Good-Bye to All of Lat...via

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back - Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."

Since I spent a little yellow wagon full of money last night warding off those who wished me to spend a large Latvian wheelbarrow of money, I played it cool today. No hangover for some reason. The roulette wheel spins and you never know.

There are no rules and if there are, they aren't fair. You can drink two waters for every cocktail and wake up with Utah's Golden Spike in your brain. Black. Or, you can forget to eat, drink a bottle of aftershave, sleep in a Goodwill coat-donation container and wake up just fine. Red.

The little roulette ball lands where it will. Last night it landed on green, for absinthe. And usually that means the house wins. So, I guess I am the house this morning. Hello, house. Hello, self.

Since winning also means you are out of euros, I went to the grocery store instead of the cafe. Bought some marvelous cheese and fell deeply in love with some dark, brown bread. I loved it, and I was IN love with it. It tasted like great clay chunks of loamy earth. It tasted like a sliver of the goddamn firmament splintered off and floated down.

I also got some local cheese after looking up the word for cheese and matching it to the label. No surprise butter with these soft, wet bricks.

You can bet I also got a "lotta takeaway" at the Coffee Tower.

Went back to that marvelous wooden palace to eat. Sat for hours writing while the house went about its morning business. Pauls was late for school, everyone had overslept, and he calmly ate his cereal and told me all he was probably missing today was "sport."

Lasma asked me to take her to the Kagabay house. I wasn't sure what that was. "The Kagabay is the police from when Russia was charging of us." Oh! The KGB Museum.

I told her we could (I didn't want to go) but I had been to one in Romania once, and it was very sad.

"Yes, sad," chimed in Madara, "but also dangerous and thrilling. You must go."
"We must go," said Lasma, "It is free, but you have to pay something like four euros for the guide. Something like this."

I told them I had bought some blueberries from an old woman this morning and thought about how she survived that time.

"Yes, but she must not have been very smart, because they took away the smart people and made them work in Russia."

I told her we could go. It all made me think of when I was in Cambodia and I was like, "Take me to the palace, please," and the tuk-tuk drivers were like, "Sure thing, right after the genocide museum."

And so we went. It was nice to walk with Lasma and hear about her life. The live casino gig was costing them a fortune in makeup and the hours were difficult. Dudes weren't creepy, but management kept changing philosophies on how much they should flirt with them. Some days they were asked to be provocative, some days neutral.

She and the other girls had a lot of trouble keeping it straight. Additionally, they were required to switch "channels" every thirty minutes, so if it was a flirt day, by the time they had a conversation going, they had to jump from dealing blackjack to calling bingo.

They didn't give her the day off when her grandmother died and she had to cozy up to degenerate gamblers all that shift, so when it looked like airbnb would let her make a living, she quit.

We were walking through a part of the city I hadn't been in yet, an interesting urban section with plenty of that marvelous Jugendstil about.

The KGB Museum is in an historic building a famous Latvian architect made for himself, but it became a police station when the Russians took over in 1917. Lenin! The Oktober Revolution! I'm pretty sure I didn't know that part of Baltic history. Like, I've read plenty about Rasputin and Anastasia and all that sexy machine gunning, but I don't think I knew there was a big land grab afterward.

There was, and this was part of it. So, the Russians kind of made this place heck for a while until the Nazis kicked them out and made it hell, then the Russians came back when the war went west and the Nazis retreated back to Poland. How must that have been? Oh, thank god, the Germans left, let's fire up the.... "Remember us, komrades? We hear some of you have been reading novels while we were gone."

 And no longer was it sexy, bald Lenin but now Stalin with the twinkling murderous eyes.

So, just endless horrors of arrest and spies and gulags and suppression and forced labor. The Communists were absolute evil, and while I like the narrative that Reagan beat them/bankrupt them by forcing them to match the US in military spending, the "currency" they were spending in the arms race were these people's lives.

Your neighbor would be in trouble for being caught with a newspaper, so they'd turn you in for being an enemy of the state, you'd have an underground press printing Latvian children's books so the language can stay alive, but the ink supplier is a spy and shoots you, and your wife goes to the work camp, etc.

This doesn't even touch it, really. The place was tremendoulsy sad, filled with the energy of desperate, broken people and steeped in the evil of the men who ran it like a Church's Fried Chicken.

And it's terrible to compare sufferings, but it still didn't touch that high-school prison in Phnom Penh.

Lasma is, like, 22, so this era is just her parent's memories. The grandmother who died the day the casino made Lasma come to work anyway had been in this building and somehow left it.

She teared up telling me about it. We were exploring at different rates but would meet at different displays and whisper the sad thing we'd just read. There was an untranslated propaganda poster she read to herself. It was Lenin's face on a bright yellow background with three paragraphs of blue text.

I asked what it was, and she was like, "It was on the walls of all of Riga's schools. It's about pledging allegiance to your family. It's not so bad, actually,"

And I was like, "Not so bad? That's how it starts, maaaan, they got to you already! This is exactly how this shit works, maaan. You went cheap!" And we both laughed because we had been so tense.

Afterward, back in the sun, two of the very few who entered that place and were allowed to leave,  I was quiet and Lasma asked me why. I said it was because I was the sort of person who would be thrown in that sort of prison. And not because I had any revolutionary conviction, but simply because I was a reader and a writer.

I felt cowardly and useless. Like, I wouldn't have been brave enough to be an enemy of the state, but I would have been considered one anyway. I wouldn't have deserved my martyrdom. All of that felt like different layers of selfishness to me. Fearful and prideful at the same time. A twisting caduceus of fear and pride.

She was like, "What the fuck are you talking about? If you would have been in there for any reason, you should be proud. It is honor to be hated by them, feared by them, for any reason. If they took you there, it is proof of your worth as a person."

My emotions after that were complicated. I am still thinking about it.

