The Bus to Sarkandaugava

There are a ton of buses in Riga. Maybe it's just in the center, where we are, that they all converge. Riga also has trolleys and trams (which I guess in the U.S. we would now call "light rail" or some such) and jitneys and legit trains. And there are different tickets for them and different prices depending on if you buy them at newsstands or on the trolley. It's kind of a mish-mash, and a little more than we've really been up for figuring out. I suppose we ought to, after complaining about being barred from the seriously dangerous public transit in Guatemala, but why bother when we can walk to everything?

Some other, less refined, web-log referred to the people who ride buses here as "pensioners and smelly alcoholics," which maybe proves that there is more than unites the U.S. and Latvia than there is that divides us. Except we also have dangerous-looking thugs on our buses.

Autumn

Riga may have as autumn-y an autumn as anywhere we've lived in a while. San Francisco and Guatemala are mild all year. DC has a nice autumn, but somehow, it just doesn't compare. Maybe not enough trees, or we just didn't pay them any mind. Here in Riga, our walk to work takes us by several blocks of parks that are just packed with deciduous trees. The park across the street from the Embassy is seriously post-card level autumnal with streetlights glowing and orange and yellow leaves reflected in the canal's water. They have squadrons of leaf-rakers out clearing the grass, but they barely keep up.

Octopus Attack

For the 23rd consecutive time, our plans to quickly post some thoughts and pictures from a jaunt elsewhere in Europe and then get back to the Latvian content have gone awry. Ah, well. We have some more stuff from Athens, which we'll save for later. Since fall is now long gone in Riga, perhaps we'll post some pictures of autumn here within a few weeks. The above is a picture from the Archaeology Museum that proves that some 3000 years ago, the people of the Greek isles founded capitalism by mass-producing golden octopus trinkets of no apparent use, not unlike the Greek souvenir trinkets now available on the streets around the Acropolis, except, made in Greece.

Athens (con't)

The editor-in-chief is getting annoyed at some of the technical problems with our contracted web publishing service. While we get that sorted out, this is another picture of some columns, cleverly non-fluted at the bottom for easy leaning on by those crafty ancient Greek dudes.

Athens Some More

We were trying to post this last night, but Blogger was down. Now we have no time to write. Sorry, word fans.

Originality

I would like to be the ten millionth person to note that this thing that the Greek Honor Guard guys do in front of their tomb of the unknown soldier has to be the inspiration for the Monty Python skit about the Ministry of Silly Walks. It is really, truly, um, something to see. And then like the proverbial icing on the cake, they wear these pom-pom shoes. I gather that these kind of things are intended to be a demonstration of complete denial of self, the individual broken down and now part of a greater whole. And not to imply that I could properly execute the official Greek Guard Walk if I had to. But some countries (ours included, I would say) manage to do their precision guarding while looking kinda bad-ass, and some, less bad-ass. But I suppose lots of people stand real still or slowly do mini-goose-steps, but the Greeks have the big Rockette-kick-steps to themselves.

Hellas!

We went to Athens. I had a conference to attend, but we went a little early to see some old stuff. This is a temple that, if I understood the little sign correctly, has actually stood like this for about 2500 years. Most of the old stuff in the Acropolis has been blown up at least once in one of Europe's periodic sprees of blowing up all of their stuff, and then restored. The Parthenon was restored, but they did it wrong, and now they've been trying to do it right for several decades, so it has permanent scaffolding around it. It was still pretty cool, and the view there of the sprawl and smog of Athens was more impressive. But the Temple of Hephaestus here did a better job of not getting in the way or being a likely hiding spot for Turks or whoever someone was trying to blow up at the time, which counts for a lot in our book.

Oh my, do we have a lot of pictures of Athens. We promise to not show very many of them here. Editing is a skill, we hear.

They say it's my birthday...

It's your birthday, too, yeah...

I'm just back from sunny Athens. Good times were had, foods involving vegetables were consumed, things 2500 years old were observed. Now I'm a year older and the sun wasn't up yet when I had to go to work. How is that for symbolism? Well, bah. It's time to go out and drink some beer and enjoy despite the cold and the gray. We're off to Kapteiņa Enriko Pulkstenis, which means "Captain Enrique's Watch," a bar named for a beloved Soviet children's film in which a friendly Cuban Navy captain visits Riga and loses his watch, but is helped by fellow communist youth to find it and sail off. Then he busts through the capitalist blockade and brings Soviet nukes to Cuba. Ok, I made up the last part, but the film did teach one Latvian colleague at the embassy his only four words of Spanish. Quoth Kapteinis Enriko: "Muchas gracias, grandes amigos!"

