Sunday Pankukas

Natalija, who runs the USA Information Center in Daugavpils for the U.S. Embassy in Riga invited me over on Sunday for pankūkas ("pahn KOOK uhs"), that is, pancakes. As it is in most of the Christian world, this was the week before Lent, and I write this on Mardi Gras, the day before the Lenten season starts. Here in Latvia and, I presume, in Russia, the whole week before Lent is a time to eat lots of fatty foods and generally make merry. Most of you probably know that Mardi Gras means in French "Fat Tuesday," and it's the day that you clear the fats out of your kitchen by cooking them up so that you can start your Lenten fasting properly on Ash Wednesday. Here it means, as it does in the Anglican tradition, eating pancakes, as many in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States do. In Poland, it means eating jelly donuts known as pączki ("POONCH key"). In general, some kind of filling, fatty food is the norm.

With Natalija, who is ethnically Russian, it means eating blini, those thin Russian pancakes that are similar to French crêpes. I learned how to make them, and given that I already know how to make crêpes, it was easy -- they are pretty much the same thing. We filled them with blueberry and gooseberry conserves and lots of sour cream, the way Russians do, on the assumption that one needs a lot of fat in one's diet in order to get through a long St. Petersburg winter. Here is Natalija, her daughter Veronika, her friend Zane, and her other daughter Emilija. I obviously am taking the photo.

A less familiar tradition is a Russian/Latvian one of burning an effigy of a very tall (maybe 20 feet high) woman figure made of straw before Lent starts. This has, frankly, nothing to do with Christianity, but everything to do with goodbye to winter, which is what she represents. I saw this on the market square in Daugavpils this weekend at a sort of outdoor carnival with merchants, craftspeople, and lots of Russian choirs in folk costumes. (The ones singing traditional Russian folk songs seemed appropriate, and the ones singing cheesy Russian pop a bit less so.) This tradition is a reminder that, for all the Christianity in this part of the world, the Baltics were actually the last part of Europe to get Christianized, and there are a lot of pagan practices still floating around, sometimes attached to Christian traditions and sometimes not. Easter itself is a case in point. Why is the primary holiday -- which is holy day, after all -- of the Christian year named for Eostre, a pagan fertility goddess? My guess is that for the average Latvian, the answer is: why not?

More Buildings of Daugavpils

Here are more shots of buildings in Daugavpils' Old Town. The first is probably the most photographed Art Nouveau building in the city. It is very fancy for what I think is just a pharmacy. You might view the photo so that you can see it close up. There are some very cool sculptural elements around the door, and I totally dig the tower.

I also like the juxtaposition of this building against its neighbor.

And as you have probably noticed, little tiny balconies are a design motif in the Baltics. The vast majority of buildings in Old Town have them. They all seem to be operable -- the upper floors of these buildings are residential, so I hope to see residents hanging out on them when the weather gets warmer.

This first photo is on one of the side streets in Old Town. I like the severe symmetry of the windows. The second photo is another building on the pedestrian mall, and it clearly follows the unwritten building code that requires little overhanging balconies.

The pedestrian mall is clearly the place in Daugavpils to see and be seen. Some of the cafejnīcas, notably Vēsma, have outdoor seating, so you drink your Aldaris, the alus (beer) brewed in Riga, and watch the scene.

Riksi

I went last night to Atilerijas Pagrabi to hear Rikši ("REEK shee" with a rolled "r") live last night. This quintet describes itself as a post-folk band. They are terrific.

You should probably know that, if my information is correct, Latvia has the largest body of folk songs in the world -- or, more accurately, the largest body that's been transcribed. This is a result of the National Revival in the nineteenth century, when all the Baltic states started asserting their own unique cultures, and in singing countries like these, it meant in part collecting, transcribing, and performing this huge body of music. I have heard that something like 36,000 songs were transcribed then, and I assume that this body of music has been added to since. For a small country, that is a lot of music. Rikši specializes in this stuff, but don't picture a mass chorus of serious Soviet singers, dressed in period folk garb and dutifully singing to glorify the Motherland. No no no -- Rikši is a bunch of young, talented hipsters who happen to love this music, and they would make you love it too.