She wanted to go to her church after that, so I went with her, Old St. Gertrude's. Very peaceful inside. She asked me if I believed in god and I told I her I didn't. "Many do not," she said, "I am not sure either, but this place has always been important to me,"

Then she said she needed someplace green, so we went to the park. There was a big statue of a lioness rolling around on her back, so I stretched out on the belly and she took my picture. I was like a forty-year-old Bettie Page.

She smoked in the park, which is illegal, and there was some concern that if she got a ticket, the policeman would get her in trouble with her boyfriend (also a policeman) but we didn't get caught. A dude with a beer saw her, though and just started drinking his beer. I kept waiting for it to escalate further. Heroin. Tax cheating. Genocide.

We saw a girl sneaking up on another girl sitting on a bench. It was fascinating theater. We saw it all developing, and when the predator girl sprang and terrified her friend it was very satisfying. Both of them were flushed and breathless with the excitement of it. Then the attacker said, "So price, motter fucker," and Lasma and I curled up on the park floor like two laughing lioness statues.

"They are Russian," said Lasma, "Did you hear that accent?" I heard it. So unexpected and funny, maybe the only English she knew.

Then she had to go pick Pauls up from school, so we parted at the giant chocolate sign.

I went crazy at a pelmeni place where you pay two dollars for a bowl the size of Thor's drinking horn. It was absolute gluttony and the purest heaven.

Bought a watercolor of the Old Town from a nice old artistlady, thought about buying some fake amber and closing that loop, but didn't. I did buy a dumb magnet with a cat on it, though. I also bought a plastic dinosaur for Pauls.

This is a truly beautiful place.

The sun was getting lower and the square was coming to life. I thought about going back to the Depeche Mode bar but remembered it was terrible. Took the tram home.

Pauls and Lasma were at the table with paper and pencils.

"Do you want to play with us?"

What are you playing?

"I do not know the English name for it. We call it Sausage."

Sausage. I see. I know this game. But I don't understand why you call it that.

"Because when you have three like this, you have made a sausage."

Ok. Ok. That makes more sense than the English name.

"What do you call it?"

Tic Tac Toe.

I played with them both. Two draws, of course. When I blocked Lasma from creating a sausage, I drew my X and said "Surprise, motherfucker," and our eyes transformed into cartoon hearts of platonic love.

Pauls wrapped his dinosaur in a napkin and made it roar itself out.

They were both very excited to see American dollar bills and Polish zloty. Pauls stole ten zloty and hid it in a Minecraft book. He said I had to read it to get my money back. I pretended to be a genius who could read very quickly. Mmm mmm, very interesting, yes, flipflipflip, hmmm, bricks, I had no idea you could..., flipflipflip, fascinating, yes. Ah, my money!

Then it was bed time, so I went to bed. I heard the girls rushing around washing sheets for the other rooms. In the morning, they would do my room, because I would be gone forever.

Sleep.

Cold beet soup on the the last day. Riga has been a beautiful part of what has been a very beautiful trip. I stood on the corner with coffee and watching the city come to life. Trams and buses, people rushing, breakfasting, kissing one another goodbye. It's the same as Seattle, but they are kissing on stone streets and their breakfast is yogurt. It was good to spend three days here and get a broader feel for what it's like. To know the streets, to walk without a map, to take the trams and buses like a person. I will miss it. It was nice to imagine being a part of it. In and out of time.

Lasma came out and said I needed to buy some chocolate from a famous Latvian place. I was like, "I have to get a cab to the airport," and she was like, "You need the chocolate more," so we ran down there. There was an enormous factory. I made a joke about Augustus Gloop, but she had never heard of Willy Wonka.

Jesus.

At the factory gift shop, she filled a bag with everything I needed to try. She was almost desperate. Like, it was important to her I have the taste of the important chocolate before time ran out forever. It was the same brand as advertised on the clock from yesterday.

Boxed it up, fist-bumped, and got in my cab. She said she would miss me. I will miss all of it. Farewell, Riga. We got very close and will never see one another again.

I watched a Zoolander double-feature on the flight home. Please don't go to any trouble, I shall have myself arrested.

Thanks for reading, fools. It was a long, transformative trip, and I am forever changed.

Art Nouveau at the Depeche Mode Bar

"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

In the morning, I went to the grocery store. There were farmer ladies selling blueberries out front and another selling differentberries inside. At a counter cafe called Coffee Tower, I got a latte. This whole trip, they pronounce that as "lotta" and get confused if you say "lot-tay." By this stage, I had learned.

About ten years ago, in Iceland, a guy in a cafe pointed to a sign reading "Coffee is not made 'to go'"  He had written it himself in chalk. The "to go" was significant. Most Europeans say "take away" (For here or take away, for here or to take away, for here or taking away), so "to go" was kind of a jab to American tourists (I felt).

Additionally, the very concept of ordering a coffee and going somewhere else with it was, then, nuts to them. You order a coffee to sit and drink it. It's not a tool, it's an experience. It's a culture. That's changed pretty radically since then. Everywhere you go has coffee windows and paper cups now. You can tell it's a fairly recent change, though, since they still advertise it.

I got my "lotta to take away" at the Coffee Tower and tip-toed back home.

The household was awake now. Pauls was eating granola and yogurt. A sleepy boy with floppy white hair. Male names in these Baltic languages almost always end in "s" and female names with "a". It's deeply weird to them when a name doesn't. In Lithuania, they wrote my name as Simonis in a note, and I wondered if these guys were thinking of me as Simons.

I asked him if he thought dinosaurs were cool or for babies. He said they were kind of for babies, but he liked them.

Lasma came out, also sleepy, and asked if I had a family. I told her I didn't. This seemed to make her sad. No children? No, I said. She said if I moved to Latvia, I would have a big family and it's normal for dads to be old. Women should have babies in their early 20s, she said, but men can be as old as they like.

I thanked her. Why tell her I don't wan't children? The Prime Directive prohibits Starfleet personnel from interfering with the development of alien cultures.

