the festival grounds, but hanging out by the castle ruins just above, it was possible to get a taste of country music sung in Latvian.

Perhaps it is just a sign of the bias of my particular taste that I have never considered the possibility of country music as a cultural export. We all know that the kids behind the iron curtain were longing for Western rock and roll. (Right? I actually don't know if that's true - but it's what many Scorpions videos led me to believe.) Rock/pop stars like Madonna, R.E.M., Metallica, and Snoop Dogg have played in the Baltics to large crowds in my time here. But should it be surprising that if you go to the rural parts of Latvia, the strain of our music that they're importing is the music that is popular in the rural parts of America ?

One of the main radio stations in Latvia plays a mix of traditional Latvian music; "Kantri" - which sounds like a smoothed-out version of country, as if played by one guy with an expensive keyboard locked on the "honky tonk" pre-set; and "Schlager" - a take on Teutonic drinking songs, like Kantri music set to a 3/4 beat, which we in America just might call "Oom-pah music." The urban sophisticates of Riga don't care for it, but the attendance in Bauska demonstrates that it is not without an audience.

Above, The Lovely Katherine, along with our friend Mandy, gets into the Kantri mood, as cowboy-hatted dudes file into the concert grounds.

Of Estonia: Leftover

Hey, we have just been too busy enjoying the fabulous and fleeting Riga summer to spend much time editing pictures or writing or publishing. When in doubt, post a picture of a pretty sunset. This is from the top-floor bar at the Radisson Tallinn, 23:00 or so. And we haven't been anywhere since then, so I think up next will be some stuff from Latvia!

Of Estonia: Weekend Bonus Photo

Of Estonia: Ceremonial Pot Holders

This is the best picture we managed of what can only be described as the ancient Estonian art form of pot-holder quilting. I didn't really understand this one. In any case, the parade was fun, and it seemed most of the participants were having a grand time marching out to the song festival grounds. I hope that in the unlikely event that any Estonian ever reads this blog, they do not take offense -- I'm merely pointing out that one element of the cultural richness of our world is that in Greeley, Colorado, we don't carry ceremonial pot-holders in our parades, while other parts of the world - and maybe even America - choose to do so.

Of Estonia: Some Dudes

After a couple days featuring mostly pictures of comely young women, however odd their headwear, we feel it important to note that we weren't there just to gawk at the fairer sex. There are also gentlemen in the parade, and though their hats aren't quite as striking, they would still merit a second look if you noticed someone walking down the street wearing one on the way to work. While we presume that the sharp red embroidery on the coat above is somehow traditional, it is not clear to your correspondent to what degree the blazers-and-little-sailors'-caps look was in use in Estonia in centuries past.

Of Estonia: Slightly Out-of-Focus Hats

The concert we saw at the Latvian Song Festival involved 12,000 singers who all clambered on a giant stage together, sang their hearts out for a couple hours, and then were joined for several more hours of singing by the assembled audience. The Estonian Song Festival featured similar numbers of singers -- at first. But after just a few songs, they started filing out and subsets of the choir sang. Maybe we were at the wrong concert (though local guidance says we were not), or maybe they really are different nations with different traditions.


Further supporting this theory: The Estonians have it all over the Latvians in the traditional hat department. The Latvians have some great traditional hats, but none are quite as outlandish as several varieties of Estonian hat, such as the giant decorated tube; the tiny sequined stewardess cap; or the red-and-gold headband, which is no more unusual than the Latvian hats, but does apparently come with a large silver funnel that you wear as a necklace. Each is pictured here with subjects and backgrounds in varying degrees of sharpness.


Just to be fair, we'll add a blurry picture of the big tube hats, too:

Of Estonia: The flower thing again

Sorry we're running behind which means more pictures than words. This seen at the parade before the song festival. It looks a lot like what they wear for song festivals in Latvia.

Of Estonia!

Your correspondents were in Tallinn for the Estonian Song Festival. Nothing against the Estonians, but I think the Latvian one was better. But maybe I'm just biased. This is the beginning of the concert, when all 15,000 or whatever singers were on the stage together. More pictures from the Estonian festivities this week.

