Day 2 and Central Market13 Jul 2010
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The Cheese!
See? It looks JUST like requeijao.
Mmmm-mmm good!
| Ceļa māte – (Mother of the Road) protected travelers on the road. Tirgus māte – (Mother of the Market) held dominion over the marketplace and commerce. --Wikipedia, "Latvian Mythology" The shirt around my head doesn't work. I end up tossing and turning most of the night, worrying about my still-missing suitcase, and getting madder and madder that it still isn't here. Finally, I get up around 4:30am and change my status on Facebook to: "Dear Polish Airlines: All I want for my birthday is my suitcase back, preferably by 5pm today. Otherwise, my poster presentation is going to consist of me wearing cheap Latvian clothes, holding up a sign that says 'This presentation brought to you by Polish Airlines.'" I start poking around online and discover that I can check on the status of my lost luggage, so I do....and find out that my bag was delivered to the hotel 2 hours ago! I throw on some clothes and race downstairs, and sure enough, they had my suitcase! Yippee!!! Thank you Ceļa māte! (I was calling her the Luggage Fairy, but thanks to Wikipedia I now know her Latvian name.) Darin and I go to breakfast (wearing MY OWN CLOTHES), and then we ride our bikes to the conference hotel to set up the posters. Both mine and the group's look pretty good....we would have winged it if we didn't have to, but I'm glad we didn't have to. We actually got a lot of compliments because ours was one of the only posters that was translated into Russian and Latvian.(Thanks, Bing Translator!) After we set up, Darin and I rode our bikes to the train station, where we successfully bought our tickets to Saint Petersburg (again, Ceļa māte must have been watching over us today), then we rode next door to the Central Market, which is a HUGE market housed in 5 old zeppelin hangars left over from the German occupation. Each hangar had a different category; there was one for fruits and veggies, one for breads, one for dairy, one for meat, and the last, you could tell a mile away it was for fish! The fish one was the most amazing...some of them were dried-out deep-sea critters with sharp teeth, while others were so fresh they were STILL BREATHING. We thought it might be good to have some munchies for the train ride tomorrow, so we bought salami in the meat hangar, cheese in the dairy hangar, and a big bag of cherries from one of the Russian fruit ladies. We tried to thank them by saying "spaciba" instead of "paldies," because most older ladies in Latvia speak Russian. Latvian has only been the main language for about 20 years, so the kids all speak it, and the girl at the front desk told us they start teaching students English in first grade nowadays. Everyone under 30 in Riga speaks great English, so we've had very few problems as long as we stick with the young 'uns. |
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