Ate some apples and did some writing and went out to see the Jugendstil.

It was my first day in this city with the camera and I took my time returning to things I'd seen yesterday without it. A thousand exciting curiosities in this town. Statues of men with milk jugs, weird stencil art of people fencing with vape pens. Just marvelous.

It was kind of a haul to get up there but it needn't have been, I was dodging frequent trams and buses that would have taken me there more quickly. The walk was purposeful. Not all who blogger are lost.

It was, as advertised, quiet in that district. I stopped into "Robert's Books" and found a Bruce Chatwin and a Theodore Dreiser I hadn't read. Treasure. A cute surprise to find a giant stack of used books in English at a nice little cafe I found by accident. Robert touched his heart when I told him I didn't need a bag. The Dreiser has Cyrillic footnotes and I noticed idioms were underlined. How long ago had some Russian student tried to make their way through it? Treasure!

Into the district!

One of the points of "art nouveau" is to bring the wild curves of nature into art and also to make art fit in with nature. Like, instead of some blocky-ass building, you get a wild facade as loopy and curly as a wisteria in bloom. And why not make those fancy loops and curls look like hot dudes and chicks?

It can be crazy and overdone or it can be inspiring as hell. Why shouldn't a spatula have Medusa's face on it? Of course my front door should show a body-builder sitting on an Egyptian queen's head.

So nice to just drift around corners and find hidden wonders. Wealthy people live in this part of town, I also saw several embassies, and now and again a Fancyis Dans with a trim beard and a thin cigarette would pop out of one to give me a disappointed look. He was hoping, perhaps, I was the kid with the chemicals.

A few seemed to have an attitude of, "really, photos?" which I met with an attitude of "You did an amazing job when you built this building in 1903; you should be proud of your work. Also, don't you live in the one with the belly-dancing griffon down the block? Dude there looks exactly like you."

Mostly, though, it was other tourists folding and unfolding maps of "key Jugendstil buildings"

I was witness to an amazing battle between a crow and a couple of cats. The crow wanted their kibble and conceived of many stratagems to acquire it including sneaking his beak under some plywood. I enjoyed watching them. The cats made many interesting sounds.

Made my way back to the Old City and did a systematic little walk through the squares and down the winding alleys. It's a really nice mix of romantic and public. You can be a Spring Break crazyperson or a lingering pair having a quiet love affair in the still peace of St. Gertrude's narthex.

Or just a family showing the kids what colors flowers come in. Theaters and plazas. No street singers, the first place I've been to without any. A few panhandlers in the park (and wouldn't you love to love them) but no guitarists, etc. Many of the cafes had live performers, though, so perhaps there was too much professional competition.

When I got spire-tired, I took a bus across the mighty Daugava and poked around on the other side of the river. Crazy hot-pink Orthodox church with bright blue onions. It's where the Russian Barbie takes communion, I reckon. Ate at a local place with fresh local vegetables.

Had the asparagus and some very nice eggs. It was cold at the outside table, and I was under-dressed (the previous day had been hot) so I wrapped a little afghan around me while I ate. I'm sure I looked just like a local grandmother. The rest of the patrons were Latvian Ladies who Lunch. Little dogs and silver bracelets.

A brave sparrow jumped up on my table and ate bread right out of my basket!

Went back over a different bridge, the Daugava a rich blue beneath us, and went home for a recharge.

Lasma was there. She and Madara (who is Pauls' mother) make their living from airbnb. It's their whole job, and they're great at it. People in and out of there. I was lucky to find a room for three days. Previously, she told me, they had been live internet casino dealers. Record scratch!!

"The pay was amazing, but the job was shitty."

It's a thing. They have these giant casinos with no people in them, just rooms full of women spinning wheels and flipping cards in front of a camera. Dudes (almost always, I am told) pay to gamble and talk to them. So many images there. Of course I asked what was shitty about it.

"Imagine every day a wedding."

...

"You have to do your hair perfectly, your face, perfect, your nails your dress, everything perfect. And even if you hear something sad, you must always smile."

I wanted to know a lot more about that, but I needed a nap before hitting the Depeche Mode bar. It's only open four hours a day.

I took an apple into bed with me like I was a Hawaiian piglet and dreamdozed. Woke up and wrote a little then armored up for the DM Bar. They're less actively anti-Russian here, so I dared to wear my navy sweater. It was cold.

The place was small. They have a pair of Dave Gahan's shoes. A sign says "We Sell Hell and Suffer Well," a reference I don't recognize. There's also a teapot next to a picture of Martin Gore drinking tea? The walls were covered with signatures and quotes from citizens of the world. "SPAIN LOVE DM!" "Let's play master and servant - Argentina."

There's a sad dart board and a sadder foosball table. Neither adhered to the theme.

They were playing a recent concert on three large televisions. The drinks are named after the type of liquor in them. I was hoping to knock back a few Broken Frames or a Black Celebration shot. Instead, I drank an "absinthe."

When I ordered it, the bartender, a woman in her 60s who spoke no English, got on the phone for instructions. She kept holding up a finger to indicate my drink would be ready any moment now. On the TV, the band sang a very beautiful slow version of But Not Tonight, which is, it turns out, my very favorite Depeche Mode song.

When she got off the phone, the bartender set a straw and a napkin on the bar in front of me. She poured the absinthe into a brandy snifter, lit it on fire, and poured it over ice in a different glass. Then she slammed the snifter over half of the straw and bent the other half toward me. She indicated I should sip the drink and inhale from the straw.

I did.

The drink was fine, the inhale tasted like burnt plastic and cancer. I didn't get a buzz but I didn't choke, so I think it evened out. I like thinking that the person she was talking to on the phone assumed I was a Sophisticate. Or a libertine. Or that I lived in one of those Art Nouveau buildings, anything. I can't quite recommend this place. It's like being anywhere with a concert on a monitor.

But I did like the anticipation I felt walking in. I almost ran when I saw the sign.

