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In Which I Wish I Wasn't Quite So Obviously English
November 6, 2006 by Mike
Riga
More on Riga, and Latvia. That's what I promised last night. Hmmmmm.
[Ma, you may prefer to just see the pictures today!]
I went into the city centre yesterday, to a *pub* called the Dickens, so what follows is nothing more nor less than self-inflicted. I walked into the pub a few minutes before the West Ham-Arsenal game. I should have known what to expect.
Beer + football + Riga = 'lads'. Brits. On a weekend of booze and birds. Before I'd even reached the bar, a group of three lads hailed me: "Have you had sex yet?"
Excuse me?
"HAVE. YOU. HAD. SEX. YET?" -- as if saying the words slowly and LOUDLY would help them to make more sense.
"Only, we've not found any brothels yet. Only massage parlours, and the birds in them won't have sex with us. Only hand jobs. And we're not after that, are we?"
Well, no, speaking for myself, we're not, are we? Not at all.
Welcome to Riga.
--
Not all the Brits in Riga are like this. Some fly in from Helsinki for less than 24 hours to eat, drink (too much, but not *that* much!), talk the good talk and catch an evening of jazz. Stephen, my host in Helsinki, did exactly that. Hats off to you, sir, seeing yr face cheered me up no end.
The jazz was pretty good - younger musicians with a harder edge than the music we heard in Helsinki. There were a couple of pianists taking turns -- again, I didn't manage to get Stephen to the keyboard. He's got it. He could do it. Stephen, you could! -- and three saxophonists. Make that two saxophonists and an apprentice saxophonist.
What happens inside Stephen's head during a good piano solo...
It was sobering to reflect on what it must have taken to be a jazz musician in the Soviet era. (I'm reading The Gulag Archipelago at the moment, so pretty much everything I see, taste, smell or think at the moment makes me contemplate the Soviet era.)
Which led to thinking about how Finland's recent past has been so different from its neighbours Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Helsinki is only 40 miles from Tallinn across the Gulf of Finland. All four are tiny compared with their next-door neighbour, Roosia. All four were Baltic provinces of imperial Roosia that won national independence in the wake of the October Revolution. But while Finland managed to hold on to that independence in the darkest days of the Second World War, the others were swallowed whole by the Roosian Bear. While Finland allied itself with Nazi Germany, the others were overrun and occupied by it. Finland was a wary, occasionally weak neighbour of the USSR; the others? They were SSRs.
Finland is a Scandinavian country, right? But it shares just as much with Estonia as it does with Sweden. Our perspective, in 2006, is coloured by the history of the last 100 years. If I were updating my website in 1906, and you switched yr steam-powered computating machine on (or told the butler to switch it on for you) we would both agree that Finland was one of the Baltic provinces and not really so Scandinavian at all.
--
The Baltic states get lumped together by the people who live here as well as the rest of us. There's a shared history and culture that binds Estonia to Latvia to Lithuania. The latter two have similar languages too. The history includes occupation and subjugation to both Germans and Russians over the centuries, not just Nazis and Soviets but feudal and military overlords for the past 1000 years. What happened to them in the 20th century, and the way they have emerged blinking into the present era, has been a shared experience too.
So, having been to the Tallinn Museum of Occupations, I was determined to see the Riga Museum of Occupations. Brilliantly done, larger and more traditionally laid out, the same terrible story, only different.
I won't get to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. I won't see its Old Town or find out if it has its own Museum of Occupations.
--
OK Dainton - when were you going to tell us about yr sideline selling perfume to Latvians? Hmmm?
Comments
By Mike With | November 24, 2006 4:02 PM
Mark: care to comment on the picture at the bottom of the page??
By mark | November 27, 2006 4:40 PM
perhaps it's one of the long lost latvian relatives I never knew I had
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By mark | November 15, 2006 2:02 PM
it's a shame you're viewing of such a great game (well result anyway) was spolied by a bunch of f**kwits.