Maira’s book about the life of a girl in her early teens was published last Friday. Even if you can’t read Latvian, you can get a clue about the stories through Anete Melece’s illustrations. The publisher is specialising on books for children and youngsters: readers which for long have been overlooked by the industry in Latvia. Maira Dobele: Nepareisas dzives skola.
What will eventually happen to the house inside a house? Dubulti, Jurmala.
Last Friday was hot. These panoramas are from Dubulti, Jurmala: a 30-minute train drive from Riga centre.
We came back to Riga a few days ago. This panorama from yesterday morning is from Dzirnavu street, view centered southwards. The brown building on the left is a health centre. The tower behind is Hotel Latvija, whose sky bar offers cocktail drinks named Orgasm and alike. Riga has developed a reputation for its sex tourism.
A bit more to the right, where the the aeroplane traces point to, you can see a glimpse of the Esplanade Park. The park hosts an orthodox cathedral, trampolines and a giant air-filled crocodile. Yesterday, in the playground while a sociology student was interviewing us about phone connections and the internet usage, a young Russian mother was beating her small boy with a shoe.
On the right, a couple of blocks behind the corner-shop cafe, is the Art Nouveau Riga where you may spot houses built by Mikhail Eisenstein, the father of the film director Sergei. During these five years I’ve been strolling Riga the area has grown very posh.
A couple of days before our return to Helsinki our friends took us for picking cherries near Livberze, south-west from Riga.
Here is one more landscape from Kapsede. The cost of heating has grown very much during Latvia’s EU membership. I’ve earlier shown you glimpses of the central heating system of the school and its surroundings (here and here). The system is outdated and will have to be replaced by something else. One proposal is a plant that would be producing electricity from (I hope I got this correct) corn waste. As a side product the faculty could offer heating to its neighbourhood – possibly noise and smells too. The plant would be located somewhere within this panorama. In the village the discussion about the plant is heated.
During the nights, if someone is not boosting their out of date techno, we hear the dogs, cranes, owls and tree frogs discussing. A bit later into the summer and it’d mainly be the crickets.
Half-way through renovation I had to acquire a battery driven drilling machine. It came bundled with a vacuum packed football–for a reason unclear to me.
Name of the place, Kapsede (prolong the first ‘e’), means the place where the dunes sat down. Long ago this was where the Baltic Sea was flushing its surfs. Now the sea is about nine kilometres away. The road from the former important harbour Liepaja to the now more important Ventspils follows the protected ridge of the ancient sea shore. Kapsede is within Liepaja’s immediate reach, yet truly countryside. Liepaja Metallurg’s chimneys are still pouring red smoke though the plant only runs at a fraction of its Soviet time powers.
We have been busy refurbishing Ausma’s kitchen, hence the silence. Under three layers of wallpaper we discovered the Russian Blue, variations of which always seem more like green to me.
Here is the salad recipe I earlier promised:
After Tomins died also the new cat was named Tomins.
An important character, Tomins, was too busy to attend the group portrait but here he is seen on top of Vilma.
This picture has gone a bit old - yet it quite well puts the lot together. In 2005 we celebrated Ausma’s 70th anniversary.
I had never gone to one before. The annual party of Matru cemetery near Kapsede took place today. I’ve heard some parties attract crowds carrying snacks and drinks. Compared, this event was pretty dry, except that some invisible witty force started fiddling on and off the synthesizer loudspeakers halfway through a hymn. This was just after the priest had remarked that we cannot take our TV-sets and computers with us when it is time to go.
