Colleagues

I haven't written a lot about my colleagues here in Latvia. Mostly it's because the term here has been a very trying one, and we have had literally no time for any socializing. My first connection to the department, Sandra Meškova, was on sabbatical this term, so that we didn't see much of her while she worked on a book, and that's exactly as it should be -- this is what sabbaticals are for. The faculty member that I was working closely with, Irina Presņakova, took ill the first week of term, and I eventually took over most of her classes when she was unable to return to teaching at all for the whole term. Two other faculty members were out on maternity leave this term as well, and that left the department operating a full roster of courses with only 50% of its usual teaching faculty. How my colleagues got through it all is beyond me, though they did. It's worth noting that the requirements of the Latvian Ministry of Education stipulate that my Latvian colleagues have more than double the contact hours with students per week that I have with my students in my home institution. Latvian faculty are seriously overworked.

They kept apologizing throughout the term that they simply didn't have time to sit down and socialize with me, and I understood completely. Add the factors mentioned above with those connected to their own personal lives involving parents, children, and spouses, and you can imagine how overwhelmed they must have been. However, when the exams we over and graduation celebrations done, I got a note from Ilze to meet her in the department office if I were available. When I got there, there was a pleasant surprise party in place in anticipation of my departure, and we all got to sit down -- finally -- and actually chat about the term and ourselves. Of course, we've been chatting in the English Philology department offices all term, but this time we could actually relax and not end conversations in mid-sentence so that we could rush off to a class.

As is usual, the food and drink was ample. In particular, there was a great deal of blood orange juice and two bottles of champagne, so we could drink the champagne straight up or make mimosas. I was presented with a small present, and a very cool one at that: a set of handmade and hand-fired dominoes that are inscribed with traditional Latvian patterns. And then we ate chocolate and assorted nibbles and drank toasts to a successful term.

I could not have asked for better colleagues. Mostly they got out of my way, which was a great virtue this term. Taking over Irina's classes meant that I needed the space to do whatever I do to make the courses mine, and they were more than happy to give me that space. In fact, I was praised for my flexibility this term. It cannot have been easy for them to integrate an American into the Latvian system when they were so harried with their own work, so giving me plenty of leeway to do my work in my way was the best situation for all concerned. We left the party with that pleasant glow that one gets after drinking a lot of mimosas in the middle of the afternoon and with promises to set up some kind of exchange program so that we can continue our professional and personal relationships. Here they are. Left to right, Inesa Antonova, Jeļena Semeneca, me, Ilze Oļehnoviča, and Solveiga Liepa. What a wonderful group of educators. And, as goes without saying, what a wonderful group of Latvians.

Church Hill

One of the major points of interest in Daugavpils is Church Hill, a rise in elevation where Daugavpilians, in their wisdom, put their cathedrals. And there are three of them all in spitting distance from each other: a Catholic one because this part of Latvia is very Catholic, a Lutheran one because the Protestants got to the Baltics early on, and a Russian Orthodox one because it's a Russian city. This mix of denominations is another example of the diversity that you take for granted in Daugavpils. Lee took a couple of very nice shots of the Cathedral of Saints Boris and Gleb, and you can probably guess which denomination this one is. Does anybody know: who is Saint Gleb, exactly?

These golden domes are especially wonderful in the late afternoon when the sun hits them just so. The interior of this cathedral is pretty over the top, though I don't have photos of it; when I stopped in, there was a funeral going on, and it seemed highly rude to snap some pictures, though I wanted to. The chanting was sublime; even the smallest Russian Orthodox churches have sublime choirs.

In addition to these three cathedrals, there is also an Old Believers church nearby, a little pink confection that looks as if it is made of marzipan. The Old Believers were an offshoot of the Orthodox. They broke away in the 17th century over a number of theological issues, one of them (so I'm told) being whether or not you were supposed to cross yourselves with one finger or two fingers. I'm not kidding here -- entire churches get founded on such minutiae as this. Lest we Americans judge too quickly on this matter, we might remind ourselves how many different kinds of Baptists there are in the United States and recall those words of Jesus Christ about judging and not judging.

I would love to go into the Old Believers church, but it's closed to all except Old Believers. All the others are of course open to all passers-by, and  there is something really delightful about being able to just wander into a church and take a breather from your busy day. And of course, this is exactly what these spaces were made for: that liminal space between your regular self and your higher self.

Ligo

Last night all of Latvia celebrated Līgo ("LEE-go"), or midsummer festival. As I understand it, the proper name for the holiday itself is Jāņi ("YON-yee," sort of like the New Age instrumentalist). This comes from from Jānis, the Latvian form of the name John, because midsummer falls on 23 June, which is St. John's Day. The celebration for Jāņi is Līgo.

Midsummer celebrations are standard all over Scandinavia and the Baltics. Because this part of the world is so far north, 20 to 21 hours of sunlight at the summer solstice is pretty normal, if a little weird if you come from parts further south like I do; the endless light has wreaked havoc on my sleep patterns. But Līgo is a reason to stay up and ignore sleep because there is an all-night party to attend, and when dusk is 23:30, or 11:30 pm, and sunrise is 3:30 am, you might as well stay up and join the fun.

Different countries do midsummer differently, but the standard practice is to get out into the countryside. Midsummer is definitely pagan in origin; St. John came later. And because there are fertility rituals connected to the celebration -- no surprise there -- getting close to nature matters. When I returned to Daugavpils on the train on 23 June, the city was deserted because everybody had already headed out to the country. As it happens, Daugavpils has its own local celebration of Līgo for all the unfortunate souls who have no friends with summer homes with a pirts, or Latvian sauna. So my local peeps Allen and Natalija, who's a native Daugavpilian, were joined by Margarita, and we headed out to a wooded area of town called Strōpa named for the nearby lake. You get there by walking through an old cemetery in the woods, and then the pine trees begin to clear, you come up on the crest of a hill, and there you are in the big clearing.

There's a stage here, and this is where Daugavpils hosts its local song festivals as part of the national network of song festivals. (Latvian song festivals are major events unto themselves. The national one is held every few years, and I regret that it's not until next year.) The stage had a whole line-up of performers: first a Latvian folk group, naturally, and then a country-western band. Country music sung in Latvian does not sound like a mash-up that is really going to work, but for some odd reason it did. But you don't really listen to the music. You dance to it, and the stage is big enough to accommodate a lot of dancers. Which of course is what we became after a beer. My student Jolanta found me in the crowd and insisted on some dancing so that my Līgo experience would be truly authentic. And then Allen, Natalija, Rita, and I took to the stage because, well, it's Līgo. Rita is a very good dancer; I feel bad that she got partnered with not quite so talented me, but there you have it. Here's the stage from the audience seating.

This photo really doesn't give a sense of how big this space is. There is seating for maybe 1000 people, and there were certainly 2000 people there.

Līgo celebrations require specific kinds of foods for eating, and I assume they are symbolic. First, bread with caraway, a special kind of Latvian cheese, and the inevitable beer. I don't know what the symbolism is, and who cares? These three foods are among those that Latvians do better than anybody, so just fill up! And there are many vendors at the festival to help you do just that, though plenty of folks brought their own picnic dinners too. By the way, rye bread fried in garlic butter is the best accompaniment for beer that can be imagined. This is what we ate instead of the special caraway bread. If anybody is going to come up with really good bar food, it would be Latvians. If anybody tells us that we did not follow tradition exactly, we can point out that we certainly drank beer, which I think counts for something.

About 23:00 (11:00 pm), the bonfire is lit. In a small gathering, it's traditional to jump over the bonfire; this is some kind of fertility ritual. Here, the bonfire flames were about 30 feet tall, so I felt it was prudent to not attempt any jumping. Here's the bonfire at our Līgo celebration. I think that with all these trees around, a fire of this size was slightly dangerous, but the fire department was close by because we hadn't actually left the city. You can see that it's just dusk at this point, but it is indeed 23:00.