A dude in a thicker leather jacket than mine was taking pictures of the concert on the TV. Remember when film was a thing, and photos cost money? He was mouthing the lyrics to the songs and making sure the three other people there knew he really liked Depeche Mode.

I had a second absinthe. I asked her to skip the straw thing. I tipped her not to do it.

Thick Leather went up for a drink and started hassling the only other guy there, a sleepy local at the bar.

"Depeche Mode, innit? Best band in the world, innit! What's your favorite album?"

The guy said he wasn't really into them. Thick Leather either didn't take the hint or didn't want to.

"What bands do you like, British bands? What British bands do you like?"

"I don't know," the man said, "The Beatles?"

I thought that was magnificent, because it might have really meant "fuck you."

Then Thick Leather, unprompted, started talking about the unrest in the world caused by Obama having armed ISIS after Bush destabilized the Middle East. I was going to ask him if he was familiar with Winston Churchill's statecraft in that region, but I'm a happy drunk and not a fightpoker. It seemed against the spirit of this place. And it was closing anyway.

Outside, I was almost immediately clocked by a Russian whose job it is to clock drunk Americans. I suppose my navy sweater didn't fool him.

"Hey-lo," he said all comrade-like. "Do you like girls?" The Depeche Mode bar version of me does like girls. "Waah ooo gah," I said, like an Hanna Barbera wolf, "where are they?"

They were, said the Soviet, at Blow Party. I was a little drunk and a lot louche, so I agreed.

Oh my god, Blow Party. It was a real place. A Madame extracted twenty euros from me, and I was allowed to see three girls dance to Britney Spears and...Major Lazer? I got pretty tanked. They had absinthe too. Whoops.

These girls then used all of their wiles, all of their skills, all of their biblical power to extract more money from me. But I am a blade forged in the fires of Wroclaw (where I, to my everlasting shame, spent $390 in the Cognac Room), and I told them no. I'm sorry Anastasia. Alas, Kristiana. I don't have 70 euros for ten minutes with you. I don't have fifty euros to buy you a glass of champagne.

There was nobody else there, and they weren't dancing. They also weren't trying very hard to fleece me. No touching, no asking. It was just me, alone in a strip club, surrounded by the staff (all potential murderers from Central Casting).

It was definitely a bad scene.

So I had one more drink.

"Ha ha ha ha ha How lucky we were/We hit the cat houses and sampled their wahrs/We got as drunk as a couple of Czars/One night I spat out my lucky stars"

I would have been very easy to roll. I only had, like, ten bucks on me, though. No cards.

When I went to the similar place in Wroclaw and ran out of money, they convinced me to use my card. When I got those handjobs in Cambodia, the girls went through every one of my pockets, poked around in my shoes, checked my belt for a secret lining, everything before holding up all the bills they found and naming their price.

So, I make sure I don't have any more than I'm willing to lose before I go into these places.

I was floating up to the ceiling like a Mary Poppins character, so I got the fuck out. Nobody said goodbye. Rode on the green fairy's wings to a Turkish place and must have ordered something, because I had tea and gyros in front of me and two little crab claws were bringing them into my mouth.

Scuttled home and sobered up in the chill on the way. It's not a vacation if you don't have a bender, right?

It could be.

It just wasn't

The Many Rewards of Riga

Many years ago, I taught briefly in a yeshiva in Brooklyn. The Jews there were Litvaks, which means (loosely) their families came from this area. People also use it to mean "Orthodox Jews who aren't Hasidim." Like every religion, there are a zillion factions. In this case, Litvaks means "Lithuanian-style" Jews.

In any case, we hear more about what went down in Poland during WWII because Western troops saw it. Here, the Russians took over as soon as the Germans were chased out and there was no need for pesky Westerners to see or document how things went down.

It was just as bad.

I had harbored some thought of seeing some of "Jewish Lithuania" to see if the names were the same as the boys I taught, but... few traces remain.

To the degree that I only remembered that as I was leaving Lit and entering... Lat.

Because of the Schengen Agreement, Europeans and Americans can travel all over Europe without stopping at the border. So, though I've been all over the place, my passport was stamped in Germany where I made my connecting flight and then wasn't even looked at in Poland, Lit, or Lat. 

The Ukraine isn't part of that deal, so... see entries about six-hour border crossings. At least I have a little square in my passport to show for it. I kind of wanted those stamps, but I suppose it's much nicer to just go like you're driving from Seattle to Portland. 

Got to Riga in the afternoon. The bus station opens out into a tremendous, truly glorious fruit and vegetable and meat market. Huge, with farmers of all stripes. I bought a bunch of green-ass cucumbers and just ate them like bananas. Got some huge oranges too. 

Walking through the local markets and trading strange coins for fruit is one of my favorite things to do when I travel. That's become my "style" over the years. 

The apartment was far away, but not super-far, and I had a map already, and it was a nice day, and I had a fist full of cucumbers, so I walked. Very glad I did. So rewarding. This place is amazing with. glorious details on the buildings and art stuffed into every corner. It's like a tasteful version of Vienna, it's like being inside a dollar-store Fabrege egg.

And vibrant, busy people. It's a thriving capital city with enormous parks and spectacular architecture. Awesome transit system. Fat blueberries. Ripe strawberries.

At the apartment, I met my hosts: Lasma, Madara, and Pauls. Two women in their 20s and a seven-year-old boy who spoke perfect English. The place was enormous with huge, old wooden floors and doors and a high, high ceiling. I loved it.

Pauls wanted me to watch him play Minecraft and I told him I would if he could truthfully tell me whether or not the orange I was about to show him was the biggest he had ever seen.

I took it, dramatically, out of my bag and said, "Behold!"

He said it was just ok.

I watched him build a brick house for a while with a secret door.

Took a nap and went out without the camera to explore and orient for the next days. I had given myself the luxury of three days here to see it properly but also to start winding down for the upcoming return.

