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.