Hello Latvia

Celebrating school

The first of September has rolled around again, and today we braved the streets with a dressed-up son and bunch of flowers in tow, ready to start a new school year. Tiss wasn't too happy to be starting school again - which kid ever is? Although I think that on the whole he enjoys school. We all attended the first assembly today, including Mikus, who seems quietly excited that he will also go to school there.
One year into it, I have come to a reserved conclusion that the school he is attending is a good one. The Rīga Central Applied Arts Primary School is a public primary school, located in the old town - just a few blocks from home. It was established in the 19th century as a German school for applied art, and a number of well-known Latvian artists and craftsmen have gone there. Today, although it is still located in the same building, it is a regular primary school in which kids are taught all of the required primary school curriculum, but also get a double of the required dose of art and home economics. Most of the after-school interest groups are art related - ceramics, animation etc, and it seems to attract a lot of parents/families with an interest in the arts generally.
One of the great things about the school is its size - there are less than 300 students, from grades 1 - 9. As a result, you get to know most of the teachers and staff, and feel very comfortable walking into the school and finding out whatever information you need, and organising a personal approach to your own situation is no problem. The location is amazing - for excursions the kids sometimes walk around the old town, and this is also where the older grades have "plein air" pracs for the first week of the school term. However, because it's an inner city school, there is no dedicated outdoor area for the kids, which is a stark contrast from my own memories of lunch hours at school, spent outside playing hopscotch, sitting in the shade, playing on the oval...
One interesting part of primary school in Latvia is that your "home room" teacher is the same one for grades 1 - 4. This can be a blessing, if you happen to land a good teacher, who you can become very attached to over the first four years of schooling. Unfortunately for us, Tiss got an older teacher who has lost her love of teaching, and uses Soviet pedagogical methods - through instilling a great deal of fear in her students, putting them down and yelling. We have been trying to teach Tiss to get a thick skin in regards to this treatment, which has been hard, and we are very grateful that she is not the only one responsible for teaching his class.
In terms of work, last year the kids were basically taught about form, rather than content. There was a great emphasis on handwriting skills, which I found bemusing, but trust that at some point in the next couple of years the focus will shift from HOW Tiss writes, to WHAT he writes...
Apart from these and a few other things, school is good. Tiss takes after Jem in terms of popularity, and is friends with most kids in the class. When we arrived this morning you could see a real joy in the children being reunited after the summer break, and it was exciting for both parents and kids alike to wonder what this year of school will hold. The days have become suddenly colder and dare I say it, I am almost looking forward to blustery autumn and winter days, when we can sit indoors and concentrate on studying, reading and learning.

Assembly in the courtyard - very inner city...

Can you see Tiss?

Someone had the great idea of taking a class photo with all the kids squinting in the sun

Afterwards we had a celebratory cup of tea with school friends

A happy 8 year old!

Holidays

Jem and I are both on holidays. This is a pretty weird concept, as for years we were both freelancers who didn’t have officially designated holidays. Lately when we have taken leave, we have done so because were travelling abroad. This year, however, with the global economic crisis and home renovations and all, we are on holidays at home in Latvia. It has been wonderful. We have been at Kūgures and not done much. The last few days Jem has been building a bookshelf from recycled timber, while I have been meditating on preserving cucumbers. As you do.

This summer was stingy in the berry department, so I haven’t made much jam, but the heat must have for perfect conditions in greenhouses, because there is a flood of local cucumbers. I woke up two mornings ago to find a huge shopping bag crammed with cucumbers on our doorstep, left there by our neighbours who just don’t know what to do with their over-abundant crop. So I looked up pickling cucumber recipes and talked to a few preserving-guru friends, who recommended making “Latgales” salad - marinated cucumber slices with onion. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Slicing cucumbers and heating jars. And crossing my fingers, because I am taking a wild stab in the dark regarding pasteurizing the jars after they’ve been filled with the cucumber mixture – I guess they could be fermented, exploding messes in a week or so. We’ll see.

Jem’s project has been a success , and after many many hours measuring and cutting and sanding and drilling and measuring again and drilling some more and, dare I say, “finessing”, a handsome bookcase now adorns the corner of Kūgures living room. What will be his next furniture building project, I wonder?

Another thing we have done while on leave is go to a two day music festival. Of course these happened to be two stinking hot (yes – over 30 degrees, which is crazy hot in LV) days, whereby sitting in the sun listening to concerts and sleeping in an airless tent were a trial at times – but generally a good time was had by all. Music festivals are only just now beginning to take off in Latvia. You don’t get crowds as big as in Australia or other “western” countries, but it is a pleasure to see that younger Latvian music organizers are starting to give it a go. This festival mainly featured local bands and performers, but it had four stages going, the requisite activities for kids, weirdo art installations, dj booth, recycled clothing stalls and overpriced food vans.

