Visiting Riga

We decided to go visit Riga because Latvia isn’t far from us and the Baltic Sea sounded like a pleasant alternative to the heatwave occupying Minsk when we made the decision. While the train and the plane cost about the same amount, we imagined that we might prefer the train because we sleep well on trains and we’d travel overnight. We forgot about the border crossings, which happen in the middle of the night in either direction. First you get passport control from the country you’re leaving. Then, about the moment you’ve fallen back asleep, you get passport control from the country you’re entering. Soon after, you get a third visit; this time, from the customs officers who want to see the luggage under your bed. We liked being in Latvia, but I’m not sure I’d repeat the train.

Except that by train we got Masha, who served as our conductor in either direction and kept our train car immaculate and beautiful. Alla said it would have been offensive to offer a gratuity to a Belarusian train conductor, though I strongly feel that she deserved one.

I liked the receptionist at our hotel in Riga, too. We arrived well before the Wellton Hotel expected us, but Alisa smiled brightly as she negotiated with the maid staff to set up a room we could take over soon. She works long hours, and we saw her often during our three days in Riga. She radiated a charming smile that warmed our hearts every time we passed through the lobby.

We discovered that we’d arrived on the second day of the City Day weekend, and we enjoyed special music and exhibitions as a result. I danced with some of the locals at a rock ‘n’ roll concert while Alla enjoyed the sun and the music, and after a long walk along the riverfront, we stayed to hear delightful modern folk music at another stage.

On Monday we took a local train to Jurmala, a district along the Baltic Sea just 25 minutes from Riga. While we didn’t enjoy swimming weather, we had a great time walking along the beach and through a district with many restaurants and shops. After a false start at another restaurant, we settled in for lunch at The Lighthouse. Dear Readers, I highly recommend that restaurant. We liked our meal so much that we came back for dinner, even though we weren’t even hungry yet. We liked everything we ordered, and exclaimed often over the flavors and textures of each dish. The duck breast, by the way, was exquisite.

On our last day in Riga we toured farther afield and tried to take in as much as possible of the city’s diverse and interesting architecture, winding streets, colorful parks, and waterways. We had a blast, and we’re already talking about when we can go back.

For more photos, click here.

Shoe repair

The strap came unglued from a pair of Birkenstock sandals and I was lazy about going to buy the right glue to fix it and wasn’t sure I how to clamp it as it dried anyway. I knew the local shoe-repair people didn’t charge much so I took it down to them.

I asked the lady if she could glue it, and she said yes. Then I asked if she had a good way to clamp it and she disappeared with my sandal into the back of the workshop. When she came back, she offered to glue it and stitch it down, for about two dollars. That sounded highly satisfactory to me, though I worried that the stitching on rubber might work out badly. I shouldn’t have worried. Look what she did:

Long walks in the country

Yesterday we went off to pick berries in the woods near a Presidential Reserve in the Braslav Lakes National Park. I got all charged up over the beautiful places we passed on the way there, and resolved to return today on foot. It would be about twelve kilometers one-way so I encouraged the others in our group to return to the area for more berries and to give me a ride home.

I began in our village, Ustse, and walked down a smooth dirt road with views of several different lakes, woods and meadows, punctuated occasionally by cute little villages. I only carried a small amount of water because I knew I’d pass numerous wells along the way and I imagined somebody would allow me to pour myself a little. The first time I emptied my bottle, however, I found myself beside a modernized home with an outdoor spigot. An old lady waiting nearby told me I could try the spigot because the owner of the house was away. I’d actually seen the owner in the yard before I got there, but she had disappeared by the time I approached so I just filled my bottle and proceeded down the road.

I should, in fact, have turned the corner just there. Distracted by the water, I proceeded ahead and marveled that I had failed to notice those beautiful homes yesterday. One place especially stood out because it had a huge expanse of manicured lawn leading down to the lake shore, multiple buildings on the compound, and a gorgeous main house. I didn’t try to take a picture of the main house because I figured I didn’t want to mess with anybody who’d managed to get that rich in Belarus. After a while the road petered out into a dirt track and I finally realized that I’d never been there before.

I turned back and returned to my corner, now with more elderly ladies. I stopped to greet them before turning down the road I should have taken in the first place. One of them took me to task: “Where have you been?”

“I haven’t been anywhere,” I replied. “I got lost. But if I go this way I’ll get to the asphalt road, right?”

“Yes,” they said, “but why do you want to go there?” The one who asked where I’d been looked especially concerned. If I went too far down the road I indicated, I’d end up at the Presidential Reserve, where uninvited guests are not welcome.

I explained that I’d be meeting some friends down there, but my explanation didn’t lighten that lady’s face. Finally I added the fact that my friends were gathering berries in the forest. This brightened the mood immediately, since they could all identify with forest berry gatherers.