Of St. Petersburg: White Nights

Sorry, we have nothing pithy to say about the Mikhail Barishnykov/Gregory Hines classic. Just some pictures taken at something like 12:45 at night from the top of the St. Isaac's Cathedral. They actually call the long days around the solstice "white nights" there. Who knew?

Of St. Petersburg: The Hermitage

The Hermitage in St. Petersburg is one of the world's great art museums. We bought two-day tickets to have ample time to see the collection. There are some definite masterpieces and some amazing rooms full of the crazy ornate stuff that czars (or tsars, take your pick) with too much money on their hands decided to make out of gold. There is the room above which is at least a couple hundred feet long, stacked top to bottom with portraits of guys in military uniforms. The portraits aren't amazing but the cumulative effect is. It's worth an extended visit.


But there are also a lot of rooms that demonstrate that when the czars and/or tsars were at the peak of their purchasing power, Europe was in a trough in its artistic development. Like room after room of portraits like these. Or the room full of monumental still lifes of fish and game that the official staff mother-in-law said made her "queasy." I guess there is no accounting for taste, but supposedly the Hermitage has a million pieces in their collection that are less worthy of display than these.

Of St. Petersburg: Towers

St. Petersburg is a city of lovely architecture, much of it designed when it was home to the Tsars who loved all things French and brought in Western architects and made giant Versailles-ripoff country homes and the like. Today we present no pictures of that kind of architecture.

In any case, some people complain that St. Petersburg isn't as interesting as Moscow because it just feels like another European city. There is some truth there, but there's also the fact that European cities are nice. And things designed and built in the Soviet era are, well, less nice. This is all to say that your correspondent enjoyed St. Petersburg. Nothing against Moscow, of course. They do have a lot in common - they're both ridiculously expensive, for example. And the people in both are an odd mix of friendly and cold that I can't put my finger on. I liked them both, but didn't fall in love with either.

In any case, a good time was had by all, including the Official Staff In-Laws.

Of St. Petersburg: Ballet

We totally went to a ballet, and it wasn't that bad. We were in Russia, so we figured ballet sort of comes with the territory. Your correspondent had never been to a ballet before, and to be honest, kind of feared the worst. I think we saw a production that was maybe less traditional and therefore less soporific than many. The story was kind of stupid, which I gather is standard for the genre: Some forest spirit captures a bird spirit and steals her wings; a hero saves her; they get married; the evil forest spirit captures her again; the hero and the bird spirit both risk death to be together again; they live happily ever after. Whatever. It was mostly just an excuse for the dudes to do giant spinning acrobatic leaps and for the girls to look hot in leotards. Or perhaps I missed the point.

The King of Pop

We were somewhat surprised to find that the good people of Latvia, or at least those more dedicated to the pop hits of the 1980's, had chose the U.S. Embassy here as the place to create a small shrine in memory of Michael Jackson. They left pictures and flowers and hand-written notes. The staff photographer wasn't available until some of it was already cleaned up by the Embassy's efficient grounds staff. It does make us wonder what the Latvians remember of Thriller, back in the late days of the Soviet era.

Weekend Bonus Photos By Request!

We never let our readers down. And given the recent stampede - nay, avalanche! - of demand for more ceremonial headdress modeling, we are obliged to comply.

Alas, no more photos of The Lovely Katherine in headdress, but here is a picture of her getting ready.

Midsummer!

So the key element to Jani is to stay up to see the sunrise. We were not too far from the coast of the Baltic on the way from Riga up toward Estonia. At some point, as we were running out of firewood and had been drinking for hours, it was agreed we should go see sunrise on the beach. We walked through the forest for a while in the mostly dark of night. It started getting darkish around 11:30 I think, though you could always see sunlight along the Western horizon, or the Eastern Horizon, or sometimes both. We set out at (I think) about 2:00 for the beach. We mostly went the right way, despite having to dodge some fences and some barking dogs and some giant road-construction trenches dug in the trails and some attempts by the more inebriated among us to abandon the beach plan and divert course to some big party in the woods somewhere that we could hear blasting out "Macarena" at 1000 dB.

