Riga

I spent most of last week (7:30 A.M. on the 3rd of October till October 6th at 10:30 P.M.) in a beautiful Riga apartment owned by the Hargan family (Kelly, Donna, and son Tyler,) friends of Brent's from Colorado. As part of Josiah Venture, they train youth leaders there, and welcomed the three of us into their home with wonderful food and kindness.

Upon return, it was interesting to compare trips with the others, as theirs were often of the mile-a-minute variety, trying squeeze a lot of material into a short time span, whether in Venice or Paris. Contrastingly, our time was nicely relaxed, though by no means boring. We woke up around 11:00 every morning, ate homemade dinner every night (one night Thai food by our own hands/utensils, as thanks to Donna and Kelly,) did minimal sight-seeing in the focused sense, and had the chance to do some enjoyable reading (Alex read James Bond, I read Ulysses, ahem!) recharging, and conversing.

This was my first time in a country where I not only wasn't a native speaker of the language, but had no knowledge of the language upon entry (both times I was in México, I spoke enough Spanish to converse and listen easily.) This was super fun, as we just learned word-by-word and phrase-by-phrase in a practical way, learning things like street, "I want," please, thank you, hello, good bye, beer, coffee, food, etc. I enjoyed this process, and would love to have the opportunity to really learn a language in this manner, though even more immersively.

One of the few touristy things we did was to visit the museum of Latvia's occupation from 1940-1991. As a whole, the museum was really affecting and arranged well. It's a really interesting building too, being held above ground at the corners so that you can walk under it. After about twenty years of independence, they were retaken by the Soviets (their previous rulers.) A couple years later, the Nazis took them over, breaking their agreement with the Soviets to respect one another's interests in the Baltics.

It turns out that the previous two years of horror (complete with expulsions to gulags, deportations to Russia, torture, disappearances, and more; the usual gamut of Soviet control,) the Nazis were welcomed as liberators. Building on this, the Nazis would proceed to blame the Soviet terror on the Latvian Jews (for to send them to their own camps,) but were generally more supported than the Soviets by the general population it seems, as some even willingly joined the German army to fight the Soviets. In reading about this and considering it later, it's such a horror to think on the fact that at that time, one had to choose which of the two he or she would fight, and which would thereby be supported. It was also so strange and scary to see the ways in which the propaganda shifted as Latvia flipped back and forth between Soviet, Nazi, and back to Soviet control, and just how blithely they were lied to for the worship of an idea.
After this, of course, the Soviets took back over after the war, somehow being allowed highly unlawful control of not just Latvia, but Lithuania and Estonia as well, which they would maintain till their fall in 1991. Really incredible museum, one of my favorites from the whole time.

I will post photos soon, after I've edited them. Or maybe once I get too lazy to edit them.

PS I typed this from a place I've yearned for since I've gotten to Oxford: a loud, talky place to get a legitimate latte and camp out till midnight and work on reading etc. I've had various places that fulfilled one or two of those criteria, but was grossly out of whack on the rest, but I was made aware this afternoon of an ice cream place in south Oxford called G&D's Ice Cream, and I've been working here a couple hours, eating their stellar Bailey's and Cream flavor and a real latte. Ahhhhhhhh.