Back soon with pictures of Greece.

Our work - for the motherland!

There are not actually a whole lot of obviously Soviet-looking things in Riga. And for good reason, your correspondent would say. Who would want a reminder of those days? Well, in truth, there are somewhat mixed feelings in some quarters, and one of those quarters is Daugavpils.

Daugavpils is Latvia's second largest city. It's near the Russian border, and with a concentration of ethnic Russians even higher than Riga's. I don't know that that means they miss communism more, but as is the case perhaps everywhere on earth, views of history tend to vary with ethnicity. One example is this sign, on a building overlooking one of the main roads through town. As indicated in the post title, it reads "Our Work - For the Motherland!" which sounds sufficiently communist to our ears that your correspondent can't imagine it lasting this long in Riga. Then again, maybe we're just not exploring the right neighborhoods.

A Picture of a Door

It's late; we don't have time to write much, or to dig around for a really interesting picture. So here's a perhaps moderately interesting picture of a door that someone decided to make out of hexagons in Old Riga. Sorry.

Hoopin it up

For the record, Latvia's national sport is ice hockey. They have a pretty good team. Or at the least, they punch above their weight for a nation of 2.5 million.

But the runner-up is basketball. ASK Riga (short for "Army Sports Club", no relation to the English word it spells) is a legendary team, having won several European titles back in the day when I can't imagine that many Europeans actually played basketball. A co-worker who is a big basketball fan offered me one of his courtside tickets for yesterday's game, when ASK triumphed in a Baltic Basketball League tilt against Lithuanian rival Žalgiris. Not that courtside seats were such a huge deal - it was far from a sellout - but as with everything, it was fun to be up close, even if the quality of basketball wasn't quite NBA-caliber.

The majority of the teams are Latvian or Lithuanian guys, but each team had a couple Americans and at least one Serb and/or Croat. Why the Balkans, I'm not exactly clear. One of the Americans, named Corey Brewer - but not the more famous basketball-playing Corey Brewer - played for the Oklahoma Sooners for a couple years in the late 90's, and has been playing in developmental or Eurpoean leagues ever since. I wonder what it's like for the few American athletes, living in a place like Riga, Latvia for the chance to keep playing professionally. It probably differs from being posted here as a diplomat in several relevant regards.

The photo above is from the ASK Riga webpage, photographer unknown.

More Jugendstil

I don't really know architecture from a hole in the ground. I can't tell a Georgian from Tudor from a Victorian. But I think mostly what they have in San Francisco is Victorians, and I think from this view, this building looks like something you might see out near the Panhandle -- a Victorian, perhaps. Except with a giant face stuck on there. The Victorian part is probably all wrong, but I'm pretty sure about the face.

New School

We're sure to have another report from another far-flung locale soon, but for now, we're back in Riga. Our neighborhood here is amazing. We live on the edge of the Art Nouveau district (or, the Jugendstil district as it's known, since there were more Germans than French hanging around Riga in those days). When your correspondent thinks of Art Nouveau, he first thinks of perhaps the Paris Metro. Riga is considered a capital of Jugendstil, at least in terms of what's surviving today. And the style here, mostly, means screaming people. We have many buildings in the blocks around us that feature figurative details. As often as not, those figures' faces look like they're witnessing a train wreck, or passing a kidney stone, or trapped in a room with two guys talking about their Fantasy Football teams. It is not yet clear to me what it was in the zeitgeist of those days that made architects think, "when someone looks at this building, they should see the building looking back and seeing the abyss of mortality." Or something. Apparently it was "new."

The above picture is at the very top of the facade of a six-or-so-story apartment building.

Stockholm, part the last

Hey, so that's it. Sweden was swell. We made it through four days of temptation without ever relenting and actually saying aloud, "Bork Bork Bork!" I.e., the trip was a success. Next time we might actually get back to saying something about Latvia, as was kinda the point all along.