First, the instrumentation is been hipped up a bit. The foundation is the bass, played by Ivars Utāns, and acoustic guitar (electrified for amplification, but not an electric guitar), played by Mārcis Lipskis. These rock instruments are joined by more traditional ones: Madara Broliša on fiddle and Zane Dukaļska on the hand drum that looks to be a relative of the Irish bodhrán. (For the record, these are the two women in the group; Zane is a woman's name in Latvian.) Finally, there's lead singer Ērics Zeps on accordian, which in the U.S. is an instrument most associated with polka bands playing Wisconsin supper clubs on Saturday night. As my Fulbright colleague and musicologist Justine Koontz has pointed out on her blog, in the Baltics the accordian is given a lot of respect, and why not? It's not an easy instrument to play, less so when you're singing as well. Which they all do while they play.

Rikši is a blast because, while the musicians treat this music very seriously, they don't treat it reverently, as if this body of music were a museum piece to be dusted off every ten years or so, performed, and then put back into the display case. They have fun with it, and the pleasure they take in performing is evident when you see them live. I'm not going to describe Latvian folk music very well, other than to say that it's eminently singable, with lots of short verses, plenty of repetition, and reasonable vocal ranges so that singers of a wide range of abilities could sing it. I picked up the tunes immediately, though not the words. And the quality of the singing reminded me that while the Baltics are northern European countries, they are also, to an extent, eastern European as well; Rikši sings with that forthright, full-throated, forward chest voice sound -- especially the women -- that I associate with sturdy peasants who make it clear that they are not be messed with.

The most remarkable thing about the evening was the audience. There was a table of oldsters, including me, but the youngsters outnumbered us by an enormous degree. (Now that I am in my mid-50s and officially an Old Person, I have permission to refer to them as "youngsters.") And they sang along with every song that Rikši played, danced, and had a great time of it. I cannot imagine a similar group of Americans singing "Shenandoah" or "The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night" at a bar. But then it's worth remembering that in a small nation like Latvia, this body of music is very much part of a cultural heritage that people seriously want to preserve precisely because Latvia is a small nation; it's one way to assert one's Latvian-ness in the presence of much larger powers. (Read: Russia, Germany, Poland.) And Latvians were pretty much born in choirs, and they remain there until their voices give out. It's estimated that two out of three Latvians sing in a choir. Note that this does not mean that they have sung in a choir at some point; it means that, at any given time, two out of three Latvians are currently singing in a choir. This is astonishing to me. No wonder they organized a "singing revolution" to throw off the Soviet yoke.

You might want to head over to Rikši's home page and listen to some clips. You can like them on Facebook too, and Artilerijas Pagrabi's Facebook page has a slew of photos of the evening, some of them with yours truly in them. Rikši's webpage is in Latvian, but you can probably figure it out, so click on the links and check them out: www.riksi.lv.

The Buildings of Daugavpils

The Old Town of Daugavpils is about 25 square blocks of early to late nineteenth-century buildings in various states of repair and disrepair. I'll be posting lots of more photos of them in the weeks and months to come, but this morning was sunny -- something that seems to be atypical of Latvia this time of year -- so I thought I had better take some photos while the taking was good.

Riga gets all the credit for having lots and lots Art Nouveau buildings, justifiably so. But Daugavpils also has some beauties, such as this wonderful building.

Daugavpils also has a pedestrian mall that's about eight blocks long, and it was one of the first in Latvia, apparently. It is lined with building after building with fancy brickwork and lovely scrolls and curlicues and anything else you could possibly imagine in mortar. Here are just a couple of random ones:

The first is just a typical street corner. The building itself sells mebeles or furniture. (This must be distantly related to the French meubles, "movables," which means the same thing.) The second is a tejas un kafijas veikals -- coffee and tea store where you buy teapots, expensive European coffeemakers, loose tea, and coffee beans. In general, if you want to translate something that you read on a store sign, go into the store, poke around and look at what they are selling, and you are likely to figure it out.

The upper stories of these buildings are flats that are generally occupied, depending on the state of the building. Some building clearly need work, but even if the ground level is unoccupied, often the upper stories are full of flats. So Old Town Daugavpils is full of people who live there; it doesn't empty out at night the way so many American cities do. The pedestrian mall is busy from sunrise till well after sunset. It is a pleasure to people watch on it, and will become more so when the weather gets better.

One of the pleasures of wandering around Daugavpils is looking at all the old buildings. Of course, here and there a building fell into such disrepair that it came down and was replaced by something more twentieth-century in design -- that is to say, plain, stark, and frankly not very interesting. But if the architecture does not always respect the streetscape that it is imbedded in, in general the scale of the architecture does. Thankfully, there are no enormously hulking buildings that are totally out of line with what is surrounding them. To its credit, Daugavpils got that right.