We got there at about 3:00 (about when the picture above was taken) and it was getting light, and though we could still see a few bonfires up and down the beach, we all were a little tired from the walk (and the beer) and mostly just sat around staring at the sea. By 4:00 it had been broad daylight for some time and we started the walk back to base camp. We got back to our camp -- basically the backyard of the country house of a friend's grandfather -- at 5:00 and crashed out. Your correspondents had to head back to Riga later that morning, but I suspect that our hosts got up later than us and went straight back into grilling meat and drinking beer.

We hereby recommend that America adopt this holiday in full.

Jani!

For a reason that is not entirely clear to me, the Latvians celebrate midsummer on the night of the 23rd, rather than the 21st, which is actually the longest day/shortest night of the year.

Name days are a big deal here. That is, each traditional Latvian first name is assigned to one day of the year, and one celebrates his or her name day in a manner not unlike a birthday. The 23rd is the name day for "Liga," one of the most popular female names. The 24th is the name day for "Janis" (Latvian for "John"), by far the most popular male name. So the midsummer celebration is generally called "Jani" in connection to the associated name days. And "ligot" is a verb meaning roughly "to celebrate midsummer."

How does one "ligot"?

* Go to the countryside. A real Latvian is a little reluctant to spend and weekend in the city. To spend Jani in the city would be a sign of insanity.

* Drink beer and eat cheese. The traditional Jani foods are a special cheese made with caraway seeds and beer that is not special in any way other than that beer is always special.

* Barbecue shashlik. Shashlik basically means what we might call "shish kebabs" and does not date back to ancient pagan rituals like most Jani traditions do. But it is tasty.

* Build a bonfire. Then jump over it for good luck. We did.

* Sing. A lot. There are approximately one million songs that one sings around a bonfire on Jani, and radio stations play them back to back to back for 24 hours -- sort of like Christmas carols. Have we mentioned that the Latvians love to sing? They sang a bunch. Many of the songs have a chorus that goes something like "Ligo Ligo Ligo Ligo Ligo Ligo Ligo," but many have a bit more to them. Then they asked us few Americans to sing for them a traditional American song that we all knew the words to - and we couldn't come up with one. We could maybe do some Beatles songs, or the Star Spangled Banner, but those weren't quite right. We just flat-out don't sing like the Latvians do. It's part of who they are, and it isn't part of who we are.

* Stay up all night. It's not that hard since it gets light so early. Except don't forget the cases of beer you've been working on for about 12 hours by now. So, there's a degree of difficulty, which some truly traditional die-hards enhance by getting falling-down drunk for Jani. We didn't feel the need to go that far, since we were beginners, but we did try just about everything else.

Ligo!

Other duties are calling us, so we're behind. But last week was Jani, the Latvian midsummer celebration.

We were lucky enough to finagle an invitation with a friend to celebrate in the Latvian manner, by heading to the countryside with several pounds of meat for the barbecue, several cases of beer, and a desire to generally eat and drink from noon until noon again. Or thereabouts. Above, your correspondents pictured in the traditional flower wreath worn by women named Liga, but often worn by any woman who digs flowers; and the traditional oak wreath worm by mean named Janis, but loaned to your correspondent in order to take his picture with an oak wreath on his head. More about Jani and Ligo in the coming days.

Sunset in Riga

Hey! We're in St. Petersburg with the Staff Parents-in-Law. So here's a picture of Riga. It won a contest for best photo by an Embassy employee out of, perhaps, multiple entries.

Of Uzbekistan: Tea Time Weekend Bonus Photo!

Of Uzbekistan: People in Big Medrassah Archways

We are not actually close to being out of pictures we like from Uzbekistan.


But we may be ready to move on soon.

Of Uzbekistan: Juice

My amateur analysis is that these things are filled with some sort of juice concentrate, or some other magic and intensely colored fluid, and then mixed with fizzy water on demand. Or maybe they just use the colorful tubes to get people to come over and then sell them a bottle of Fanta. I never actually saw one in operation.