Finally, it is worth noting the importance of women wearing flower garland crowns on their heads. You can buy them at any flower shop the week before the celebrations, and Latvia abounds in flowers shops. Men might wear crowns of oak leaves on their heads, but these are less common. I found out that this is because in theory only a man whose name is Jānis is supposed to wear an oak-leaf crown, though I suppose that this rule is ignored by lots of men (and some women). I mean, how often do you get to wear oak leaves on your head? Regrettably, I did not have a crown and I sort of wanted one, if only for the photo op possibilities. However, Allen assured me that it was not in fact required, and I would guess that what seems to be a charming tradition at first would become an annoyance once you started dancing.

Līgo is easily the biggest Latvian bash of the year, and this in a country that celebrates at the drop of a hat. I'm really grateful that I got to be here for it, and I am already planning how I am going to bring a little Latvia home with me and celebrate it next year in Maine.

Last class

As promised, here are some photos of my last class with my adult English class. Zane Vaļule, a grad student at Daugavpils University, taught the grammar portion of the class; I, as a native English speaker, taught the conversation portion. Here we are on the front steps of the university's Humanities Building. Note the flowers that were presented to Zane and me, which is standard Latvian (maybe even legally required) practice. Left to right: Jolanta, me, Zane, Vilmars, Marija, and Pavels.

The class was an interesting mix of both native Latvian and Russian speakers, and as the conversations developed, we learned fascinating things about each other: Pavels ran for city councillor of his hometown Krāslavas in the recent Latvian elections. Vilmars works as a forester for the Latgale provincial government, and Jolanta is a lawyer who helps monitor illegal forest cutting in the province. And so on and so on. Here's another one of us.

Many thanks to Gunnars, Jolanta's main squeeze, who came to class and took the photos. He too was delightful, and thanks to him and my students I now have the words to one of the songs that is sung for the festival of Jāņi (St. John's Day, or midsummer -- the biggest bash of the Latvian year). Stay posted for more on it because it all starts tomorrow!

Wistfulness

A few weeks ago, I wrote about homesickness and wanting to be back in my own bed and cook with my own pots and pans and eat my own strawberries from my backyard. I still want all those things, but now those feelings are very mixed with the realization that my time really is almost over. In a little less than two weeks, I will leave Daugavpils and Latvia, only to return home to a large pile of mail and projects that will get my ready for the fall term. I keep forgetting that I have this other life that I also have to deal with, but the book order forms from the university bookstore were a good reminder.

Wistful is how I would describe my feelings at this point. As wonderful as being in Latvia has been, I actually am excited about taking on my medieval literature course in the fall, which I haven't taught for a while, and reinvigorating the Honors Program at my university with the able help of my colleague Sarah Hentges. We co-direct the program at present and have been working on revamping it entirely, from curriculum to policies to scholarships and everything in between. I'm also ready to return to the ripening of the raspberries in my backyard so that I can eat them (of course) and make jam for the winter. I hope that Trudy, who has been staying in my house in my absence, has enjoyed the strawberries all June, and if she should read this, perhaps she will put a few in the freezer for me. Just a suggestion.

And having a date at which this all ends is very helpful. Once you have that date in place and the work of the term is done, as it is now, you can really start focusing on all the things that need to happen so that you can get home. I am now packing up materials, giving away some books that I don't need and leaving them in the English Philology Department's library, figuring out how to pack clothing in a sensible way to expedite traveling over the Atlantic with as little as possible. I have found out that the postal service, Latvijas Pasts, will ship a box home up to 20 kilos (about 44 pounds) for a little over 100 euros (roughly $120). While that seems like a lot of money, it compares very favorably to taking it home on the plane, where checking it as a second bag will cost exactly 100 euros (about $107). The slightly higher cost seems worth it to me to not have to lug a rolling duffle and a large suitcase around Riga, Boston, and environs. (I think that in general I packed very lightly for six months and managed to get four seasons' worth of clothing over here. Still, it looks like a lot when it's spread all over my flat, the way it is now.)

Having this leaving date has been actually pretty refreshing. I look at the calendar and think, OK, that's it. I will be done. And with great cleansing of spirit, I get rid of more stuff, not that I collected all that much, for once on my life. It's time to get on with my own life, and slowly returning to it via email and such has been liberating. As good as it is to be jolted out of your routines -- and in the past six months I have been jolted out of all of them -- the reason it is so good is that you eventually return to them, and you return to them in light of what you learned in your post-jolt phase. I've already spoken about some of the pedagogical changes and issues that I want to explore further, and I am planning how my new colleagues Ilze, Sandra, Solveiga, Jeļena, and Irina will continue our own collaborations.

Despite all that, wistfulness is the predominant feeling. Case in point is my final class with my adult English speaking class that I have co-taught with a graduate student here, Zane Vaļule. Zane taught grammar, and I taught conversation, and for our last class we decided that a party was in order. And so it was: I brought a cake (naturally), and everybody rose to the occasion in terms of bringing things to eat. (And everybody learned a new English word: "potluck.") We had homemade sausage from Vilmars, who is a hunter; if you have never had venison-elk sausage, you have not yet lived. We had little meat-filled pastries, delicious bread from Jolanta, cucumbers and tomatoes, assorted fruits, soft drinks, cream-filled pastries, Laima chocolates. And to drink for the requisite toasts? Two bottles of Latvian champagne and homemade šmākovkas ("SHMOCK -- of -- kuss"), introduced to me as the Latgalian moonshine that everybody makes at home. (It's 50 proof, arguably the strongest alcoholic beverage that I have ever drunk.) Zane and I were presented with small gifts of appreciation and, even in more typically Latvian fashion, flowers. Following that, students composed and delivered a short speech to each of us. Mine started with, "Robert. You are a great man," which made me well up a bit. Then we sat down, and the party started and continued for two hours, long after the class period normally ends.

So if you were still wondering why people would go overseas to teach in a foreign environment and deal with all the hassles that go with it, now you know why. Like I said: wistful.

Evaluation

As I think all educators do at the end of a term, I'm now going through the "what I could have done better" phase of reflection. I don't think a lot of us really think as much about what we did well (and I will leave that to my students to judge), but I know that I always end the term thinking, "Well, it was a good class, but . . ."

Generally, I think that I would have done more to acclimatize my students to the kind of connections that American-style education does very well: that of taking the personal and connecting it to the materials at hand. Added to that, I would have stressed more strategies for owning the course material rather than just parroting it back on an essay.

My students were initially puzzled, I think, about spending some time in class discussing their own complex language histories in their families, but we used this as a way to understand how the French and English must dealt with each other in medieval England when both languages were operating side by side (with Latin thrown in for good measure), separated largely by social class and status. Once we had that personal discussion out of the way, they seemed to be very savvy about why someone might choose to learn English or French or Latin in the complicated language stew that was medieval England. Though, in reality, it wasn't as complicated as the current language stew in Daugavpils, Latvia . . . Once they got the sense that their own personal experience as linguists was relevant to the class material, they were willing to go with me. But it was something that they were not used to.

Furthermore, students in Latvia are not really as used to class discussion as American students are, and my courses in the States are all about class discussion. This makes it hard for them to take notes -- they are not always sure what exactly they should be taking notes on -- and I could have a better job of separating lecture and discussion of lecture material. Latvia does this very well, actually, dividing courses into "lectures" and "seminars," where seminars means specifically discussion of material. I'm not sure that I would use that artificial construct myself, but I do think that helping students know what to take notes on and doing more work of summarizing discussions would have helped them, and probably would have clarified more for me what I thought was important about a class.