Stockholm by air and by land and by sea

If only the bright boat there were sailing rather than just sitting obscured by a streetlight. Anyway, it wasn't a particularly productive trip for the photo department, but climbing up to a hill on the island opposite the old town on a last afternoon to find a series of hot-air balloons floating (at seemingly dangerous altitudes) over the city was a definite highlight. The balloons seem so out of place that to our photo editor's eyes, in many shots they look photoshopped in, even though we know they weren't.

We failed to get a picture we planned on using to demonstrate it, but Boston:Dunkin' Donuts::Stockholm:H&M. There were literally street corners downtown where you could see three or four H&M retail locations within a block or two. One quite stylish Swedish woman your correspondent talked with said she does all her shopping in the U.S., because she was tired of all the H&M that predominates Sweden. She was too polite to say so, but it probably doesn't hurt that you can probably buy a cashmere sweater in the U.S. for the price of a cup of coffee in Stockholm.

In other world-beating Swedish retail news, the Swedes say Ikea "ee-KAY-uh," and it's theirs, so they must be right. Other Swedish sources indicate that everyone from the lowliest drone to the grandest millionaire in Sweden has some furniture from EeKAYuh. We only know this from work-related sources, because unlike the carpet-bombing approach of the H&M, even in Stockholm, Ikea only has warehouse stores in distant suburbs. In any case, if you want to start getting snobby about authentic pronunciations of your some-assembly-required bookshelves, you have the appropriate ammunition.

Water Everywhere

Stockholm is a great walking city. You have a small section of old winding streets and medieval-feeling churches and homes (although most of them are full of shops selling tourist tchotchkes - one of the best things about Riga's Old Town is that the tchotchke factor is fairly limited); you have an efficient grid-layout modern section of town with neighborhoods and street-level retail; and maybe best of all, you have water all over. Stockholm is built on a series of islands, and it makes for lots of pleasant waterfront bars and cafes and such. We spotted these people taking turns paddling against the current coming over a spillway under a bridge. They weren't hard to spot, since there were twenty or thirty people leaning over the bridge staring at them.

The Archipelago

We went out on a boat on three-hour tour, and did not get stranded on any islands. There were no coconuts to be seen anyway, which was the key to all of Gilligan's hijinks, anyway. The archipelago of islands great and tiny stretching out from Stockholm is pretty in a windswept and grey kind of way. It's not unlike Maine. We passed the first ever automatic lighthouse. The boat tour featured an on-board brunch (for those of means) that featured Swedish delights such as some sort of cold herring casserole.

Sweden

Details soon.

Old Tallinn

How adorable is this? A perfect little row of olden houses with perfect little white clouds above. Not perfect: the exposure on the picture, but oh, well.

Anyway, Tallinn's Old Town oozes charm. Maybe to it's detriment. Some argue that Riga's less-charming Old Town is actually better because it doesn't have enough charm to attract quite so many cruise ships, and therefore it's still-pretty-nice buildings don't all contain tourist trinket shoppes. Being fair, Tallinn's old town is a nice mix of tourist trinket shoppes and bars catering to bargain-hunting Finnish drinkers. There were also some art galleries and some restaurants, though your correspondents had absolutely no shame in going to "Route 66 American Pizza," which The Lovely Katherine pointed out we would never do if we had come to Tallinn from America on a vacation. But being local to the region, Estonian food is not so different from Latvian food. And a man can only have so many meals of breaded meat and potatoes over two years.

Orthodox

This is the Orthodox Cathedral in Tallinn. It has a proper name, but your somewhat lazy correspondent doesn't have his field notes handy and isn't going to go get them just to put the correct name on this church. The inside was quite impressive, but they didn't allow pictures. Outside the Cathedral (and Riga's Orthodox Cathedral, and maybe every Orthodox Cathedral), there were several older ladies with headscarves (one might even call them "babushkas," I suppose) begging for alms. It seems that there are never men - apparently they're otherwise occupied, or begging is women's work or something. I gave them each 10 kroons, which is about a dollar, but is paper money in Estonia, where they have notes worth as little as 20 cents U.S. In Latvia, by the way, they have coins all the way up to a $4 coin, which for some reason has a picture of a cow on it. It's an easy way to lose serious cash to seat cushions at movie theaters or public buses. Or church pews, I suppose, to weakly attempt to tie this back together.