The next time my water bottle started to run dry, I noticed a couple of people carrying buckets of water and looked over to see where they’d been. I saw a public well and went to fill my bottle with cold and delicious water.

In the next village after the well, I stopped to talk to three people sitting in a particularly beautiful yard. I asked if I could photograph the yard, and after consideration, they said yes. First they wanted to discuss what I might do with any photos. They told me I could put the picture on the internet but that I shouldn’t do anything bad with it. Later they even agreed to let me photograph them.

They live in Latvia but have this summerhouse in Belarus. I asked them what people usually ask me: “Do you prefer one over the other?” They replied to the effect that each has its plusses and minuses, and then asked about where I live. I told them that I divide my time between Boston and Minsk, and for me each has its plusses and minuses too.

I walked ahead, overshooting my destination, and finally got a ride back. I’m really glad I took this trip on foot. I saw much more per kilometer than I would have seen in a car, enjoyed the exercise, and got to chat with several interesting people. I wonder where I can go for another walk tomorrow or the next day.

Zarina's vacation

I’ve written before about my friend Zarina. Because of a visual impairment, she can’t go anywhere without a guide, which often means me. She was on vacation when I came back from Boston. Her vacation spanned the whole month of July, and she started it at home with her mom. However, she asked if I could take her to another Lightsound concert, and she came back to Minsk specifically for that.

The concert was a dud, but I finally got her to understand that I was serious about forming an organization to provide volunteer guides for any of the visually impaired people in Minsk. I needed her help finding somebody to act as coordinator for the service. We had several opportunities to discuss the idea over the following days because Zarina didn’t have much to do when she didn’t have a guide.

She kicked things off by asking me to help her get an updated photo of herself for social media. Her boyfriend and I took her for a long walk through several downtown parks. We had a nice walk and I took lots of pictures. After a couple of these outings she relaxed and became more talkative, telling me that she’d lived all her life in programs for the blind and that she had until then felt that she didn’t know what to say in conversation with a sighted person. This melted my heart enough that I took her for some more walks and pressed the idea of building an organization to make more volunteers available to more people.

Finally, Zarina found me the right person: her roommate. Masha has a degree in social work and she can see well enough to use a computer and even ride a bike. We all sat down together last week to talk about how the service might work, and Masha effectively led the conversation. She has far more ideas than I did and she has the time and enthusiasm to make them happen. Now it’s time for me to round up a bunch of volunteers. So far, so good.

There's always something

I like working out at the little public gym at Hockey Club Yunost Minsk. It’s a friendly place with an array of good equipment but almost nothing in duplicate. After I’d been going there for a while, I donated a wall clock because theirs had long ago disappeared and I thought we’d all like to know when it’s time to go home. Later I donated some audio cables and connected the TV to the room’s audio system. Still, there’s always something else to fix and the repairs are generally out of my reach.

One time I walked in and discovered that the benches were missing from all the exercise machines and all but one of the movable benches were missing the padded tops from their frames. Somebody had decided that it was time to re-cover them all and simply took them away. They came back after a few days, looking not much different from the way they had looked before they disappeared.

The showers present a special set of problems. One time somebody replaced an ordinary shower head with one of those hose-mounted showers, but they didn’t install a bracket to hold the head in place. We had to hold the head in one hand while washing with the other. I thought about donating a replacement showerhead, but worried that doing a repair that required me to bring my own wrench might be perceived as intrusive. Instead, I put a big rubber band in my bag and attached the showerhead to the hose at a comfortable height every time I took a shower. This was much better than the previous situation, when water shot out of the pipe with no head attached at all.

Sometimes there’s no hot water, and once there was no water at all. Frequently there’s no soap. I carry my own soap and I bathe in cold water when required. In Belarus, we adapt.

Today when I checked in, there were no keys at the front desk. Nastya told me that they were downstairs in the locker room, so I went down and walked in. Oops. The locker room was filled with women who had just left an aerobics class. Apparently, something bad had happened in their locker room, something that left them with a flood, so we had to share. More accurately, the guys had to wait their turn. I changed behind a door in the hallway and got on with my workout.

There’s more, but you get the idea already. In closing, let me leave you with a picture of the floor in the aerobics room. Most of the nails are lined up in a row, but at this spot, it appears that the workman had taken too big a toot on whatever he was drinking. I love it:

Two hours in Frankfurt

I arrived in Minsk yesterday, by way of Frankfurt. Flying from Boston to Frankfurt, I met an interesting Muslim woman named Rawda. She was on her way to Cairo to attend her sister’s wedding, and shared with me her perspectives on a number of things. We ended up talking much of the flight, and I enjoyed her blend of sincerity and buoyant enthusiasm. She promised to take me into the mosque in Cambridge when I return and teach me about how Muslims pray, something I’ve wanted to understand for a long time.