I would definitely have discussed strategies for note-taking. My own strategy is to write everything I can down, and then pare them down to essentials later, recopying them into a more organized format. Time-consuming, yes, but I can recall the content of lectures I listened to thirty years ago with clarity because of this. And I would definitely have discussed the importance of paraphrasing: that is, not simply cribbing materials from sources but putting them in your own words so that you understand and own the material. This was a big problem in my final essays, and I am guessing that Latvian students are so used to going to sources as The Authorities that they don't fully realize that they bear some resposibility for making sure that they only use sources but also synthesize them into their own knowledge banks.

All of these things I would do point up two things. 1) Working in a different educational system is eye-opening because you are never sure what your students know and what they don't know. This is not a bad thing; you get a Fulbright, after all, to learn how a different educational system works and how to integrate yourself into it. 2) This one applies to Latvian and American students: educators need to remember that teaching is not just about teaching content but also teaching how to learn: that is, what practical skills you need in order to succeed in the class and beyond. This means teaching how to listen to a lecture, how to take notes, how to study, how to write and format a paper -- in short, how to own material and then show others that you've owned it.

But enough beating myself up. I can always do things better, and I go through this same process every term. But under some trying circumstances -- basically, substituting for and eventually replacing a faculty member when it was obvious the tenth week of term that for health reasons she would not be able to return to the class -- it did not go badly. Students did learn some basics of the history of the English language, as their final essays showed me. Several of them wrote lovely things about having me as an instructor at the end of their essays. They liked having a native English speaker and hearing my American accent. I find this amusing because nobody has ever told me that he or she likes my accent. I'll take it. 

Latvian National Library

I posted a while ago about running a reading group at the Latvian National Library in Rīga for the U.S. Embassy, a program under the direction of Nils Students. Here are some photos of that event that have appeared on the U.S. Embassy's Facebook page. You can see that Nils bought some nibblies to eat, and these are all things that were mentioned in the book: Russian chocolates, Georgian mineral water, and clementines, which were a once-a-year treat in the Soviet Union -- if even that often. The woman to me left in the second photo is a Latvian lawyer who loves to read. It's really gratifying that this program has a set of regulars who will read any recommendation that is put out there. And, again, I make the plug: Anya von Bremzen's Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is the best memoir that I have read in recent memory. (Actually, that is not quite true. Equal to it is Richard Blanco's The Prince of Los Cocuyos, his growing up gay and Cuban memoir set in post-Castro Miami. Read them both!) 

For those of you who are interested in the interior of the Latvian National Library, here are couple of shots taken by Lee. The building is spectacular, made to resemble a mountain of crystal that appears in Latvian folk tales. And as cool as it is from the outside, it's really cool from the inside -- a gorgeous interior space. I would have written my dissertation a lot faster if I could have worked in such an inspiring space as this. (More likely, I would have wasted even more time gawking at and poking around all the books.) The visible stacks are in particular wonderful, as is all the sleek, blond wood. I understand that the Library has a project calling for all Latvian citizens to send it a favorite book which they may inscribe if they like about why it's a favorite. The Library will then create a collection of favorite Latvian books, as chosen by its own citizens. What a wonderful idea!

Social Contract

Lee and I spent last weekend in Vilnius, Lithuania, where we met fellow Fulbright professor Kathy Knapp of the University of Connecticut, who is teaching at Vilnius University. I would say that Lithuania is more prosperous than Latvia, though that may be comparing apples and oranges: Daugavpils is a provincial city and Vilnius is a capital. That said, we got into a discussion about the general prosperity of all three Baltic states, which is something that has seriously impressed Kathy. She has noted that when the Lithuanians set their mind to get something done, it gets done. And fast. And well.

I have to say that I would apply this as well to Latvia. Regardless of how the Baltics compare themselves to each other -- and given that they are all kind of siblings, making comparisons among themselves is expected and perhaps inevitable -- the place where they are 25 or so years after the fall of the Soviet Union is impressive to the point of astonishing. Grocery stores are thriving, and the shelves are stocked. Generally, infrastructure like roads and sidewalks are solid. Trains run on time, nearly to the minute. Businesses are (generally) doing well. It is fair to acknowledge that a place like Daugavpils still is dealing with abandoned factories, and there are a lot of them. But compared to the complete economic meltdown that followed the end of Soviet times, the economy here is generally stable and well balanced among manufacturing, food processing, and transportation repair. It's not as prosperous as it might like to be, but I bet that it's far more prosperous than it was.

I have commented on the entrepreneurship that seems to be taking place in the city very recently. Even more restaurants have opened since I last wrote that not more than two weeks ago, and the cultural events in the city continue unabated. Kathy noted the same thing where she is based and said something that I thought was very perceptive. She noted the social contract that is in place here: the idea that pensions matter for people's long-term well-being, that health care is universal and relatively inexpensive, and that there is a shared sense of a governmental obligation to take care of all its citizens. She pointed out, I think correctly, that people here afford to be entrepreneurial precisely because the social contract in place means that they don't lose everything by going out on a limb and taking on a financial risk. When you know that you will have health care regardless of how your business does when you start it, then you're much more willing to start it in the first place.

This strikes me as the most admirable thing about the Baltic states, and indeed Europe in general. The huge and furious debates in the United States at present, and especially under the administration of a Donald Trump, really centers on: what is government for? I find it ludicrous that so many governmental officials in the U.S. claim to hate government and want to do everything to get rid of it. If they hate it so much, why did they enter it in the first place, then? To destroy it? Here, government seems to exist to take care of needs that citizens may not be able to take care of themselves, health  and long-term stability among the top priorities. The social contract in place means that people can actually take risks and try something new. It's exactly the kind of spirit that the Baltics needed and still need following the breakup of the Soviet Union. I don't mean to suggest that the place is a paradise; the Soviet Union had a straitjacket social contract to the point that the State dictated virtually everything in a citizen's life, and there are vestiges of that attitude still in play here. I do mean to suggest, though, that starting from the premise that the role of the government is to help make people's lives better seems to work very well here. In contrast, for too many American citizens (read: Congresspeople), the role of government is to not exist at all, to the point where everybody is left to fend for themselves. It's a political and economic system that creates winners and losers. If you are one of the losers -- and, make no mistake, the system is specifically designed to create losers and keep them losing -- well, tough shit to you.

Deep down, the anti-government government officials know this. You can tell they do. For example, a political party that could create a health care plan that eliminates health care for 23 million Americans while preserving it for its own members is the height of cynicism. And equally cynical is the fact that the economic system that they tout so much -- with a deregulation of virtually everything -- created the system in which even more than 23 million Americans didn't have any insurance at all. Blaming poor people for being poor when you in fact systematically made them poor, and then punishing them for it, is despicable. 

Here, on the other hand, Latvians don't have nearly as much, but what they have is enough, and if they want more, the system encourages them to go out there and try something. My landlord Jans is a good example. He is now fixing up a few apartments so that he is a property manager of sorts, but he has also put together a cell phone business that sells parts and services, and this work takes him all over central Europe. My friends Allen and Natalija are another example; they are putting together a design firm business, settling in Daugavpils because it is cheap and central to many places. And my favorite little bakery just opened a restaurant across the street from its original location, and have done so on the cheap: the decor is cheery and simple, the food is basic but very good, and should it fail (but it won't -- they are very savvy), then their lives won't be over. They will just try something else.

This is one of the reasons that I feel so comfortable here in Latvia, and it sometimes surprises me to hear how much my students want to go the United States. Certainly I don't blame them. It is a fascinating and wonderful country, and it looms large in mythology. And when they express cynicism or despair that Latvians are not the leaders of Europe, or that Estonia is so much more technologically savvy, or Lithuania is so much more prosperous, I have to remind them that where they are is remarkable by any measure. And that though they would love to visit the U.S., they might in the long run not want to stay there. American excitement and innovation are great draws. So are Latvian comfort and security. I would choose the social contract here any day.

Alberta iela

Alberta iela (Albert Street) in Rīga is the street for Art Nouveau buildings. While buildings in this style are all over the district known for them, this street is all of a piece -- one over-the-top building after another, all dripping with grotesques, curlicues, floral motifs, faces, and such. Here are a couple of the gems that I particularly like.