I love photo walks, but it's also very nice to just look and think and see. So, took a nice long looksee to the Old City and sampled its charms. Unlike many of the places I've visited (Warsaw might be the best example of the opposite of this), they've fully integrated modern shops and cafes into the Old City.

It's not like a theme park, it's an active, wild, district with all sorts of colorful restaurants and record stores and hotels and boutiques. These places just happen to be in centuries-old buildings.

Huge hypodermic church spires injected the skyline with Lutheranism.

There were at least three "American Motorcycle" restaurants, which cracked me up. This is where Europe comes for its hamburgers, I guess. If you have the money for a Johnny Rockets franchise, get over here right away and retire a millionaire in six months.

I found a Depeche Mode-themed bar and pledged to return.

Got some coffee at a hipster joint called Rocket Bean. It was expensive, which surprised me, but it was excellent, which surprised me even more.

Thought it might be funny and cool to see the new Captain America movie, so I walked over to an enormous theater and bought a ticket. I made sure it was in English. It was subtitled in both Latvian and Russian.

Older people speak Russian because the Russians used to run this place and they tried to eliminate the Latvian language. Crusading Christian knights trashing the place, Russians taking over, Nazis kicking them out, Russians coming right back.

The countries in the Balkans may have been the pieces empires traded and moved around to build themselves, but the countries in the Baltics are the board.

The movie, Kapteinis Amerika, was great. The ticket was less than a cup of coffee at Rocket Bean. When the bad guys say "Hail Hydra" the subtitles read "Slava Hidra" which, of course, made me think of Slava Ukraini!

During a slow scene, I went to the bathroom and got locked out of the theater. They lock you in and then, I suppose, lock you out. I thought about the train from the day before and how I had lost my cool banging on the walls. Stayed cool this time.

I must have missed a scene where the gang convince Hawkeye to join them, because by the time I found someone to let me back in, he was firing arrows at people. Hawkeye was.

Long walk home late at night, but not too late for the trio. They were drinking juice and talking about their boyfriends. Lasma is dating a local cop and Madara is dating a soldier. Both dudes are always off training. The cop, apparently, resembles Kristaps Porzingis, a Latvian who made it to the NBA.

People are always shouting "Kristaps!" at him from across the street. I couldn't tell if that was an issue or not.

Pauls was also awake. He told me when something falls out of your mouth and into your drink, the Latvian word for it is "ships." The crumbs in your drink are "little boats."

Super cute! I had big plans in the morning to visit the Art Nouveau District and asked them for tips.

They were like, "Boring! We call it the Quiet District!"

Fair enough.  In the morning, I would yawn my way to the Quiet District.

One Tin Savior Rides Away - The Hill of Crosses

"Listen, children, to a story that was written long ago, 'Bout a kingdom on a mountain and the valley-folk below. On the mountain was a treasure buried deep beneath the stone, and the valley-people swore They'd have it for their very own."

I pulled into Siauliai after a brief panic attack on the train. It's harder to read the station names through the windows here, and they don't make announcements in English, and I thought I was where I needed to be before I actually was. Got up, grabbed my bags, went to the door. Door didn't open. Banged on the doors like a nut.

Ran back through the car to the door on the far end of the car in legit panic that the train would start moving again. From whence sprang this disquiet? Like, if you miss your stop, get off and catch the next train going the other way. No bad days.

But... I just didn't want to miss it. Some instinct was like, "Get out. Out out!"

I saw an old man in a bookstore parking lot once trying to get in through a locked side entrance. He tried the door, and it didn't open. He tugged again, nothing, and then he went fucking crazy, yanking at the handle, rattling the glass. He would not be denied.

He seemed like an animal to me, and I thought of him while I was pounding on the train walls. I became him.

When I got to the open door, the trainlady was like, "I know you, you're the guy who wants to go to Siauliai. Well, this ain't it."

The train started creeping along again and I was too ashamed to go back to my seat. I had just run, grimacing, past these people. I stood in the corridor with my bags and waited there.

A thing I love about Lithuania is that the bus and train stations have seed kiosks next to the magazine racks and coffee counters. Big colorful envelopes promising flowers and vegetables. It's just so sweet to think that planting and gardening are such a casual thing here that you would impulse-buy some not-yet-born baby carrots or morning glories.

And it's not instant gratification. Like, with a candy bar, or newspaper, or latte, you want it right then and consume it quickly. The seeds imply work and planning and delayed satisfaction, but it's such a part of the fabric of their lives, that's normal. Beyond the souvenirs and the monuments and the traditional food, this might be the symbol that gives me the most real insight into their national character.

And that was on my mind as we pulled into Siauliai for real this time. Patience. Calm. Seeds.

It's a small town, and you can walk everywhere. It's big enough to be pretty cool, though. Like, it had everything I needed. I stayed in a hotel here instead of an airbnb. Cheap, easy. Dropped off my bags, washed my face. Washed my hair. Mapped out the route to The Hill of Crosses.

That's why people come here. Story goes, it was a sacred place where people prayed and left crosses and when the Soviets took over, they were like, 'Hey, Imagine no religion -- it's easy if you try," and they turned the churches into discos and bulldozed this place.

But, people sneaked back and put more crosses there, and the Russians did a Jim Belushi-style doubletake and were like, "But.. how, I thought we...ok, fire up the bulldozer." And they trashed it again, but again people came back at night.

Again crosses sprang up. Rinse. Repeat. Until the Reds gave up. And now, it's just nuts with crosses all over the dingdong place. A symbol of both faith and resistance.

My hope was that it would be interesting and not another Zalipie, a place with a cool story but an underwhelming payoff.

On the way to the bus station, I passed the mighty Cockerel Clock! Back in Tarnow, gateway to Zalipie, the drivers rolled their eyes when you told them where you wanted to go. Here, though, they were like, "I don't speak that lazy-tongued hamburger nonsense you call language, but here is a mimeographed pamphlet with every possible minivan that goes to the Hill of Crosses."