Imbir Cafe

The Imbir Café is about three blocks from the University, and it's a tiny, neat-as-a-pin café run by a very nice young Russian couple. The Imbir specializes in pankukas -- pancakes, but really more like crêpes and filled with both sweet and savory fillings. They also serve kafija and teja, and cakes -- but their real stock in trade are their macaroons, which are incredibly good. This place is usually jammed solid; here's a quieter moment when I was there drinking a cup of kafija and eating macaroons.

My Flat

A couple of dedicated readers have been asking for photos of my flat. My cell phone plan doesn't allow for a lot of data, which is why I will need to change it with LMT (Latvijas Mobile Tele), but I managed to get these through.

I live in an a 1960s- or '70s-era apartment building that was erected by the Soviets to house the huge numbers of industrial workers flooding into Daugavpils. From the outside, the building is nothing to write home about, but when Latvia declared its independence, people could buy their apartments. Previous to that, the Soviet Union owned everything in the Soviet Union, making it the world's largest landlord; you rented from the government. When people could actually own their apartments, they had far more incentive to fix them up. My landlord, Jans Rimvids, renovated this little flat, and I am the first one to live in the renovation. It's a little studio, done up in sleek IKEA-type furniture. Quaint it is not, but comfortable it certainly is. More photos to follow.

Roll with the Punches

My second week of teaching at Daugavpils University has been a week of rolling with the punches. When you have a Fulbright, what you think you might be doing in your guest institution and what you really end up doing may not be the same thing.

My colleague Irina, whose courses I would be visiting over the term and guest lecturing, is still ill -- so much so that she has is in Riga, three hours away, for testing. I didn't know what this meant, exactly, and I thought that her condition was serious. The equivalent where I live in the States would be going to Boston, also three hours away, for testing, and that would mean that something is serious. Here, not so much, apparently; going to Riga for treatment seems to be routine. But in any event, Irina is out for the week, and next week -- well, who knows.

So I spent another week substituting in her classes. This doesn't bother me in the least; I am enjoying myself immensely doing what, after all, I came here to do. But I was concerned about what this might mean long term if Irina isn't able to come back to the classroom immediately. When I expressed this concern, my colleagues, through not fault of their own, misinterpreted my feelings and assumed that I was very unhappy about the situation, which is not the case. So I went to my new chair (it was Irina, and now it is Ilze standing in as a substitute) and the Dean of the humanities faculty to assure them that everything is fine. When people get sick, you fill in for them. It's as simple as that.

That said, the substituting is pointing up many of the extreme differences between the American system of higher education and the Latvian system. The history of the English language course here is really a course in the philology of Old English, at least in the first term: a week is devoted to the study of Old English verb forms, a week to noun forms, a week to adjective forms, and so on. My course -- and American courses in general -- is really a course in cultural history, looking at the larger picture of how languages change over time and what that means culturally and historically. Our system is geared to a literature program, and theirs is geared to a linguistics program. So while I am more than happy to discuss Anglo-Saxon culture, language, and literature -- any excuse to show students Anglo-Saxon jewelry from the Staffordshire Hoard and look at manuscripts like the Lindisfarne Gospels is OK in my book -- there will come a point where I won't be equipped to teach this course. I'm not there yet, but I will be. (If you're interested, Google "Staffordshire Hoard" and "Lindisfarne Gospels" and feast your eyes.)

In the meantime, I was told to continue teaching it as I would at home, which is fine. At home, however, I would have a textbook, and students would have it as well. Here, the work of the course is based entirely on my lectures, with some online supplements. Because in the Latvian system students do not buy their own books, I'm at a real disadvantage because I can't assume that we are all on the same page, quite literally. This is especially true in Irina's literature course in 20th-centruy American literature. I lectured on American modernism last week, and this week we looked at some lyric imagist poems of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Carl Sandburg. But I found them online at the excellent website poetryfoundation.org, and we read them in class as a class. This was a new experience for my students. They had simply never read texts together in a class, which is of course one of the basic ways that we teach in the States, everybody with the same book open to the same page. Here, rather, students are given reading lists and expected to read on their own. In class they won't have a text in front of them at all, which makes it hard to do close reading, and impossible to construct meaning as a community of readers. This is especially true of long texts like Pound's Cantos; the only way to teach such a text is to zero in on particulars, and I won't be able to do that. The emphasis here is much more on the teacher as expert, and students are adept at note-taking. I don't say this to criticize the Latvian system, which seems to work; it's just that I can't quite figure out how to make my pedagogy, which is so central to how I teach that it's never occurred to me to question it in any way, work in this very different system.

