The Network

One of the great pleasures of traveling is putting together the network of people who make your travels seamless. Whether you intentionally work on putting this network together or not -- and I seem to be gifted at putting it together without trying very hard -- it's doubtless a very useful thing to have.

Case in point is my first night in Riga. I met Justine Koontz, a musicologist graduate student at Butler University in Indianapolis, at the Fulbright pre-departure orientation in Washington, DC this summer. Justine is studying Latvian choral music (Latvia is a world capital of choral music, FYI), is a composer as well, and is currently studying at the Riga Conservatory. How cool is that? I received an email from her via Facebook inviting me to dinner on Monday, my first night in Latvia. It turns out that she is staying 10 minutes from my hotel. How easy could that be?

Justine is my Facebook friend because I sang in an early music ensemble in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the early 2000s. Seriously. The director, Chris Wolverton, is now on the faculty at Northwestern University in metro Chicago; he's a theoretical physicist and, obviously, an early music geek. He is friends with Chris Walsh, a choral conductor from Miami University in Ohio, who now lives in Riga, having married a Latvian woman, and conducts a well respected choir there. Chris W(ol.) connected me to Chris W(al.) via Facebook, and I connected Chris W(al.) to Justine. I figured that we should all know each other.

The moral to this story is, first, that Facebook Makes All Things Possible. (Even if you don't like Facebook, there is no denying that it makes this kind of networking really easy.) And second, these connections will help pave your way into a new culture. Chris asked me what part I sing when I contacted him, and though I am not sure I'll be able to sing under his direction, much as I would like to, he is very well connected chorally in the country -- as I expect Justine is becoming as well. So I think that I may be able to explore choral music in a much deeper way than I expected to, and it's in large part because I have these "in"s.

Then there is Uldis, who is a Latvian living somewhere in the American west (California, I think), and who happens to have been very good childhood friends with my niece Amy when they were growing up in Glendale, Arizona. Amy put us together, and Uldis is a linguist who just finished his Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He is sending me all kinds of interesting stuff about Latvian, Russian, and English as the languages in Daugavpils, and I'm learning a lot about the complicated language politics of Latvia. He's also recommending places to go visit in the country when I'm there. I had no idea Amy knew any Latvians until five days ago, when she contacted me, and then when Uldis followed suit.

And the nice thing is that Chris, Justine, and Uldis are just part of my now Latvian network. My soon-to-be colleagues Irina, Sandra, and Jelena are also now drawn into my Daugavpils/Latvia network, not to mention the folks at the American Embassy there, among others. So, if you are traveling somewhere off the beaten path, tell people where you are going. Jump at any opportunity to meet anybody who might have a connection to that place because, well, you just never know. I certainly didn't.