Helpful. Cool. Found my little van, had to kill and hour, so I bought the ticket to Riga for the morning. It occurred to me that it was the last ticket I would buy on this trip. That was the final Unknown segment. Everything from Riga on was booked. So, that was a moment.

Got some coffee, read The Handmaid's Tale, got on the chopper.

Sat in the front for fear of missing the stop. It was another one of those, middle of nowhere places that you have to let the driver know you're stopping at. Plenty of people go there, but they usually take tours. I saw some hippie German hitch hikers.

If you do what I did, you're supposed to look for a little sign that reads Kryžių Kalna. When I saw it, I made gentle grunts and gave off enough nervous energy that the driver knew to stop.

It was a 2KM walk from the stop, which is about twenty minutes. So, more Zalipie flashbacks, but I could soon see it in the distance and it was very clearly what it was supposed to be.

Quiet walk through the sort of terrain I think later will define this trip for me. Quiet blue skies with enormous white clouds over fields of bright green grass dotted with yellow flowers. A child could easily draw The Baltics with just the small packet of crayons they give kids at restaurants.

Enormous bees on Spring Break got fucked up on nectar.

Nothing around, just the occasional solitary tree, and in the distance the bristling spears of the Christ Child.

When I got there, I had the place to myself but for the exception of the hitch hikers who had somehow beaten me there. Quiet, almost-eerie ramble around this strange place.

Because of personal and cultural corruption, I had the lyrics to Spill the Wine in my head. Instead of a religious epiphany or emotions about the defiant, brave souls who'd contributed to this place, I was humming 1970's #3 hit on the Billboard charts. I looked at the wild variety of crosses and sang "there were strong ones, tall ones, short ones, brown ones, black ones, round ones, big ones, crazy ones."

You can't help what's in your head. "I dreamed I was in a Hollywood movie."

Many of the crosses were handmade and personal but many of them looked like they had come out of a crate marked "Crosses for The Hill - 50 Cents." I saw the same tin Christ hundreds of times. Very easy to picture him in an overflowing drawer of himself at Home Depot.

Christs for all purposes. Strong ones, tall ones, short ones..."

But, it was a very peaceful and interesting place. Some old pieces there, many encrusted with jewels or hand painted, a few very old with Jesus falling off, making a break for it.

 I also saw a very sweet bird living in cross. I called him Christ-o-pher Robin.

Easy ride back. Happy thoughts. It felt good to walk the 2KM there and back to the stop.
Tooled around Siauliai proper, ate some bread and spinach pies. Rambled around by the lake and in a cemetery. Some very beautiful girls were playing cards on a tomb. The frames on their sunglasses were large and they wore pretty skirts. It came off as natural and not grim or ghoulish. Why not play cards in the cemetery?

Ate proper dinner at the hotel. There were six men in the hotel bar, each at their own table. On a large HD screen, Elton John croaked through bad cover versions of his own greatest hits. The bartender, hair in a high black bun, eyebrows in high black arcs served everyone slowly and with a reserved humor.

Oh, Nikita, you will never know anything about my home.

I drank local cranberry bitters and ate herring with beets. The other men drank vodka and ate French fries. They were Russian. Russians and Texans are the same, arrogant pot-bellied businessmen obsessed with the Motherland. Singing drinkers and drinking singers sure of their own worth. Jeans and rings. She must have been serving men like this all her life. She will continue to serve them for all of theirs.

And the New York Times says god is dead.

The sun was crazy red and round as it set. It looked like the world was red underneath the sky and someone had scraped away a circle to show the fierce undercoat. I slept early and long. In the morning - Riga.

Vinyl Day in Vilnius

"If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending to the story and real life will come after it. 

It isn't a story I'm telling. 

It's also a story I'm telling, in my head, as I go along. 

Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else." - The Handmaid's Tale

The last day in Vilnius was very peaceful. I had breakfast with Asta. She told me about growing up with fresh vegetables and how much she loves the change of weather, because the change of weather means a change of soup.

Soup is a part of every meal here.

Her partner, Donatas, is what they used to call a "gearhead" back in the day. Loves cars. Loves oil and roaring. Loves pieces and parts. Bolts and belts and solenoids and torque converters. He was very clean, though, with a haircut like an Icelandic pony.

I had "done" the town, so the goal this day was to plot out the rest of the trip, to just take a few hours with my charts and my sextant and a book interpreting the navigation of the stars. I drank instant coffee and ate dates.

The box they came in read "Juicy Dates."  Which will be my stage name when the audience tires of Amber Regrets.

Getting up to Riga wasn't going to be a problem, but getting back to Poland where my flight home is will be tricky. Because of an "exclave" on the West Coast of Lithuania, it's difficult to take a shortcut back to Warsaw.

This exclave is called Kaliningrad and is a sizable chunk of Russia that doesn't connect to Russia in any way. It will definitely be in the news when all hell breaks loose over here again some day. It's a port full of tanks and battleships right in the middle of Europe. It gives them great access to Scandinavia and everywhere else.

I guess it's kind of like Alaska.

In any case, you can't enter it without a Russian visa, and those are expensive and not, to me, worth it just to cut across Ivan's back yard on the way to soccer practice, so... I booked a flight from Riga to Warsaw, a cheap shared room for that evening in Warsaw, and then a little shuttle back to the airport, so I can hear Ruggles a'purring again.

All of that was still cheaper than the visa. And faster, of course.

I finished reading The Bluest Eye (scary! sad! great!) and also finished the last story in The Pegnitz Junction (fantastic!), and started something called Ferdyduke. After about twenty pages, I threw Ferdyduke in the Ferdydump and started The Handmaid's Tale.

Which is excellent.

Ferdyduke is a classic of Polish literature that has been highly recommended several times, and I've started it several times, so I packed it figuring this would be the only possible place to read it. But, it is not my bag, baby.