I will find this harder as I guest lecture in Jeļena's course in early British literature, which was added to the schedule at the last minute, to my surprise, and given that I trained in this stuff, my delight as well. Students here, even though they are reading British and American literature, don't necessarily read it in English. With limited copies of texts, they often read in their native languages of Russian or Latvian. I appreciate this limitation, but it will be hard to teach Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and not talk about his glorious language: Shakespeare is of course all about the language. I can demonstrate some basics about blank verse, of course, but to not be able to really dig into the poetry . . .

Before I left for Latvia, I was advised by my colleague Lisa, who taught in Slovenia on a Fulbright fellowship, to roll with the punches. She was right. I don't mean to present this as whining because, honestly, once I'm in front of a classroom, I take charge and thoroughly enjoy lecturing about material that I find fascinating. But I do feel a bit like a square peg in a round hole, trying to figure out how to fit in.

I will say that once my colleagues were assured that I was more than happy to go into the trenches and teach what was needed where it was needed, they have expressed deep gratitude. "You're always smiling," Ilze noted, which I'm sure is not true. But teaching is in fact a lot of fun, and I really like how my students are responding, speaking up, and getting less shy about not having a full command of English. (I keep telling them that their English skills beat my Russian and Latvian skills by a country mile.) The good thing is that we're all very aware that we're working on melding two very different systems, and this lead to really productive pedagogical conversations down the road. In the meantime, we all continue to roll with the punches.

Haircut

Everything, even the most mundane of tasks, is an adventure in a country where you don't speak the language. I have needed a haircut ever since I arrived in Latvia, and hair salons are everywhere; you just look for a sign that says "frizētava" or some variation thereof, and you have found one. On the other hand, finding one where you can explain to a stylist how you get your hair cut is a different matter altogether.

Enter Uģis Urtāns, a teacher in one of the Daugavpils secondary (high) schools, who I met at a public library presentation on my third day in Daugavpils. It turns out that he lives in the building next to mine, is working on his master's degree in translatology, I think, at Daugavpils University, and has become my indispensable translator when I need it. He came with me to arrange a cell phone service plan, for example, and said that he knew a good place for a basic haircut.

And so he did, navigating the language barrier for me so that I could look a bit less shaggy. And he actually stayed throughout the entire haircut in case I needed any help. I think that he likes to practice his English, so I hope he feels that this is a mutually beneficial relationship. I promised him to visit his school and meet his English club.

At any rate, now I have a hair cutter. She speaks only Russian, but I have her business card and have been told that all I need to do is come to the salon, point to her name, and they will schedule me with her. It's heartening to know that people really do want to help you when you need it, and if depend on the kindness of strangers, they will almost always come through.

Teaching, Week 1, Part 2

My American literature courses went well, I think. The students are in the third year, which may be why they were a bit more vocal. As it turns out, my lecture on American modernism (a subject I have never lectured on before, and I think I did a pretty creditable job, all things considered) was a recap of the end of their last course which ended with modernism. I gave it an specifically American slant, discussing the Great Migration north, the suffrage movement, the lost generation, and so on. So some of the material was new. And it's fun to talk about innovative forms in theater; Thornton Wilder's Our Town is a play that they were not familiar with, and perhaps they should be. It's a heck of a lot more accessible than Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, which is on their reading list . . .

My other colleague, Jeļena Semeneca, is teaching the early British literature course, which was not originally on the schedule, and all of a sudden is. It's unclear to me how courses get scheduled here; I understood that this course would not be taught this term, and I brought my notes that I have when I teach our equivalent. Now it is scheduled, and it seems to me that for an institution that seems to have a fairly regimented curriculum, there's more flexibility than one might think. Part of this might be due to the fact that chairperson Sandra Meškova, is on sabbatical this term, so things are in a bit of a flux. As my colleagues Ellen and Lisa, both of whom have had Fulbright fellowships, said, roll with the punches. So OK.