By all means blow these photos up to see all the detailing. 

I must say, though, that as much as I like Alberta iela, I would not want to live on it. It was equally dripping with tourists snapping photos of these buildings (myself included -- guilty as charged), and I think that a lot of us forget that these are actually working buildings. In this case, these are apartments filled with actual Rīgans who I expect get tired of constantly having to deal with strangers traipsing up and down the street and gawking at what are, after all, private residences and not public property. I think that I might choose to live in one of the less spectacular buildings, or maybe in the one of the less desirable neighborhoods in Rīga. That said, Art Nouveau is an astonishing architectural style, and we're lucky that they didn't get all torn down in some hare-brained urban renewal scheme. If I were interested in learning a trade and living in Latvia, I'd definitely consider plasterwork because I would have lifetime employment.

Lecturing

Now that I'm on the downside of my fellowship and will be leaving Latvia in less than a month, I've become reflective of my teaching practices and what I did well and not so well here. This is one of the questions that you have to answer for the final Fulbright report, and I am grappling with it.

One my students described my class as a "conversation," which pleased me immensely. I am unsure if it pleased my students equally as much. It was surely a new model for them coming from this crazy American professor; I remember seeing the mild bafflement at the beginning of the term when I would ask them a question about their own language use that was clearly not asking for information that I had already given them. I think that they very much appreciated being able to join in a scholarly conversation, as, for example, we did when discussing how people navigate two languages when we discussed how the English and French did the same thing in the Middle English period. They do this all the time in their own lives (sometimes they're navigating three languages), and I think that it pleased a number of them that their own experiences were actually relevant and a valid source of scholarly inquiry in themselves.

At the same time, I think that some of them were equally frustrated by this conversation model. In a scholarly culture than emphasizes lecture over discussion, students seemed to be unsure what exactly they needed to know for their essays and final exams, and it's also a culture that emphasizes final exams in particular. Many students did not really take notes all term, and I wonder if they simply were not clear that class "conversation" doesn't mean idle chitchat: this is lecture in itself. I think that in retrospect, I would have done more to state unequivocally that everything said in the class is potentially relevant. I think that I would have used the blackboard more too, though I certainly used it a lot, making the point that if I bother to write it down, you better do so too. I sympathize with them if they were unfamiliar ground, but I think that 90--minute lectures every day would have been deadly for them and boring for me. My conversation model is undoubtedly different; in my colleague Jeļena's literature class, this distinction between lecture and discussion (here, known as "seminar") is actually built into the schedule, every fourth class or so devoted to specifically discussing a piece of literature. Jeļena would discuss medieval culture, and I would lead the discussion of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's tale, for example. I enjoyed guest lecturing, er, leading discussion immensely,  but I remember thinking that this separation of the two was not a model I ascribe to. Discussion leads to lecture and back to discussion and back to lecture. I would start with the Wife of Bath, letting student repsonses lead us to discussing the position of women in English medieval culture and medieval marriage, in turn taking us back to the tale. My own students who take notes take them frantically, as I tell them everything I say could be used in an essay somewhere. The ones who don't take notes pray at the end of the term that they remember everything. So I think that being more clear about what's important and saying so intentionally, encouraging my Latvian students to be very intentional themselves about note-taking, with me leading more recap of each class's major points at the end, would help a lot. I wish that I had done more of this.

When I return, I also want to look more closely at the art of lecturing and see what's out there in terms of scholarly discussion about how to lecture effectively. The commonplace in American higher education is that lecturing is passé and passive, generally ineffective as a learning tool. Students learn my doing and not by listening. I certainly do not agree with this stance because I remember lectures from my undergrad days that have stayed with me decades later simply because they were so good. However, I do agree that many university instructors are not effective lecturers. (I count myself among them. I am a good lecturer but not a great one.) But I do think that there is value if you're a student to listening with intention, which to my mind is a form of doing, and in particular processing a lot of information, deciding what's important, getting it down in some kind of readable and comprehensible form, and then going over the notes later and cleaning them up so that you end up owning the material. There are ways to lecture that are not simply passing on information by rote, though sometimes even that is necessary. Students here respond to lecture mode pretty well, unlike their American counterparts. It is worth doing some research to find out why.

Fashion

It's difficult to generalize about such a broad topic as fashion, but it is worth noting that people do dress differently here. So this will mostly be a somewhat random set of observations about Latvian and, by extension, European dress.

In general, I would say that there is more dressing up in Latvia. Not that you can judge this by my students, who dress pretty much like college students anywhere, in very comfortable, casual clothes. But the faculty and administrators are often very smart and polished. My dean is always in a very tailored suit or jacket and skirt; some of the male faculty are in a jacket and tie every day, as is my colleague and French professor Sergejis. My own colleagues on the English faculty are a little more casual, often showing up in jeans and comfortable blouses, suggesting perhaps that dealing with literature is a messy business that requires rolling up one's sleeves. I took my cues from them and sometimes wear jeans with natty print shirts in an attempt to look a bit more professional than my students.

There are also more occasions to dress up in Latvia, I think. I love seeing high schoolers out on the town. The young men are often in suits that sometimes come in very cool colors: royal blue, green, burgundy -- and bow ties, which are catching on in a big way here in the Baltics. Young women are often in long, floor-length skirts with dressy blouses. You see this more often than you might expect, and I think that they are often going to a concert or a dance or something. The fact that cultural events are far easier to afford in Latvia might be a contributing factor, and I expect that it is. Here, there is a real sense that an occasion demands proper dress, a sense that I think young people in the United States don't observe quite as much. Or maybe I just live in Maine, where the weather dictates fashion more than anything.

Incomes are not as high in Latvia as they are in the Unites States, but this fact certainly doesn't stop people from indulging in good clothes or, more accurately, good looks. I am impressed with and sort of overwhelmed by the number of secondhand stores in Daugavpils, and they have very good stuff in them. If one is willing to go through lots of racks of things with patience and a practiced eye, looking for the right piece -- and many Latvians clearly are willing, judging by the customers that I see in the stores -- one can easily put together very fashionable, very well turned-out ensembles. I am constantly surprised to see a woman wearing just the right boots striding confidently, a man with just the right scarf knotted just so, the neatly pressed shirt, the perfect pin on the perfect lapel. People here devote some time to looking good, and it shows.

There's also a certain number of men who go out in public in their athletic track suits. Adidas seems to be the brand of choice. You American readers have seen these guys in malls all across America, and they generally look sloppy. For some reason, as casual as this outfit is, Latvian men do not look nearly as slovenly as many American men do. In part this is because Latvian men are generally trim; obesity is not nearly as great an issue as it is in overfed America.

I am sort of surprised that I am paying attention to women's clothes because this is something that I normally don't care a lot about. This winter, I was totally smitten with women's winter coats. This is truly a first for me, and it is because in Latvia they come in wonderful, delicious, ice cream sherbet colors. They are also cut in very flattering ways, as are women's dresses. You see a lot of cuts that are right out of a 1950s department store like B. Altman; the Mad Men look for women is alive and well in Latvia. There are also plenty of floral prints that are really pretty wonderful. Of course, you can find these anywhere; I just noticed them more here because they seem so prevalent. I might go so far as to generalize that dressing in a traditionally feminine way is very much the norm in Latvia. This is not a criticism of my women friends who don't care for feminine clothing for any number of reasons; one can dress to please oneself and always look good. But femininity seems to sell here, it sells well, and it looks great.

One thing that I have noticed on young men, as well as some older men who perhaps should know better, is the very tight, pegged jeans look. This, I believe, is a Euro-style: jeans that are tight in the waist, loose in the back, and very tight down the legs all the way to the ankles. Some jeans actually look like tights, and I can only assume that they are part stretch fabric; it's the only way one could actually get them on. A couple of decades ago in the States, Levi Strauss, recognizing that American men were getting wider and wider, created a line of jeans that has, as the company put it, a little more "skoosh" in the fit. Baggier jeans have been the norm since, at least outside of urban areas, in recognition that we eat too much. But not here; tight, tight jeans are de rigeur for the average Russian teenager. If you don't have several pair, you are not allowed to live here.

