Triviana Latviana 2

More in the long line of somewhat random observations about what makes Latvia tick:

I am curious about the little felt hats that I see people wear in the sauna at the University gym, where I swim regularly. In the sauna, many people wear a felt pointed hat that is sometimes printed with the word pirts, which is Latvian for an outdoor sauna, usually a wooden shack heated with a woodstove. I wonder if it's designed to heat your body even more, as if being in a sauna were not making you hot enough.

I have also noticed that only in Latvian supermarkets can you find supplies for your pirts. If you don't have a bundle of birch branches to swat yourself with (supposedly, it releases toxins in your skin and is therefore good for you), you can actually buy them already tied together and bundled for you. They are next to the little felt hats printed with pirts on them.

Latvian windowsills are generally quite deep, which means one can put lots of flowers and plants in them. It seems that there might be a federal law mandating this, because all windowsills have them, even those in public stairwells. I don't know who waters the public area plants, but I have yet to see one with even a single brown leaf on any of them. Orchids are especially popular, but any kind of flowering plant will do. If there is room, there must be several of them.

The Humanities Building of Daugavpils University has locked classrooms which you need a key to open so that you can teach your class. Therefore just inside the front door is a little office that looks like a ticket booth at a train station and contains arguably the most powerful person in the university: the Keeper of the Keys. Keys must be signed out and returned. This is initially bewildering for an American visitor, which has no such system. This means you can't just walk in to your class at 7:59 for an 8:00 class. Your students will be waiting for you, and you had better have remembered to get the door key.

Even plebian, everyday Latvian beers like Aldaris are pretty darn good, but the microbrewed ones are amazingly good. In particular, I am now enamored with something called Valmiermuižas, which is brewed in Rīga. They brew unpasteurized beers that, as my mother would say, would grow hair on your chest. They don't make an enormous number of beers -- a light, a dark, a wheat beer, a porter -- and I am working my way through all of them. Locally, the brewery in Daugavpils, Latgale, makes a very respectable light and dark. The dark is better, but I bet I could drink gallons of the light in the summer.

Next entry on the growing list of TINDs (This Is Not Done): Do not put your coat on the back of your seat in a restaurant or public space with seating. Latvia abounds in standing coatracks, and coats are, logically enough, supposed to be hung on them. There is probably one near your table; there always is. It only holds six coats, you say? It seems to be buried under the weight of at least twenty coats, you say? This is irrelevant. Add your coat to the pile. This Is What is Done.

One of the pleasures of Latvia is the endless array of pastries that, in the name of intercultural research, I am obligated to gobble my way through so that I can report to you about them. You have already read about honey cake (medus kūka), which I am getting addicted to. But there are kūkas galore, not to mention little apple strudels that I eat at least twice a week for breakfast, cherry-filled somethings that I eat at least twice a week for breakfast, and a rotation of others filled with raspberries, prunes, and apricots that I eat the remaining three days of the week. If this seems excessive -- and, well, it is -- it's worth noting that a single pastry costs maybe 30, 40 cents. In the U.S. a single pastry would be $1.50. I am single-handedly closing the Latvian trade deficit by eating pastries. 

 Daugavpils reminds me a lot of Flint, Michigan, where I grew up. Like Flint, Daugavpils had a lot of industry (thank you so much, Soviet Union) that collapsed when the Soviet Union did. Therefore  there are a lot of crumbling factories in town, looking the worse for the wear. (In Flint they have been mostly razed.) Recently having met a very cool British guy and his equally cool Latvian wife who are designers in the largest sense -- graphic designers, interior designers, industrial designers -- it struck me that Daugavpils could well be on the verge of a kind of renaissance, as artists and creative types who are looking for cheap space could move in and do their thing. I'll have more to say about this in a later post on where I think Daugavpils might be headed in the future, but it strikes me that Daugavpils is where Flint was ten years ago, on the verge of rethinking and rebranding itself. It could be very cool, and I don't say that just because Allen and Natalja now live here, though they are certainly helping matters out.

Fast food is not very common in Latvia, but the two major burger chains, SubBurger and HesBurger, are fascinating to visit. Many travelers sneer at the idea of going to a fast food chain when visiting a foreign country. Not me. Fast food, an essentially American concept, is totally worth seeing translated into other cultures. First, the restaurants are bright and cheery and look exactly like a fast food restaurant anywhere else, except you sort of need subtitles. It's when you order that things get slightly weird: what are potato chips doing on a burger? And why is that particular combination called an Arizona Burger, when there is nothing remotely desert-like about it? Why is mayonnaise the condiment of choice, so much of it in fact that the burger keeps sliding off the bun? The one thing I really like is the portion control: there is no super-sizing in Latvia. A Coke is a small Coke. That is your choice, so that you can't overeat the way fat, overfed America does. And I must say that Latvian French fries are excellent.