It did teach me, however, that the Polish words for "fingers" and "toes" are the same. Worth carrying it around the world for that, I'll say.

I think the Liths were waiting for me to leave so they could mindmeld or whatever they do for lovemaking, They're too fragile and clean-seeming to picture fucking. I just imagine she hums like a tiny car for him and he makes a sound like new soup for her, and their muscles contract.

That... actually sounds kind of hot. Which means I have been on the road a long time.

Took the long walk into the city and went back to the tea house I liked on the previous day.

You are here again! Do you want the same thing?
"Yes, please. The Lord Henry."
Yes, I know. Are you here a long time?
"Just today. Tomorrow I'm going north to see The Hill of Crosses."
Why?
"It looks...interesting."
It is, perhaps, the top-10 creepiest place on Earth.
"Haha. Ok, I'll go get creeped out."

(Loud church bells ring outside for a long time)

After the Hill, you will go home to the UK?
"Haha. No, I live in Seattle in the U.S. Do I sound...English?"
No, but you ordered tea. Americans drink coffee.
"Why were the bells so loud just now?"
To tell the hour.
"But they rang at least twenty times."
To tell it is an hour. It is your own responsibility to know which one.

I shopped around for some amber, which is here too in great quantities, but it's very expensive, even for a little chip carved to look like a heart. Nobody is getting any.

I popped into an antique shop that looked promising, but it was also very expensive. It had ID cards for Nazi officers and Soviet medals. The most interesting, to me, was the Mother Heroine medal they give women who have ten or more babies.

Good work, Natasha, we were running out of soldiers and prostitutes. The state thanks you.

I left without buying pricey Prussian coins or Himmler's shoulder blade.

Outside, children straddled wooden bicycles and their parents, one tenth of the way to a Mother Heroine medal, helped them balance. Little girls held out candies and asked for them. When they were told no, they selected different candies. And again until a candy was approved by the state.

I popped into a deli for dinner and met the meanest woman. Holdover from The Bad Old Days, I think. She sold me some pretty bad cepelini (those blimp-shaped potato things) and some just-ok beets.

Walking to a park to eat, I heard a violin playing the familiar sad sounds of Where is My Mind. So unexpected and beautiful. I started shaking with emotion. I followed the sound until I found the musicians and sat on the steps near them just as the singer was "swimmin' in the Caribbean."

I ate the beets with my fingers and wept. I am trembling now remembering it. Why was it so powerful? That happened yesterday with Cherry Bomb too. The street musicians are what I will remember about this place, I think. And the beautiful red Church of St. Anne.

I took some terrible video of them. It's just awful, really. I just wanted to be near them. I'm so much more used to being affected internally, from passages in books, from thoughts during films. They changed to the Game of Thrones theme, and I needed a coffee. My fingers were purplepink from the beets. My mouth, if I could have seen it, was probably the same color.

A guy walked by in a t-shirt that read FUCK HAPPENS, which cracked me up. A sign at a cafe read "Come to the Dark Side, We Have a Coffee."  The "a" in there killed me too.

I was open and happy, a kiln-fired porcelain creamer painted with folk flowers.

Bought some coffee and when I came back out, the musicians were playing Where is My Mind again. I thought it would have less impact, but it was just as beautiful. In fear of immunity, I left.

On the (long, long) walk back, I wanted a drink, but the famous whiskey bar (King and Mouse) was closed on account of coming down with a case of the Sundays. Same with the famous brandy bar. A sober night for Captain Kiln Creamer.

Which was fine. I would be taking the bus in the morning to Siauliai to see the Hill of Crosses.*

Farewell, Vilnius, you were a town of kind people, beautiful live music, and tasteful monuments.

*Spoiler Warning - I made it there with no trouble as these pictures show.  These are the pictures you get for this entry. Does it make sense? Not to me.

If It Be Your Vilnius

The bus from Kaunas to Vilnius was probably the easiest, smoothest segment of this trip, which has been a Baltic millipede of many, many segments. It's probably because I didn't schedule it. Took a nice shower, made some nice coffee, packed my bags nicely and walked down to the station. Just to see.

I was like, "Vilnius?" They were like, "That bus is leaving in two minutes and it's $6." And I had two minutes and $6, so snip snap snorum,

One of my favorite things about Lithuania so far is that the word for "thank you" is pronounced "ah-choo." Easy to remember and hilarious to say. Please pass the pepper. Ah-choo,

The driver gave me my ticket, I sneezed my appreciation, and we were on the way.

I read more Mavis Gallant. Rich and beautiful. I don't know who to recommend it to, but The Pegnitz Junction is magnificent. I loved the feeling of reading it.

The outskirts of Vilnius were shabby as we approached, the city is sort of frayed at the edges. Oh, Toto, I don't think we're in Kaunas anymore.

Bought some bread with onions and mysteries inside, traded in my dollars for Euros. I was looking forward to some new coins for my collection, but Lit and Lat are both firmly on the Euro now. It means things are a little bit more expensive. But, I guess everything is compared to The Ukraine.

Back in Lublin, I was told that the locals go to Georgia for their cheap holidays. I liked thinking about that. I go to Eastern Europe for cheap vacations, and Eastern Europe goes to Georgia. Where do the Georgians go?

Took a taxi to my apartment. My hosts were a couple of woodland creatures named Asta and Donatas. O' the casual beauty of their faces and bodies, the silver refinement of their gestures and manners. He works in the National Library and fixes MINI cars for a hobby. She's in Marketing and makes tiny arts and tiny crafts.

They're preparing for a road trip with their friends in four MINIs to Belgium.

Other lives, other worlds.

My room is enormous. Huge windows, crayons, bookshelf. Hilariously, there's a giant picture book of Estonian bus stops!

I think I meant to get right out into the action, but I closed my eyes for a moment, and.... hours passed in a Lithuanian nap. Maybe I sensed I had the time. Two days here. The parts of the trip that don't involve loitering at the Ukrainian border have been go + go, so this is a built-in rest stop.