If one doesn't wear tight jeans, one wears what I would call over-engineered jeans. They can't just have a pocket in back; there must be a smaller pocket sewn on the bigger pocket. Or the legs are gathered into an elastic band like you find on sweatshirts at the ankle. Or they are carefully bleached on the front of the legs, the back, and at the knee to give them that worn look. Or they have fancy stitching somewhere in a place where nothing is clearly being stitched together. Plain jeans that are just, well, jeans are maybe illegal. 

Latvia is the world capital of truly fashionable eyewear. I have had the same kind of glasses for decades now, with one brief foray into 1950s-type Elvis Costello glasses which my optometrist stopped carrying in a size that fit my face. (I am still bitter about this.) But I feel positively dowdy in Latvia, where everybody who wears glasses has something retro, futuristic, or otherwise totally rockin'. 

I really like the fact that at the pool, there is simply none of the obsessive body image issues that we see too much in the States. I am sure that there are Latvians obsessed with how they look, as the gyms here are full of people working out, and at least one of them is devoted to serious bodybuilders. But at my community pool, who cares? Lovely old women show up in flowered swim caps and ancient swimsuits. Men wear their Soviet-era trunks that have seen better days, or more to the point, better decades. Everybody goes to the sauna to relax, and who cares what we look like? We are here to swim. There seems to be less body consciousness in Latvia, which is a good thing, I think -- a recognition that people properly come in all shapes and sizes, and that's the way it's supposed to be.

Triviana Latviana 5

Having taken the train back and forth to Rīga a number of times -- about a 3 1/2-hour trip -- I can say with authority that Latvians love their garden plots. Every town of any size is surrounded by tiny garden plots where citizens who live in big blocks of flats can grow rhubarb, tomatoes, and cucumbers for pickles. Very often there will be a small hut, a "summer house," where the family might well live all summer, treating it as a kind of second living room. And equally as often there will be a greenhouse, sometimes obviously built from whatever the owner could lay his hands on and other times a little more professional looking. These plots probably fed people seriously well in Soviet times, and even now Latvians need to dig in the soil and grow things to eat, pickle, can, freeze, and otherwise process. This is not unlike many hipster Americans who, like me, are rediscovering all those things that our grandparents did and are now doing them as well.

Speaking of, the little plots between the buildings of flats and the parking lots surrounding them are tiny, but that will not stop Latvians from planting them intensely with flowers. I do not know who is responsible for which plot, or if residents just adopt them randomly. (I can say that the one in front of my flat has a fine crop of overgrown dandelions.) I see sweet old women tending their plots with an intensity normally reserved for grand master chess players. The parade of flowers has been endless since the weather started getting warm: peonies, lilies of the valley, marigolds (already!), bachelor buttons, grape hyacinths, lilacs. It's lovely to see people softening the harsh outlines of the Soviet flats with -- what else? -- endless flowers.

In public flower beds, the city workers have been digging and planting and redigging, putting flowers in and making sure that the floral displays are pretty much ongoing and endless. It is surprising how many workers there are to plant and weed flower beds. When the beds in front of Vienības Nams were first planted, there were at least ten workers who were carefully plotting the beds and putting in flowers. No random English-style gardens here, where flowers just sort of grow in a haphazard way wherever the seeds fall. (It's my preferred style, which speaks either to my haphazard gardening habits or my laziness.) No, sir: here gardens are laid out with Prussian precision and discipline. They are very beautiful; I love how the floral colors make patterns, but it's a heck of a lot more work than I would ever bother with in my own flower beds. I expect that when the tulips start to droop, they are quickly and efficiently replaced in the middle of the night with something that's on the verge of blooming. We shall see.

I don't know how the business cycle works in Latvia, but a slew of new businesses are opening in Daugavpils. Three new restaurants/kafejnīcas have opened in the past two weeks; a small hotel (viesnīca) is about to open, and two others that had been closed have reopened, one with yet another restaurant attached. I wonder if there is some kind of cycle in which business loans are doled out because it seems that a lot of businesses are popping up all of a sudden. They might be seasonal, but Daugavpils doesn't get that many visitors, even though it is working very hard on increasing the number of people coming to this part of Latvia. You can always tell a new business has opened because of the endless balloons that are hung over the door for the first few days, often in the colors of the Latvian flag (burgundy and white). This is Key.

I'll have more to say about fashion in a later post, but one fashion statement of sorts that I have noticed in Latvia is man capris. That is, capri pants, sort of, on men. They are not really capris, or at least not what Mary Tyler Moore wore on  The Dick Van Dyke Show. They are more like pants that cut off just below the knee and sometimes fitted tight to the leg. And sometimes not; Adidas makes a version of these that are basically warm-up tracksuit capris. They seem pretty sensible and comfortable, actually, but they aren't really a thing in the United States. However, man capris were sort of a trend a few years back among the Must-Be-Closest-to-the-Latest, which generally means somewhere urban and other than Maine.

I was in Rīga this weekend because my guy Lee has arrived in Latvia for a couple weeks. We met up with my fellow Fulbrighter Justine Koontz and have now seen two of the oddest sculptures I can imagine. Odd Sculpture (O.S.) #2 is Glittersnail: an eight-foot-tall snail whose body is fiberglass and whose body is covered with mirrored tiles of the kind that you find on a disco ball. Here it is, surrounded by Justine and me:

O.S. #1, though, and clear winner for sheer strangeness goes to Spacemonkey (or, if you prefer, Astrochimp). Spacemonkey is apparently a salute to the animals that were sent into orbit in the early space race between the Soviet Union and the United States. There was a plaque in front of this sculpture that explains this, but it currently not there, so the sculpture has no context. Well, other than seeing a 30-foot tall monkey in a spacesuit, which for me was not nearly enough context. You can imagine seeing this in a lovely park in Rīga and saying to yourself, "What in God's name is that?" (Which is pretty much what I did.) That said, you have to sort of dig something so very weird.

 Windows in Latvia -- well, Europe in general -- are very smart. Newer thermal windows in buildings both open from the top, leaning downward slightly into the room so that you get a crack of air at the top, and from the side, opening wide into the room so you get a full breeze. This is vastly superior to American sash windows, which open up only halfway by sliding up the frame. On the other hand, European windows never have screens, and I have noticed just as many bugs here in Latvia as I have at home. How did the Latvians miss that?

My school term is not ending; it's sort of dribbling away. My master's candidate courses ended in mid-May, and she has turned in her final essays. She is now taking exams of some sort. My second-year students end next week when their essays are due, and my adult students end in mid-May when their class ends, for whatever reason. I am still extremely unclear how the schedule works here. At times it has felt as if the administration was just making it all up as we went along. This contrasts sharply with the American system, in which I could tell you my final exam period dates for the year 2019 already because they have already been set. One system isn't better or worse; I simply am blissfully unaware of what exactly is going on, and I decided early on -- wisely, in retrospect -- to not let this bother me. And so it doesn't. 

Homesick

I am surprised that it has taken this long for homesickness to hit me. It's not severe at all, and I am still certainly enjoying myself, but I am also getting wistful for being back in my own home and puttering about in my garden and drinking coffee out of my own coffee mug.

When I first arrived, I was moderately bewildered by all the new stuff I had to navigate not to mention classes to prepare, so I had no time to even think about home. I also wisely got involved in making presentations early on -- I was in front of a high school class my fourth day in Daugavpils -- and being busy helped immensely. If I could give one piece of advice to a new Fulbrighter, it would be to get involved in your new community immediately.