I’ve got to admit I’ve always loved the music festival atmosphere and it was a pleasant surprise to see that the kids enjoyed it as much as we did. The night before Tiss and Mikus had put on a big whinge about not wanting to go, because they didn’t want to go to lots of concerts. But on the first night, when we stopped at 1am to have a snack before retiring to bed, I could see that my two overtired sons were hooked on the excitement of so much music and mayhem going on around them all at once. We had already seen fire twirlers, a friend’s bands play, a hard rock band in a big cleared-out hay barn, run into a crowd of crazy dancers at the front of a stage and danced madly along with them, played a bowling game and won prizes, been accosted by the evangelistic vegetarian crowd, posed for photos on a piece of interactive art, and pitched our tents in a huge apple orchard next to 100s of other tents. Of course, there were low points, for example when the DJ booth finally finished blaring over the camping area at 6am and Mikus woke up after only a couple of hours sleep - this was definitely not fun - but generally, we had a great time, and I am sure that the next time we suggest going to a music festival our sons will be hyped and excited at the prospect of what is to come!

Road trip

In the 1930s there was a campaign in Latvia for locals to be tourists in Latvia itself: "Apceļo Dzimto Zemi!". I have always thought that this was obviously the way to go - to know your own country as well as travelling around others - but until now, for one reason or another, we had not done very much travelling in Latvia itself. This year, mostly because the kids are bigger and no longer scream during long car trips (thanks for the Ninteno DS, Oma and Opa!), and partly because we are not travelling anywhere overseas this summer, it is the Summer of Local Tourism. I had also decided to begin to actively take people up on vague offers of visiting them at their country houses (people tend to put out "you must come and stay with us in the country this summer" invitations quite often), and so when the parents of Tiss' school friend invited us out, I purposefully set a date and this weekend, we packed up the car and headed out to their place in Latgale.

After an almost 5 hour trip (which was meant to take 3 hours but lengthened because Mikus began to vomit and wouldn't stop - and this was even BEFORE he started playing the DS), we turned up at their place, way in the middle of a wheat field, right by a slow-flowing river. The river was perfect for swimming, not very deep, with a sandy bottom, and the boys spent the next day in the water. This country property also had a melna pirts - or a black sauna - which we went in that evening. I won't go into the cultural description of saunas in Latvia - that is a post that has been brewing for a while - but in short, a black sauna is a traditional sauna which has no chimney, which means that the smoke from the fire fills the room and is let out before you go into the sauna to wash. The walls of the sauna and the stones on the stove are black with soot. This was our first time in a black sauna and it was very pleasant - the heat felt a bit different, kind of softer, I guess, and visually, people look so good against the black walls! We spent most of the two outside, eating by the river, swimming, the boys did a lot of running through the fields, all of the menfolk went on a boat ride, and that evening the boys slept in a tent, with their freshly home-made wooden swords for protection.

Next day we kept on driving, and apart from stopping at every lake we passed (the region Latgale is called the "land of blue lakes"), we also took part in the "unpacking" of a potter's kiln. This part of Latgale traditionally has many potters' workshops, and you can visit the artists at their homes. We were lucky enough to turn up during a kiln unpacking, and got to see the pots coming out gleaming and hot. We (and everyone else in the crowd of people who were there) helped carry the pots outdoors, where we chose the ones we wanted to buy. The boys were most interested to see the kiln and the wares emerging from it, and Jem and I scored some beautiful pieces at sensational prices, straight from the artist himself. Not only that, but it was great to hear the local dialect being spoken by people around us - singing in the Saucejas we have learned many songs from this area, in the Latgallian dialect, but to hear a conversation between Latgallians is an experience in itself. To my surprise and pleasure, I actually understood everything that was said today, and found myself wishing I could speak the dialect as well.

Boy, kite and dog

The sauna is heating up...

A few of our pieces. Pieces of grass mean "this is reserved"

One of Latgale's many beautiful lakes

Latgallians are Catholics, so you see the roadside crucifixes along country roads. Reminded me of Tuscany!

Simple Pleasures (or bare feet, frogs, books, and berries)

Finally, its summer in Latvia. We may start later than everywhere else in the universe, and it all ends sooner, but what we lack in duration, we certainly make up in intensity. The honey-scented countryside with its decadent green is doing its thing - if you sit still enough you can actually HEAR the plants growing rapidly around you. I have been working two (LONG) days a week in Riga and spending the rest of the week with the boys in the country. The temperature the last few days has been in the high 20s, which is a HEATWAVE for the locals, and is predicted to last for another week or so. We have spent a couple of days at the beach, and now are living outdoors under the trees. Jem is right now outside trying to fashion a home-made slip 'n' slide for the boys - do you remember the slip 'n' slide? I never had one, never tried one, but when I was around 10 I watched those happy kids squirming around in soapy water on the tv ads and tried to curb my envy.