Jeļena's first class was instructive. As she is not a specialist in early British literature (she works more in the nineteenth century), I will be doing a fair amount of lecturing, starting with Beowulf  next week. She spoke more about the functions of literature, asking students why we read literature. It's both an easy and difficult question; we assume that it's a good thing to do to the extent that we don't really consider why we do it (or, more accurately, why it might be a good thing). The discussion was instructive in that it really underlined some of the differences between an Eastern European orientation and an American one about what a literature program is all about. First, she emphasized that the goal of their papers was to present "scientific objective reality" about a text. I've not heard this kind of language in a literature course before and certainly have never used it myself. I am guessing that it reflects a (maybe Soviet) attitude that literature must be "scientific" in order to be on par with the other sciences, both theoretical and applied. To translate this into the terms that I use in my class, the goal of a student essay isn't simply to personally respond to a text, but to analyze it; that is, step outside of one's personal response to explore what formed that response. I think that Jeļena and I emphasize the same things, but we extremely different language to do so.

The rest of the discussion was equally instructive. The students struggled with the many ideas as to why one reads literature. Some of them are easy: one reads for pleasure, for information. But some of them were much more subtle: one reads for linguistic knowledge, for example. (This is perfectly true, though it's certainly more true when you're reading outside your mother language. I learn a lot of French grammar when I struggle through a French text, for example. I'm certainly not reading for pleasure, or very much pleasure.) One reads for ideology: texts reflect a world frame that one adopts and/or resists, at least for the duration of reading the text. Students really struggled with the idea that one reads for moral instruction, perhaps because we don't necessarily read for that much in contemporary literature. It's central to medieval and Renaissance literature, of course, as Renaissance writers are always telling you, so that I will be able to leverage Jeļena's opening lecture in very interesting ways.

I have not thought of literary study as particularly scientific, as that's not the premise from which we work -- exactly the opposite, in fact, which is why so many in the West look at our discipline as kind of mushy in that it's so value laden. It's going to be very interesting to continue this conversation over the course of the spring and see in what other ways the very premises that undergird how I think about my discipline will be challenged -- and, I expect, how I will challenge my Latvian colleagues and students in return.

Teaching, Week 1

I have finished lecturing my first week at Daugavpils University, and if feels very good to be doing what, after all, the State Department is underwriting me to do in Latvia. It was a relatively stress-free week, but it was also a bit trial by fire.

The faculty member that I am working most closely with, Irina Presņakova, took ill last week, seriously enough that she needed to be hospitalized. This meant that her first week of classes would 1) be cancelled or 2) be led by me. I don't like to cancel classes, partly because in my home institution classes meet only once a week (for three hours -- this is to accommodate working adults), so that cancelling a class means cancelling a significant amount of the contact hour time. So I told her of course I would teach the classes, not entirely sure what I would be getting into.

In Latvia, the curriculum for courses is far more regimented than it is in the U.S., with set reading lists for students and pretty strict schedules from which one can't deviate greatly. (I suspect that this is because students take state exams, and everybody must generally cover the same material, but I'm not sure if this is so.) One of Irina's courses is the history of the English language, which she is taking over from Sandra Meşkova, who is on sabbatical. I teach this course in my home institution, but from a very different set of premises. Here, all the students are in a philology department, learning languages so that they can translate -- and hence the history course is very much a course in grammar and language structure. Classes meet once a week for 90 minutes, and the history course lasts all year; it is split into two semesters. The entire first semester is devoted to Old English: one or two weeks on the verb forms, one or two weeks on the noun forms, one week on the adjective forms, and so on. Having taken Old English in grad school, where it was commonly known as Old Anguish for good reasons, this approach would be deadly to me; I couldn't talk about Old English noun cases for two hours, much less two weeks, though students here are well prepared for this kind of work. I, on the other hand, teach the course more from a premise of cultural studies: how does Old English lead us into Middle and Modern English, and how does the language reflect the culture that produced it? might be the way to frame where I start. Of course, I talk about grammar and philology -- one can't avoid this -- but primarily to help my students, who are not trained philologists, understand how Old English differs radically from Modern English.

So, anyway, Irina told me basically to go in and do what I do at home, which I did. Mostly it was history: here are the Celts, here come the Angles/Saxons/Jutes, here come the Vikings, and here is what the linguistic map of the British Isles looked like through these centuries, roughly from Roman Brittania to the end of the Viking Age (400 to, say, 900 A.D.).