As I settled in, though, I got to the point where Daugavpils started feeling like a place I lived and not just a temporary way station where I existed. It is of course both: I've been here now for four months and am now looking at the final month or so I have left before I leave. I have noticed that when I walk on the pedestrian mall or along the Daugava River, or when I relax in the sauna following a swim at the university pool, that I see people I know, and I greet them and have light conversation. I have a network of acquaintances, a community of sorts.

That said, I'm in the community but not entirely of the community. Not having either language spoken here means that I can't engage much further than light conversation, and that is something that I am missing. Conversations in English here are massively rewarding with Latvians, but they are also a considerable amount of work. They're often stilted and one-sided as my friends struggle to find the way to say what they want to say. Thankfully, they don't worry about grammar much with me, or at least not as much as they used to, so conversations don't devolve into grammar lessons.

I miss the English language -- both hearing it and reading it -- in a lot of ways. In particular, I miss being able to read a newspaper, or at least read one when I'm not sitting at my laptop. I haven't been able to take part in all the political action in the States that is the Resistance because it's harder to do from here. Putting my name on online petitions is easy, but making international phone calls to legislators is not, with the time difference and cost ($5 to $7 a call, generally). Rallies and meetings are mostly impossible. I have been mostly content to watch the endless battles and mess of the Trump administration from afar, but now I am feeling as if I want to put on some battle gear myself and jump into the fray.

On further reflection, it may be that homesickness hits precisely when you feel settled because you know that settled feeling is going to be temporary once you pack up and head home. My fellow Fulbrighter Justine has been here since September, so she has had a full nine months here. She mentioned in one of our conversations that maybe the five-month stint that I have is a better model because it's hard to get that settled and then have to give it all up. She is concerned about re-entering the American mode of life because she is now so used to doing things the Latvian way. I suspect that I will not have this problem -- or at least not acutely -- but I will be interested in seeing how my return to the States plays out in the long run.

What I am sure of, though, is that I will have the same experience that one of my favorite English writers, Rumer Godden, had about her childhood. She and her family moved from London at the outbreak of the First World War to India, where her father had business, and she returned to England when she was a pre-teen to attend boarding school. For the rest of her life, she went back and forth between the two countries, probably staying in England more in the long run, but always feeling homesick for one country or the other. I expect that I will have the same experience. My first week home, I will not be able to get salāti grieku at my local supermarket. I will no longer find harčo among the soups on a restaurant menu. I will no longer see people walking around with flowers in their arms because they someone they know has a birthday or name day. And, invariably, I will say, "I wish I were in Latvia."

Vienibas Nams

Vienības Nams ("VEE-eh-nee-bus nams"; "Unity House" in English) is the serious cultural center of Daugavpils. Here is the theater, the concert hall, the public library, the Latvian cultural center, the tourist information office, the souvenir shop, and the USA Information Center, all in one building on the city center square. Oh, and there's a Swedbank with handy cash machines and a museum devoted to Latgale's very own moonshine šmākovkas ("SHMOCK-uv-kuss") for good measure. And the library doubles as a rotating art gallery for local artists. Talk about one-stop shopping!

Built in the 1930s in what I call the Balt Deco style, I think that Vienības Nams was part of the trend at the time to give all Latvian cities a place to put Latvian culture out there for Latvian citizens. This was certainly tied to the nation defining itself culturally. Having existed only since 1918 as an independent state (the Soviets didn't move in until 1940), Latvia worked hard at extolling its Latvian identity. Daugavpils was the second largest city in Latvia, a status which it retains to this day, and the feeling was that it needed a worthy center of cultural activities way out here in the boonies, far from Rīga. It certainly got one.

The theater is somewhat amazing in the number of productions in mounts. It's the only theater in the country where Russian and Latvian actors work side by side, and occasionally productions will be in Latgalian, the old language of Latgale, as well as in Russian and Latvian. There is a production at least once a week and sometimes more often. Generally a show will play one night, and then, I assume, move somewhere else in the country. This means that the average Daugavpilian could see 30 to 40 professional productions a year (assuming that the theater is quieter in the summer). Most American cities ten times the size of Daugavpils could not match that output, and certainly not by the work of a single theater. The range and frequency of shows is remarkable. Comedies, tragedies, classics -- Chekhov to Shakespeare to domestic farces to stand-up one-woman shows -- you name it, Daugavpils Teātris presents it.

 I haven't taken in a lot of theater since I've been here -- not having the language is a severe handicap in this regard -- but I have spent a fair amount of time in the koncertzāle ("KON-sert-zah-luh"), or concert hall. To give you sense of the range of events that happen here, it's worth noting that in the course of ten days, I watched the Belorussian Theater and Dance Company from Minsk perform Swan Lake in the theater, heard the United State Army Band (Europe) perform in the concert hall, and the day after that heard a group of jazz musicians jamming all night in the open space that had cabaret seating set up (and a bar conveniently located next door) as part of Daugavpils' month-long jazz festival. This sort of endless, wildly varied programming is typical. Here are a couple of photos from those last two concerts.

That signage above reads "Fifteenth International Jazz Festival," in case you were wondering, and this jam session was totally cool. Musicians just wandered in and out of the sextet, rotating constantly, and playing whatever struck their fancy. At any time, I am guessing that five nations were represented in each sextet at any given time. In case you didn't know, Poland has a huge jazz culture, and apparently Belarus is not far behind. The U.S. Army band is about as crackerjack an ensemble as you can imagine. Most if not all of the musicians are professional caliber, and they are really disciplined; they are, after all, in the Army.

Ticket prices would make an American green with envy. The full-length ballet was 3 euros (about $3.25). The band concert was free. The cover for the jazz concert was 2 euros ($2.15). The most I have ever paid for a concert here is 6 euros, and that involved a well-known Latvian folk singer and his many musician friends. All 45 of them. I don't know how the ticket prices are set up other than to say that they must be subsidized somehow. A surprising number of concerts are free. If you don't see a ticket price on the poster, you assume that it is.

The nicest thing is that concerts are often scheduled early in the evening. They typically start at 18:00 (6:00 pm) or 18:30 (6:30), so that you're home at a decent hour and your workday tomorrow isn't shot. It also means that it's really easy to bring kids to a concert, and everybody does. Training children from an early age to attend public events like this is an excellent idea in that they learn early on how to behave in such events, and they also learn to support community events like the arts. Latvians get this right, and it shows.

Multicultural

I spent Wednesday afternoon with fellow Fulbrighter and musciologist Justine Koontz here in Daugavpils at the Polish Cultural Center. Justine has been researching Latvia's choral traditions, which are sort of astonishing, and a side interest has the been the existence of the many cultural centers in virtually every town or city in Latvia that help support choral activities. A town's cultural center, to put it simply, is where the town's citizens make art. They sing, they dance, they paint, they write poetry -- whatever their creative passion might be. These centers have played a huge role in preserving Latvia's folk culture. I may be wrong, but I think that they were set up by the Soviets, no doubt to help acculturate comrades to the greater glories of socialism. Even so, if I am correct, this is one thing that the Soviets actually got right, even if their motives were ideologically grounded in the usual communism-for-the-Motherland.

My student Krzysztof accompanied us. He is a Polish Erasmus student studying Russian at Daugavpils University, so he's fluent in Polish, and I figured -- correctly, as it turned out -- that we might need a translator. Krzysztof was nervous about this, though he shouldn't have been. His English is very solid and his Polish superb, and he did a wonderful job acting as our intermediary with Svetlana, one of the lovely staff members at the Center. (For those of you who don't know, Erasmus is an exchange program for students and faculty within the European Union nations.)

What impressed us, first, was the range of activities in the Polish Cultural Center. There are choirs and dance troupes, of course, but also a sizeable lending library of Polish books, an art gallery, a children's center, a kitchen, and exhibits of Polish costumes and cultural artifacts; the place was buzzing with activity as we wandered about. Svetlana told us that Daugavpils is about 15% Polish, so that the linguistic and cultural map of the place is even more complicated than the usual Latvian/Russian paradigm. In fact, Daugavpils was part of Poland at one time, but then it's been part of every neighbor that it has, being a border city in a place with endlessly shifting borders.