There was plenty to see, however, so up I got, camera packed, map folded, and off to the Old City (as is the pattern and the theme). Long walk there. Getting pretty used to enormous churches. Got sad thinking about the history of them.

Like, these places were forced to become Christian. Ostensibly to "save their souls" but practically because The Pope and Western Europe condoned the looting and murder of "pagans." You were allowed to come up here a'rapin' from Germany or England or Etceterastan if you were spreading the Lord's word.

So, to keep from getting a bunch of French arrows in your thighs, you put up a cross and said, "No pagans here. Look how Christian we are, maybe even the most Christian."

It makes me think of the way Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about "whiteness." Because they are forced to by culture and out of fear, people will claim to be whatever they think will give them the most rights. And if they can get other people to agree, they're in great shape.

What's the best thing to be... White Christian? Brother, I'm so glad you said that, because it describes me exactly. Go loot those tree-fuckers in Estonia, we're all busy saying grace over here.

Before they got cathedral spires all stuck in them, though, the Lithuanians fought a famous battle with the Teutonic Knights and busted their horns all the way back to Malbork. Kept themselves pagan a little but longer.

Malbork is where I was a few weeks ago, It's been very cool to read about these things and then see them, of course.

Into the Old City, which is enormous and thriving. Happy people everywhere delighting in the sun. More tourists than Kaunas, but something called Europe Day was going on and there were food carts lining the streets and a huge religious concert with thousands of people. Nuns on picnic blankets. Teenagers in church-group tee-shirts.

Wandered in and out of amber shops and coffee places. Stunned by the facade of the National Theater. It's three... I guess muses, but they have gold comedy, tragedy, and... neutraly (?) masks. Their outline against the sky, their strange balance, the integration of the theater into the city. I was stricken with emotion. It was A Moment.

It made me want to be famous and dead and asleep and fucking and old all at once.

 
Hot-air balloons rose in the distance and I headed to their launching place. I passed many street musicians on the way. I've been in... eight cities and heard "Imagine" in all of them and Adele in most of them. Here, though, two boys with a guitar and violin were singing a Lithuanian song that everyone seemed to know. The crowd sang along beautifully. The emotion on their faces. It was a moment for them.

A filthy old man with a nicotine-yellow beard, his face the color of street-sleep, did a Zorba the Greek sort of dance. His jeans were dark with urine. His sport coat was badly torn at the shoulders.

Further down the cobblestones, two teen girls were singing Cherry Bomb. I couldn't believe it. My heart already open from the theater statues, this song rushed in to fill it. After so many days of melancholy Old City crooning, so cool to hear something with an edge.  I showered them with 20-cent coins.

Ducked into a tea house and drank a pot of something called The Lord Henry. Used books and records lined the walls. Marvelous patterns and colors.

Climbed the hill to the castle to see things from above. Long, winding road up, up, up, a magic hill to the castle. The day was warm, and bright; people from all over the world were breathless and happy. Selfie sticks were extended and bristled like the pikes of the invading Turks must have once.

I watched a cat clean himself high in the castle wall, I watched a crow empty a trash can. I loved that crow. A bag of pistachios was too heavy for him to get out, so I took it out for him. He kept a respectful distance while I did this and when I turned my back, I heard the scattering of a hundred shells on the stone.

Sorry, cleaning crew. I was in love.

Beautiful long views of the city glowing as the sun lowered itself. There was a funicular, and I sang an Italian song at it but I didn't ride it down. I walked back the way I came and remembered the balloons.

Dogs and families. Children dressed like animals. Salons. Beards.

Cheated on the crow and gave my affection to the Church of St. Anne, a gorgeous old brick masterpiece that looks like it will fall on you and stand forever all at once. Schrodinger's cathedral.

Like most things of genuine significance, it was difficult to get a photograph that really captured its essence or the way it made me feel, so I bought a magnet.

Floated to where I thought the balloons (remember them?!) had come from and found myself in Uzupis, a cute little side-community dedicated to cats and freedom. Kind of an artist's colony apart from the city, but like most of these types of places, rapidly gentrifying.

Or so it seemed to me. And, since I've been run out of Atlanta, Brooklyn, and soon Seattle for just those reasons, the signs are familiar to me. I say this without malice (but with melancholy).

Uzupis is known as the "Lithuanian Williamsburg," a term I think is meant affectionately and in reference to ten-years-ago Williamsburg. Nice and gritty with tea shops and used book stores and a giant constitution fixed to a wall proclaiming this an independent and free state in which people are required to be kind.

As is necessary in such places, there is a large restaurant serving "Tibetan food." When you buy the hip neighborhood kit, the first thing out of the box is the Tibetan restaurant.

I drank more tea and read for a while.

Watched the sun commit suicide and walked back to St. Anne's to see how the brick looked in a different light. Made myself laugh thinking Church of St. Anne sounded like Church of Satan if spoken quickly. Wondered why I'd never thought about that before.

Had dinner and some gross bitters at a tourist trap. Nasty herring but great beetroot soup. 33% of the meal was just fine. The waiter wanted me to drink more, but it was gross, but I'm the girl who can't say no, so it was one more shot of yucky bitters. Vacation.

My rationale was, it would probably take years before I acquired a fondness or taste for it, so I had better get started.

The apartment is kind of a long walk from the action, so it was kind of a long walk home in the dark. Which I did not mind. As I was heading away from it all, walking toward the Old City were well-dressed gangs of high-cheekboned miscreants with heartstopping haircuts. They were gathering for a rumble in the disco.

In the morning, Asta was cooking cottage-cheese dumplings and Donatas was sorting bolts, screws, and caps. Her ingredients were carefully organized by the side of the stove. His car parts were kept carefully organized in plastic containers.

Clean light shone on these beautiful people and their organization.

They leave for Belgium soon.

The car parts are for if something goes wrong. The dumplings are for me.