Rawda had a plan. She had a four-hour layover in Frankfurt and thought she should go downtown and see something of Europe. I had a slightly longer layover and knew something about getting around Frankfurt, so I suggested that we go together and look for an interesting place to have breakfast. She worried that she’d be singled out for super-scrutiny because she wore a hijab, but I was the one who got grilled at passport control. The agent wanted to know where I was going and I told him that we were just going for breakfast and returning for flights just after ten a.m. He looked alarmed and I asked him if this were crazy. He said yes, but then admitted that downtown is close and the trains run every fifteen minutes. We proceeded.

I don’t have any pictures to show you of what we encountered when we emerged from the Frankfurt train station just after six a.m. As we climbed the staircase from the underground station-plaza to street level, we passed three derelicts struggling to stand up. One was kneeling on the stairs, facing a bloody needle a few steps up. I hustled Rawda past them and out onto the street without stopping to get out my phone. Shortly after I explained why I’d hustled her up the staircase, she pointed over her shoulder to another group and commented that the guy on the ground was at that moment giving himself an injection into his ankle.

We found a hotel and begged a map, and then set out to take our walk. We started out in Taunusanlage Park, which wasn’t completely empty but most of the people there didn’t appear to have any place to go. Things got a lot better when we walked down to the riverside parkway along the bank of the River Main. Joggers jogged, cyclists cycled, and we walked; particularly enjoying an alley of lush plane trees. Near where we intended to turn away from this riverside walkway, we found an excellent climbing structure. I’ve always been a sucker for such things, so I had to climb on it. This looked like so much fun to Rawda that she climbed a little way up as well.

After breakfast at the train station, we returned to the airport where, once again, Rawda sailed right through security and I had a hard time. I was wearing an anti-heat shirt with some Velcro vent closures, and the Velcro tabs always show up on those new x-ray body scanners. Usually this just means that somebody pats me on the tabs and sends me on my way. The German guy found it necessary to give me a full-body rubdown, twice on the front and twice on the back. Then he made me take off my shoes and he took out my shoe inserts. I had rent money stashed under the inserts, and I think it almost disappeared when I glanced up to see what was going on with my computer, sitting unattended in a bin on the conveyor belt after passing through the luggage scanner. When I looked back at his disappearing hand, he made a point of wrinkling the money and then put it back into my shoe. I can’t guess why I received such a thorough examination at all, unless it was so I’d have something to talk about in my blog.

Anyway, I enjoyed the walk and the conversation but Frankfurt didn’t endear itself to me this time.

Beantown Dance Camp

I’ve spent the last week dancing and having a very good time. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while but various factors prevented me. Soon after I started dancing Lindy hop, I heard about a famous dance camp in Sweden called Herrang. Everybody agrees that it’s a splendid way to improve one’s dancing, but nobody says anything encouraging about the accommodations. Beantown, on the other hand, shares a stellar reputation for quality, and offers much better accommodations. I chose Beantown.

As usual, when I got there I realized that I don’t know anything. I expected this. Dancers joke about how every time they move up a level they discover a world of much better dancers and amazing new possibilities. In case I missed the point, an instructor told me in an advanced class on the first evening that my swingouts needed work. That’s bad news, because the swingout is central to Lindy. I reported the next day, and almost every day following, to the practice sessions, where I enjoyed the guidance of a private instructor who gave me some pointers each time and then sent me off to practice with whatever followers might be hanging around. I got a lot better, but understand that I still need to work at it.

Every evening we had dance parties, almost entirely to live music. I enjoy dancing with almost everybody. I like dancing with the new dancers because it’s fun to welcome them to the world of Lindy. In addition, I certainly like dancing with the experienced dancers because they open my eyes to new possibilities and help with the collaborative process of interpreting the music. I did plenty of both, along with a little watching, listening and admiring. Finally, all day every day I enjoyed spending time with dancers. We had a very friendly group of interesting people from around the world.

The class tracks during the day included materials on technique, musicality, specialty styles, routines and much more. Most of the instructors impressed me, and some of them impressed me a lot. Not wanting to miss anything, I tried to go to classes more or less all day long every day and then go to the evening dances. People warned me in advance that this would be a bad idea, nearly impossible to complete, and I did have to cut corners. Mostly I cut corners at night, going back to my dorm room soon after midnight. My morning classes generally began by 9:00 or 9:30 and I needed to get some sleep.

Speaking of the dorm room, this is not what I expected at all. I got a large and bright room with a private bathroom, air conditioning, and pleasant view. Endicott College, the venue for the camp, has a gorgeous campus with private beaches, wooded paths, fountains, numerous excellent dance floors and an expansive dining hall run by Marriott. The excellent food surprised me even more than the nice dorm room. I don’t know what kind of education the kids get at Endicott College, but it’s sure a great place to hang out for a summer dance camp.

I highly recommend Beantown and I’d love to go back.