What impressed Justine, second, is the fact that there isn't the kind of cultural purity that she sees in Rīga. In other words, cultural centers in Rīga are very concerned with preserving specifically Latvian culture. In Daugavpils, the Polish choir sings works in Polish but also in Latvian, which would not be done in Rīga. Certainly Rīga's status as the capital and hence the center of all things Latviana has something to do with this; one would expect Latvian culture to be the center of discourse. But Rīga's cultural centers -- choirs, dance troupes, what have you -- could acknowledge that Latvia is actually more culturally complex than it first appears. Apparently it chooses not to.

Daugavpils does, though. There is also Russian and a Belorussian cultural centers in town, and to my knowledge none of them is particularly concerned with the kind of cultural purity that is seen in other parts of the country. I've noticed this first hand; I have heard Russian choirs singing in Latvian as well as in Russian. On a more practical level, restaurant menus are always printed in two languages, Latvian and Russian and often three, with English thrown in for good measure. I have not seen Polish on a menu, though I have seen it in other print venues. Justine, whose ear for Slavic languages is far better than mine, said that she heard Polish on the street more than she expected in Daugavpils, which is saying something as well.

It is common knowledge that Daugavpils is the most culturally diverse city in Latvia. It's also common knowledge that it's the city that most Latvians don't like very much, even if they have never been there, and Daugavpilians have a self-effacing attitude about living there themselves, as if they are supposed to apologize for being from Daugavpils. As someone who was born and raised in Flint, Michigan -- another aging industrial town that Michiganians love to hate -- I can say with authority that I understand this attitude only too well. I totally get Latvia's concern with preserving its own culture, and it also seems to me that the kind if multiculturalism that Daugavpils has is seen at some level as a mild threat to Latvian-ness. I am not singling out Latvia for criticism here. As the United States grows ever more diverse, there is more and more pushback against the "other," as we have seen with the election of a president whose entire platform was based on "America first," America being defined as straight, Christian, white men who have determined that their endless privileges are under threat from everybody. (It might be fairer to say that the American pie should be divided more equitably, and that doing so would be a good thing.)

Daugavpils could be and should be the model for Latvia and the Baltics about how to make multiculturalism work. There are certainly tensions here about identity, but they are not overwhelming, and I hope that Daugavpils sees its diversity as a genuine asset and not a liability. I would be putting this kind of information about various cultures living here on the tourist brochures, and Daugavpils University has already started capitalizing on this: it advertises that one can study Russian in the most Russian city located in the EU, and many students from all over the world do just that. The Polish Cultural Center's work in seriously preserving Polish culture while acknowledging that this Polish culture is infused with other cultures seems to be a model for this. As Justine put it, "When you never know who your neighbors are going to be in ten years, it's a good idea to get along with them." Exactly.  

 

Vilnius 2

Vilnius is a city I wandered around more than took photos of. It is eminently suitable for wandering; its Old Town is large, and the street layout is as bewildering as Rīga's is. Here are some of the few photos that I took. This first is, to my mind, the ubiquitous Vilnius shot. Wherever you look, there is always a church tower or steeple peering out over all the other buildings. I like the contrast of colors here, how the setting sun captures different shades of stone.

Vilnius is lucky to have a little river running through town (as well as a big one). This is the river Vilnia, which is really more of a stream. It loops around Old Town, and in one of its loops sits the groovy neighborhood Užupis. You have to cross little bridges to get to Užupis, which adds to its sense of being set apart from the rest of Old Town. Here's one of the bridges with one of the Orthodox churches in the background. You can see that spring is getting seriously started in Lithuania. By the way, an interior design feature that I saw consistently in the Orthodox churches in Vilnius was the use of marquee lights. Seriously. The Greek letters for "Christ" were spelled out in one church over the icon screen in marquee lights, as if Ethel Merman were going to show up to belt out some Russian chant. 

Here's a panorama from the top of tower in the Museum of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which is one of the former palaces. There's a castle on a hill nearby where I'm sure the view is even better, but that would required climbing the hill. Kathy Knapp, my fellow Fulbrighter, has run up there on one of her morning sprints, and we agreed that sitting down and having lunch in an outdoor café was a far better plan. Unfortunately, the photo doesn't do justice to the view. One of the pleasures of the Vilnius skyline is seeing it punctuated in all directions by Catholic, Lutheran, and Orthodox church spires. 

And this is just a typical street scene, here snapped from the portal of St. Anne's Catholic Church, a little gem of a church and dripping in Gothic-style brickwork. This seems to me to be another ubiquitous snapshot of Vilnius -- churches in the foreground, churches in the background, and cobblestones galore. 

Having said all that, it's also worth noting that Vilnius may look like a museum set but it isn't one. There are loads of tourists, yes, but once you get into the regular neighborhoods, like the one where my hotel was located, you can see that this is very much a working town, filled with ordinary people doing their laundry, walking their kids in strollers, going to their yoga classes, and chatting with their friends in outdoor cafés. You can tell that winter is long in the Baltics because once the outdoor cafés open, they are simply flooded with people who have been cooped up too long in overheated apartments. Daugavpils, three hours to the north, has opened up its outdoor cafés with a vengeance. Every restaurant that can have one does have one. Spring has come, the voice of the turtle is in the land, and the beer is flowing. 

Triviana Latviana 4

I have now joined the ranks of the Latvians, having taken flowers to my dean for her name day. (See previous post.) This extremely Latvian behavior involves both the giving of flowers and the recognition of a name day. You just can't get more Latvian than that. In her office, there were already bouquets galore, a nice spread of salmon on bruschetta, Lithuanian cream cake (of course), Latvian sausages, sweet cheese, crab salad, cookies, and coffee. You have to give it to the Baltics: they celebrate at the drop of a hat, and the celebrations involve great food. And lots of it.

Last week there were three holidays in Latvia. 1 May is Workers' Day, May Day elsewhere in the world. I am unsure if this is a legacy of Soviet times -- I do know that in Moscow, this was a day for a big parade that showed off military hardware -- but here it seems that it is theoretically about workers. I didn't see a lot of celebrating for this, but this might be analagous to the United States' Labor Day, which is really an excuse for a three-day weekend. For non-American readers, Labor Day is always the first Monday in September, and it (un)officially marks the end of summer.

The second holiday, 4 May, is Independence Day, though I am not sure that it's called that. I don't exactly know what the official name is, which is mildly confusing because Latvia has two independence days, as near as I can tell. The first one in 18 November, which marks the birth of the Latvian nation in 1918 (100 years next year! Bring on the cake and coffee!). Every city in the country has a 18 Novembra iela (18 November Street), which tells you that this is an important day. The May holiday marks the independence from the Soviet Union, which for Latvians is an equally important day. There was considerable fuss on this day; the Latvian flag was hung everywhere (all buildings have flagpoles attached to them for this purpose), there was singing and dancing in the city square, there were special concerts, there was a craft fair. It's a big deal.

The third, 9 May, celebrates the end of the World War II, and this one is celebrated primarily by Russians in Latvia; at the time, after all, Latvia was still a Soviet republic. It is difficult for an American to fully comprehend the colossal devastation and loss of life that the Soviet Union endured for the five years of war. Estimates are about 27 million deaths, though nobody honestly knows. There were a number of very old men and women with their medals on their jackets. They are perhaps the children of war veterans because the actual veterans would now be in their late 80s and 90s. Everybody else wore ribbons in orange and black, which gave the whole affair a Hallowe'en air, though I am sure that was not the intent. The color of the ribbons must mean something, though I am not sure what. There were enormous numbers of flowers laid at the WWII memorial in the park adjacent to my flat, and there were fireworks that evening. I know this because they started outside my window within thirty seconds of my going to bed. I of course got up and watched them, figuring that I would be a little fuzzy in my 8:00 morning class the next day, and indeed I was.