Of Uzbekistan: Suzani Sellers

I met this woman serving plov, the national dish of Uzbekistan, in a market where women sold gold jewelry from identical little red velvet cushions. This woman cooked plov in the back of the market area and her daughter ran around delivering it to the various jewelry-selling stalls. She was nice, and the food was plov-ilicious.

The next day, I happened upon her and her husband walking elsewhere in town. They walked right up to me, so I don't know if they had orchestrated our chance meeting or not. In any case, they invited me to visit their house. This was very kind of them, but of course also had the motive that the woman spends her evenings doing traditional Uzbek embroidery work and they wanted to sell me a piece of her handiwork. Or maybe they just buy the stuff and then convince gullible tourists that the woman made it herself so people like me who weren't totally sure they needed a piece of traditional Uzbek embroidery feel guilty and buy one. Anyway, I bought one. I think it's nice. I think they were also nice, and clearly had a clever sales ploy, but also served me tea and apricots in their home, so they deserved something for their kindness/entrepreneurial zeal.

Of Uzbekistan: Mosque Day

Overflow crowd of men praying at a historic mosque in Bukhara. The younger guys mostly show up, do their prayers, and then head out. The older guys show up early, sit in the shade of a tree chatting, and then hang out for a while to continue the conversation afterward.

Of Uzbekistan: There's Gold in Them Thar Desert Wastelands

After our side-trip to the mountains some cousin of my host family took me, along with the unmarried son of the family, down to Bukhara, which was probably a four-hour trip by car. We made a couple stops along the way, including one spot out in the middle of nowhere where people were mining for gold by hand, pictured above. They had dug out tunnels by hand in the desert floor, bringing up buckets of dirt which they ran through a little sluice and then used a pan to sift out the gold flakes. It was technologically the equivalent of 1849 in California, except for the motorcycle.

We eventually made it to Bukhara, after stopping at every road junction along the way to ask someone which road went to Bukhara. And we eventually made it to my hotel by asking someone for directions every fifty feet in the town and still going the wrong way half the time.

Of Uzbekistan: Another Weekend Photo Bonus!

They have some great hats in Uzbekistan. And some older guys who look like they are right out of central casting to add local color for the next Indiana Jones movie.

Of Uzbekistan: Three Buckets of Cheese and One Ton of Hay

Hiking in the mountains was nice. It's kind of difficult to really do much hiking in Latvia. To your correspondent, you can't really go "hiking" unless you have some mountains or at least hills. I suppose walking through a scenic forest could be hiking, but even though there are plenty of forests in Latvia there don't seem to be many trails. Or maybe we just don't know where to look.

Anyway, it was great to go hiking. I went with one other tourist in the area - a Ukrainian guy -- and one of the young men from the family I was staying with, who served as guide, rode on a donkey while we walked, and borrowed my camera to take a picture of me in front of every tree and bush along the way (none of those pictures are being posted). He also helped us find some cool old petroglyphs of a stick figure with a spear chasing a bunch of bighorn sheep. Along the way we passed homes of other villagers (and their pack animals carrying hay to wherever it is you take hay, as below). The girls above (looking at my Ukrainian hiking companion as we each took a picture of them) thanked us for showing them their picture on the digital camera LCD by offering us each several of the bite-size cheese balls they were carrying in their buckets. I've never had anything like them - they cheese, but hard as a rock. They were also one of the few local foods I had in Uzbekistan that turned out to be not delicious. It was ridiculously kind of the girls to give them to us, but I carried the cheese balls around in a pocket for a day and then left them behind in my next hotel room.

Of Uzbekistan: Nurata

The Uzbek stuff just doesn't stop! I think this is better than the way we used to do things, where we would have written a single very long report on the trip, with links to some pictures. Feel free to let me know if you disagree.

Anyway, a couple pictures today from the Nurata mountains. It was beautiful. I was worried that a little range of mountains in the middle of the desert would be more like hills than real mountains. But there were actual jagged peaks. They were not very tall in the grand scheme of things - certainly nothing compared to the neighboring mountains in Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan. But the weather was great, the rolling green of the lower elevations was fine for hiking, and the taller rocky outcroppings made for good scenery. At the very least, they were a lot more mountain than anyone will ever see in Latvia. And, since it was the middle of nowhere, it was a good place to do another shot of the stars moving above the mud-walled home of the family I was staying with (above, obvsly).