It is so good to have a relax in the country now, because the last few weeks of our lives have been the busiest weeks of the year - before Jani my bosses turned up from the USA, which means I was "on call", Jem's parents also arrived for a three week visit - which meant a pretty intensive time of playing and visiting and touring, and was WAY too short, might I add - and the museum had its first exhibition open, for which Jem did the design. And although all of these things were very positive experiences and enjoyable, they mean that we have been working and socializing way too hard, which is all wrong - in this kind of weather you need to lie on a lilo in the middle of the lake and not do much. Beer in your hand.

Anyhow, back to the country. One of the big joys of the last few days has been Mikus in bare feet. TWO bare feet on the grass. A couple of days ago Jem + Mik's doctor + his splint maker between them worked out that Mikus' splint doesn't need a part under his foot any more - that his ankle doesn't need to be supported. Now the splint just compresses and wraps around his lower leg like a leg warmer, in order to protect the bone if he gets a direct blow to the leg. How cool is that! I don't know who is happier - Mikus or us - to see him racing around the front yard with two bare feet. The muscles in his ankle need strengthening, and he has moments of limping when he gets tired, but give it another few weeks and he will be running faster than the other kids.

On to Matiss - who has finally discovered the joy of reading. Both Jem and I were avid readers as kids, and it has been quite frustrating for me to watch my 7, almost 8 year old struggle with reading in the last year at school. He was only doing it when he was forced, and then only reading the minimum requirement. At the beginning of his holidays we pushed Tiss to read a chapter of Winnie the Pooh a day, and when he actually finished that (a few days ago) he was puffed up with pride. We bought him a little book light to celebrate, and ruled that if he couldn't fall asleep, he was allowed to read a chapter or two in bed with the light clipped on to his book. What an incentive! That, coupled with a trip to the library, and we've got a bookworm on our hands. He finished another (comparatively long!) book between last night and this morning, and I can see, finally, that a love affair has begun. Amazingly, Tiss can also read English - this happened without any training, apart from telling him the sound for "th" - he just picked up a reader for kids his age and ripped through it. Probably totally normal, I'm assuming if you have the skills for reading one language it can be transferred fairly easily to another, but to me its seems like a miracle.

As for me, I've been watching frogs in our little pond near the house. Totally delighted. There's brown ones and green ones, with spots, or stripes, and if you sit quiet enough, you can also see tritons (or are they called salamanders in English? Lizards that live underwater). In Queensland, in my childhood, there were green tree frogs that lived in the bush around our house: they were so prolific that occasionally you would visit the toilet to find a green leg sticking out from under the rim - they would crawl in under there to enjoy the cool water flushing downwards. Later, the frogs began to die out, and by the time I was at uni a whole movement had been established to try and recreate frog habitats in suburban Queensland, to encourage them back into our backyards. Jem and I spent hours digging in our hard, rocky earth on the hilltop to make a tropical pond, lined with black pond liner and succulents planted around, so that we could have frogs in our yard. As a result, we had a lot of cane toad spawn in our tiny pond, though I do also remember being excited about a couple of miniscule green tree frogs that made an appearance. But it was a struggle. Here, frogs are obviously pretty common - and because we don't farm or have any pesticides or fertilizers, our land is a frogs paradise. The kids can spend ages with little nets catching hem by the pond, holding them in their hands and letting them go again. You walk along the edge of the pond, accompanied by the plop, plop, plop, of tens of frogs leaping in the water to evade you.

A last highlight of the past week - berries. Strawberries to be precise. Strawberry season is coming to a close, and every opportunity I get I take off to the market to inhale the aroma and to buy a kilo or two or dark red, mushy, sweet berry goodness. I haven't started making jam yet, but will be doing so presently, because at this time of the year you have to make the most of this, the most yummy of fruits.

So, that's what's happening at our place. I'm not sure I will get motivated to do another post for a while. Outdoors is calling...

Work in Progress

Things are moving. Slowly, slowly, but surely. The builders keep telling me that if they can just get a few more boys on the job, we could be moving in by autumn... personally I think Christmas is a more likely scenario, but, whatever. Come 2011 I may be almost properly equipped to take on visitors from Australia!

At first these photos seemed very macho and technical, but I'm starting to get an appreciation for the Jeffrey Smart-esque lines and placement of certain items, and the colours. Jeremy's been photographing every time we go to the house, and we have a growing folder documenting the progress of the building work.