I was told that Latvian students were shy and did not speak much. I didn't find this to be the case. Not everybody spoke, of course, but that happens at home as well; most, however, were talkative and genuinely tried to engage, though I have the sense that some of them were unused to actually being asked questions like, "What are some of the Celtic languages?" and "What kinds of words do you think Old English borrowed from Latin, and why?" One of the things I repeatedly say in class at home is "Do you have any questions or comments?", and one student told me point blank that Latvian students are never asked this in a class. I am going to take some getting used to.

Generally, my Latvian students were very attentive, and I had that odd experience of having students writing down everything I said. American students just don't do this, for some reason. (A sign of the times, though: one student looked at the blackboard where I had written a lot of material, pulled out his cell phone, and took a snapshot of it.) I hope that Irina will be happy with the content that I covered early in the term. We will talk in the next few days so that I can prepare her for her return.

Her other course is a course in 20th-century American literature, a field that I am not trained in, though I have read widely. For some reason, this class was livelier -- maybe there's something about reading texts and talking about them that loosens students up in a way that discussing noun cases in Old English doesn't. More on that course in the next blog post. 

Kafejnica

Perhaps one of my Latvian friends will help me out here and give me the proper plural form of kafejnīca. (An update here: I have been informed that the plural is kafenīcas.) Latvian is very inflection-heavy -- there are seven cases for nouns, for example, and it's unlikely that I will even begin to master the subtleties of gender, plurals, polite versus informal forms, and so on in my time here.

But kafejnīcas, which I'll simplify by just calling them cafés, are everywhere. I explored them when I got here because my kitchen in my flat was not fully installed when I moved in, and like everything in the Baltics, what should take two or three hours often takes two or three days. That was fine with me. It was an excuse to explore the many cafés of Daugavpills.

But that's not really a very good translation because there is such a wide range of these kinds of little places. Some of them, I am guessing, are throwbacks to what the Poles under communism called a "milk bar," a worker's cafeteria where you could get a plain, maybe stodgy, but filling lunch on the cheap. Some are rather fancier than that, cafés in the more French sense where you linger over a cup of coffee and a pastry. Some are cafeteria-style; some are sit down-and-be-served. Some are both. All are wonderful.

The thing that distinguishes them from real, full dining experience restaurants is that they tend more toward late breakfast and lunch than dinner; they tend to be busiest over the lunch hour. The cafeteria "milk bar" types like Vēsma or Mego (connected to a Mego supermarket) is that you pick up a tray and choose your food, much the way you did in high school. There is always a zupa (soup) and three or four entrees: fish cakes, chicken cutlets in various cream sauces, breaded pork cutlets. These plump little cutlets are called cepelini ("TSEP eh lee nee") because of their resemblance to, well, a zeppelin. There's usually two or three salati and a dessert case of compotes, puddings, fruit cups, and so on. You point and pick, and a nice lady fills up your plate with largish portions. You pay, you eat, you're done -- generally for about 3 or 4 euros. (The current exchange rate is about 1 euro for $1.07.)

Other cafés like Šokoladņa specialize in little cups of cappuccino and, like its name suggests ("shaw ko LOD nyuh"), chocolates: chocolate covered dates, chocolate mousses, truffles. You don't really eat a full meal here unless you want to go into a sugar coma, but these places tend to be full in the evenings, where people stop after doing their evening shopping for a pick-me-up.

Cafés like Luna (whose tagline is, in English, "Good food. Even better coffee") do a brisk business in coffees, light meals, and pizza, which you can get pretty much everywhere. Luna has cornered the market on Daugavpil's hiperati; a lot of younger students hang out here late at night, some of them obviously on dates, others paying rapt attention to their cell phones. Vēsma also has a part of its restaurant that serves pizza and light meals. This part of the restaurant, confusingly, is called Wasaby [sic], which I couldn't figure out until I saw the complete sushi menu. Vēsma is pretty much everything to everybody.

Others specialize a bit more. I haven't been in a kafejnīca called Ukrainska Hatka, but its menu is Ukrainian, and its zupa of the day must be borscht. Another sells burbuļu teja. I did not expect to find bubble tea in Daugavpils, and my acquaintance Natalija had as hard a time wrapping her head around this concept as I did when I first encountered it on Guam years ago.

It's not hard to eat out here, though I suspect that these cafés do such business because they are generally cheap and filling. Incomes are lower here than in the the U.S. and the rest of the European Union, but this does not stop people from public socializing and seeing and being seen. Hanging out in a kafejnīca is one way to do just that.