Thomas Kinter
Learn Russian in the European Union
Daugavpils, Latvia
Spring 2022

February 16, 2022

It has been five weeks now since I got off of the plane in Riga, and I can now write about having gone back to see more of the city than the bridge I crossed over on my way out on that first day. My pre-semester language program recently ended and the other students and I decided to spend the weekend in Riga to see the town that holds a third of this country’s people. The bus-ride took about three and a half hours from Daugavpils to the west where the capital city sits on the Daugava river just a few miles from the sea.

We arrived in Riga at night and were unable to see much of it, but the next day’s weather was good and we had an excellent morning to walk around. In the newer parts of the city the streets are wide and the buildings, while often very beautiful, are modern and much like those in other cities, but as you cross the park that separates the old town, it becomes very apparent that your surroundings are from a different time.

The crooked streets and narrow lanes of Riga’s city center were lined with homes and churches built centuries before the oldest of those in America’s cities. The streets themselves are in some places so thin that I have heard of one spot where a person can at once touch the walls of the buildings on both sides.

The first big stop that my friends and I visited was the House of the Blackheads, which was the home of the Brotherhood of Blackheads. This was an organization of merchants that for many years were prominent in Riga society. The building’s front is well known as one of the most recognizable images of the city and the rooms inside have hosted centuries of parties for monarchs, aristocrats, and other fancy and official people from the distant as well as not-so-distant past.

After stopping in at a café for some lunch, I wandered around the town and ended up seeing a few of its oldest churches. I did not have any particular plans for what to visit but the churches only seemed natural as they were a few hundred feet taller than the buildings around them and all I had to do to find them was look up. The art inside these buildings was beautiful, but I was also impressed by the view from the spire on St. Peter’s Church, where I felt like I could see straight across the whole country.

I would have enjoyed having more time to spend in Riga, but the weekend ended just as quickly as they do in America, and I had to get back to school in Daugavpils. My semester classes have begun and although they can be difficult to get through at times, I know that I am getting a lot from them. They are all in Russian just as the pre-semester classes were.

I have not done very much in the day-to-day during the recent weekdays besides my usual routines and classes, but I enjoy going around town and seeing how things are similar and different in the daily life of people here compared to back home. Getting to spend time with my host mother and her family here in my apartment building has also been a great pleasure to me and has made me understand a lot more about how the people here live and think. What I have learned from them has perhaps been the most valuable part of this semester so far. I look forward to writing more soon about new experiences with them and with my new friends here.