All About Latvia

I was hoping for a pretty girl.

It’s a single guy’s dream, you know. Traveling alone on an
international flight in hopes to meet a sophisticated, smart,
educated, well-versed, gorgeous woman. And madly fall in love with her. Or at least get her number.

It must only happen in movies because every time I travel, my wish never comes true. This time, an airline staff member placed a young, smart, sophisticated dude next to me, who wasn’t even into talking with a strange “furriner” near him. The only time we exchanged any words was during the departure from Chicago. As I looked out of the airplane window, I saw Milwaukee lit up like Baghdad during the shock and awe. Only without the casualties of course. It was still America. The city looked bright yellow and gorgeous from up high.

“Wow. Look at that,” I told my unfortunate companion, who too might have been hoping for a woman seat partner.

He looked at the view. He mumbled something along the lines of Mmm-hmm. And then reclined back in his seat. Can you really sum up that view with the monosyllabic expression.

We ate in silence. We slept next to each other in silence. We were true men. No unnecessary words were exchanged. None at all.

Not that I longed for a company, you see.

Back at O’Hare during boarding, I did befriend one passenger. A much older gentleman, probably in his 80s, who was going to Norway to meet up with his Norwegian wife. She came over to the States after the war and three weeks ago, she went on her frequent trip to Norway to visit family and friends. And now, my nameless friend was following her. He was a pleasant man, well-versed in the today’s politics and history. He sounded like a retired executive or some high-ranking individual in a company. We talked about the Michigan’s economy, and the Great Depression. He was a well-spoken kind old man, but he had one major flaw — He never heard of Latvia.

Then, the boarding started and in this havoc I lost him. I saw him once again in Copenhagen when I had to empty my pockets for a carry-in luggage check. But he was far away and I didn’t feel like raising the security level to red.

From Chicago, the flight felt long. Leaving late at night has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages was going through the customs without hardly any crowd gathered at the x-ray machines.

The disadvantage was that at the takeoff, flight attendants began
offering us food when I felt like closing my eyes and trying to get
some sleep.

On the connecting flight to Riga though another man peeked my curiosity. It was more about his appearance than anything else. His long silver hair laid on his shoulders. Somewhere his head hair met with his long beard hair, but I couldn’t tell where one ended and another started. He was going bald on the top of his head.

Each of his five fingers boasted several silver rings that covered his whole knuckle. Each with a different emblem and each, I suppose, symbolized something different. A silver bracelet adorned his right wrist. He wore a green shirt, but apparently whoever made the shirt just smeared green all over it,
leaving some white stripes along the way. He must have loved it at first sight. He wore striped pants held on his slim waste by a giant belt with silver holes in it. The narrow stripes of red, brown, yellow lines on his pants connected his belt to more amusing red winter socks placed on his feet.

During the flight, he sat Turkish style right across from me and another gentleman. His feet were folded under his bottom on
his seat. When a flight attendant approached, in his perfect English
he ordered a half-liter can of a Latvian beer, Lacplesis. Maybe he just wanted a beer and this being a Latvian airline they only serve Latvian beer. I didn’t know. I noticed him again when we boarded the bus to ride to the airplane. He was the last one to leave the bus, even though I politely offered him to go first. Without saying a word, he just raised his ring-ridden hand and showed me to the door. I proceeded with a smile.

Perhaps he is an non-reformed hippie. Well, he is definitely a
non-conformist, secure in his bearded manliness and hip pants, which he must have gotten out of his time machine closet. Maybe he stopped shopping in 1979. I wonder about his purpose for coming to Riga. Travel? Visit relatives? Is he a former Latvian who immigrated to the West those long years ago? My questions were answered later when I found out that he is a Latvian American coming from Los Angeles to visit relatives.

At the airport, an old woman met the bearded hippie. They took a cab before me and took off.

***
I suspected that my cab driver, who are notoriously of a questionable character in Riga, was under the influence of alcohol. I also suspected he was taking advantage of me,
but I decided to let him. He took me home through a different part of town, saying that traffic is likely to be hideous. I let him have it
and paid about 20 dollars. The man was up in his years. An ethnic Latvian, he appear to hate everything that’s Russian.

“Wherever you find a Russian, there is also a bardak,” he said referring to the Russian word for chaos. Some Latvians took to this word as their own.

We chatted about local politics, in particular once I told him that I was a reporter back in the States.

“So you found your dream in America?” he asked. I told him that I was still looking. Maybe the dream is here in Latvia.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 1.51 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.