Of Uzbekistan: A Girl, a Boy, and a Bird.

My home for one night in the Nurata mountains was a guesthouse in the village of Hayat. This is part of a program that some development agencies started to try to use sustainable tourism to support the villagers in the mountain valleys. On a select few families' land, the development program had built a simple structure for housing a few guests. The one where I stayed even had a basic shower.


The family was courteous, and served me ridiculous amounts of food, all of it tasty. But they weren't really friendly, per se. The women served meals and cleaned up, as seems to be the role for women in Uzbekistan generally. The men did some work with the livestock and in the garden, and spent a fair amount of time drinking tea. The unmarried son was clearly assigned to be social with the guests, and sat with me at meals, and sat near me even when I was just leaning against a tree, reading a book and enjoying the fresh air. He also seemed to be assigned to trying to sell me additional services, such as a motorcycle trip to see some ancient petroglyphs, or renting a donkey to ride rather than hiking, or visiting a traditional Uzbek sauna. (In another halting conversation mixing my few words of Russian and his few words of English, it took some time to become clear that the "sauna" was maybe not the right word, and that "brothel" was maybe closer to the truth.)


This left the grandchildren of the family, pictured here, who were too small to have too much assigned work, and seemed to really enjoy hanging around and staring at me while I ate or read or whatever. They were more than willing photo subjects. I don't know why the girl's head was shaved. A lot of young girls had extremely short haircuts. The boys usually didn't, which makes me doubt it was lice-related, but it's hard to be sure. There was also the bird at the top of this entry, in a small wooden cage hanging from a tree -- I think more pet than food source. It may or may not have been a willing photo subject, but it didn't really have much choice.

Of Uzbekistan: The Sticks

Uzbekistan is all kind of remote, as the world goes. But when your correspondent happened upon a chance to get off the tourist trail, it got seriously middle-of-nowhere remote. As unusual a destination as Uzbekistan is for American travelers, there are actually a fair number of relatively adventurous types there to see the sights. The standard trip would take you to the ancient Silk Road cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva. Your correspondent decided to cut off Khiva from the end of his trip and spend a couple days heading out to the Nurata Mountains. The trip out there involved three or four hours' journey by car, including a side-trip to see Lake Aydarkul. The side trip took our little taxi out over gravel roads, turning into bumpy dirt roads, turning into double-track path through the grassland, with nothing in sight except the (very) occasional goatherd. Pictured above is a makeshift tent, I think only a sun shelter, but maybe actually a home, seen in said middle of nowhere. Below, an ancient Soviet bus, of the kind that still plies some of the less popular routes in the country.


Other than the desolate landscape, the driver was particularly nice. He spoke Tajik, Uzbek, Russian, and one or two other languages, but not English or Spanish or Latvian(!?). So our conversations were limited by my 25-word Russian vocabulary. Nevertheless, he invited me over for a delicious home-cooked meal at his house, since we were passing by anyway, either because he was hungry or friendly or both. I pulled out my Russian phrasebook and we managed to have a halting conversation about his home and his family.

He also had an assistant who rode along in the backseat, although it was never clear why. The only thing I can tell that he did on the trip was this: At one point some sort of big flying insect -- vaguely cicada-like -- flew into one of the windows of the car. The assistant captured it, and then held it by the wings so that the driver and I could watch it struggle and wriggle its legs. After some discussion in Uzbek (or Tajik), they agreed to dump out a bar of soap that was still in its little cardboard box (I'm not sure why it was in the car at all), put the insect in the box, and shake it around a bit. I thought maybe they were trying to keep it as a pet or a totem or something. But a few moments later, the assistant rolled down his window and dumped the bug out of the box back into the wild. Why? Unfortunately, my 25 words of Russian did not allow me to ask, and the Russian phrasebook didn't have an entry for "Why are you using a soapbox to torture that grasshopper?", so I returned to enjoying the scenery speed by.