 One of the pleasures of being in Latvia is drinking the endless beers that are available here. You haven't heard of any of them. My new favorite is a light beer, perfect for summer, brewed in nearby Kraslava ("KRAHSS-lah-vuh") and called, logically enough, Kraslava. There's also a dark beer that I need to try. Valmiermuīža ("VOLL-meer-mwee-zhuh") is another superb beer, recommended by former Fulbrighter Steven Vickers. It is dark and foamy; you sort of eat it rather than drink it. I think I've mentioned Lielvārdes ("LEEL-var-des," just like it's spelled) already as well. Latvia is not a wine-producing country so much, though I am told that the northernmost winery in Europe is actually in Latvia. But you can get great wine here from all over Europe. French and Italian wines would be the obvious choices, but I have discovered table wines from Moldova. Moldova is one of the great wine nations of the world, and you probably didn't know this. Some wine experts say that the best wines in the world come from Moldova, but they are totally unknown because it was another Soviet republic that never exported its goods. Others among you may not even be aware that there is such a country as Moldova, but there is. Consult a European map. That is, consult a recent European map.

Though I have not explored them much, there are lots and lots of vodkas from Russia that you have never heard of if you're American. My take is that if the label is in Cyrillic, then it's a real Russian vodka and maybe not exported at all. The range of vodkas is remarkable, as is the Russian capacity for drinking it. My Russian comrades are more than happy to share their expertise in this burgeoning field.

Spring is slowly springing in Latvia, and one of the manifestations of this is that daylight hours are extremely long. Latvia is pretty far north, as you see if you look at a map of Europe. Maine, by contrast, is at the same latitude as southern France, which usually surprises Mainers because the weather sure isn't comparable. This means that here in Latvia dusk occurs later and later and later. Currently it's at about 10:30 pm, which is very disorienting to me. Darkness at home is a visual signal that it's time to go to bed, but it just doesn't get dark here. And we are still a month away from the summer solstice, which is a huge celebration in Latvia. Daybreak is about 5:00. My biological clock will be permanently altered by the time I go home.

For the record, Latvia, like most of Europe, uses what Americans call military time. 10:30 pm is actually 22:30 -- that is, the twenty-second hour of the day. 3:00 pm is 15:00, 6:15 pm is 18:15, and so on. This takes some getting used to. It took me a month to figure out that all you do is subtract 12 from the number that looks odd, and you get American time. I am a bit slow, but now I manage it fine.

My phone company, LMT, has given all of its customers free internet all week on their smartphones. To what do we owe this corporate benevolence? Why, the world hockey championships, of course. LMT wants to assure all Latvians that they will not miss a minute of the Latvian national team beating all the other European teams -- which so far they have done. I don't know what to make of this corporate policy other than to find it delightful. Today Latvia is playing the United States. I have prudently chosen to not take sides, a fact that bewildered my adult English class. As you can imagine, they have taken sides.

Vilnius

I wasn't in Lithuania long enough to really write very intelligently about it, nor even in the capital Vilnius to really do it justice. I had a three days' holiday there on our spring break, where I met up with Kathy Knapp of the University of Connecticut -- another Fulbrighter who is teaching at Vilnius University this term. We met at the Fulbright orientation meeting last summer in Washington, D.C., and made plans to meet some time. So here we are! That's St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in the background. What this photo does not capture is the hordes of European tourists everywhere. The Baltics are not on most North Americans' itineraries (yet), but Europeans sure have discovered them.

Vilnius is a lovely city built on hills so that there are lots of interesting vistas. Its Old Town is one of the largest in Europe and mostly beautifully restored. In particular, there are Baroque Catholic churches. Lithuania is a very Catholic country compared to Latvia and Estonia, and the churches apparently came into money in the Baroque period with the rise of the Grand Ducky of Lithuania, which ruled over a considerable chunk of central northern Europe. So most of the churches are dripping with statuary and fancy drippings, all designed to send you into celestial orbit. But my favorite was this little gem, St. Anne's, which has some Baroque features but never lost its essential Gothic vibe.

I mostly walked around the city, which is compact, dense, and very walkable. The fact that there is a cafe every ten meters helped, where you could get your morning, afternoon, and/or evening kava. Lithuanian is closely related to Latvian, but they are not mutually intelligible. So just when I felt I was getting the hang on one language, I had to deal with yet another one. Probably more people spoke English in Lithuania, though, which was helpful.

It is a museum city, as is fitting for a capital. It does have some rivalry, though, with Kaunas, about 90 kilometers to the west, which sees itself as the cultural capital and Lithuanian heart of the country. That said, the Lithuanian Picture Gallery is sort of the national gallery, and it seems to be housed in what was a house in the city's core. You feel as if you are wandering around someone's private space, someone with good taste and a lot of blank walls. The Museum of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was kind of a wash, on the other hand. It has lots of good stuff but not much in terms of explaining why the stuff is important. You start in the foundations of what was the castle, and the ruins are marked as, well, ruins. "Here is the rubble from when a wall fell in the fourteenth century." And sure enough, that's rubble in front of you. That sort of thing. Here is a pot. Here are a bunch of bombard balls from the sixteenth century (sort of a precursor to cannon balls). Yeah, yeah, but what's the story behind all this? I was glad that Kathy was with me for this museum. Cracking jokes about all this stuff made it quite fun.

The best part of Vilnius is Užupis, a little neighborhood tucked in the bend of the Vilna River. This is where the hipsters live, so much so that the neighborhood has adopted its own constitution which is posted on one of the street walls in 25 different languages. Among its provisions:

• Everybody has the right to be sad. 
• Everybody has the right to celebrate or not celebrate their birthday. 
• Every dog has the right to be a dog.
• A cat is not obligated to love its owner, but it must help out if help is needed. 

I could live under such a constitution. Here is Užupis's main crossroad, and just up this street is a terrific Italian restaurant where I had a little glass of the house wine and some excellent pasta. This is something that I have missed in Latvia. Though there is pizza galore, there is a dearth of real Italian cooking in Daugavpils. Someone should open a restaurant -- I'm just sayin'.

Cisneros in Latvia

Each year, the U.S.A. Information Center in Daugavpils (an outreach branch of the U.S. Embassy in Latvia) hosts a literary event in one of the area high schools, this year at the Russian Lyceum. The event consists of a group of educators choosing a book that speaks to the American experience. High schoolers and high school teachers from all over the city read it and then meet to discuss it. It's like a book club, though on a rather grander scale.

This year the committee that organizes this event chose the book that I suggested: Sandra Cisneros's coming-of-age novel The House on Mango Street. I suggested it for a number of reasons: 1) it's short, which is no small consideration with readers for whom English is not their first language; 2) it's also very poetic, so it would present some challenge to these very skilled English readers; 3) it's taught everywhere from elementary schools to graduate schools in different contexts, so it's an easy teach; and 4) it offers a Latino prism on American culture that would likely be unfamiliar to Latvians. If you haven't read it, go do so, and you may thank me later for the recommendation.

Here are some photos of the day, which took place on April 18. First, me and the teachers, followed by one of the lead organizers Irīna Bučinska. Then there's the auditorium at the Russian lyceum itself, which I sort of dig with its Balt Deco styling.

The most important participants of the day, however, were the diligent students, who gathered, discussed, and presented on Cisneros's prose-poetry novel. To my knowledge, this is the first time that Cisneros has been taught in Latvia. I hope it won't be the last.

There are more photos on the Info Center's Facebook page, and lots more information about its many programs. As always, thanks to coordinator extraordinaire Natalija Oševerova for making all of this happen. The event concluded with more free books for these readers from the Embassy and, of course, chocolate for everybody.