I honestly have no idea what this is going to be about, but on this foggy morning in Riga, I felt like it was time to write something. Philosophy of Writing and Sharing I have not been writing my blog because I had this moment last year where I thought… why am I sharing my …
Warning! This is not my normal travelogue kind of post. Read at your own discretion! Prerambling Lying around and not working for the first time in a long, long time gives me time to think. Of course, I spend most of that time trying to distract myself via social media, entertainment, and reading, but …
How Many Tabs Do you Have? This morning, I am looking at my laptop and closing the tabs that I had opened the day before while teaching my students who range from Intermediate to Advanced speakers of English. For those of you who don’t know, I teach primarily at Lingua Franca where I engage in …
Game of Thrones leads me to think about my place in the world. What is my identity? What is my culture?
The Song Festival 2018 This year Latvia held its 26th annual song festival and 16th annual dance festival. These celebrations are held every 5 years, and I feel blessed to be living here in both the Centennial year and the year of this incredible event! I thought that there was no way the performance could …
This post is dedicated to Stephany Kecy who always seems to have my back on social media! (fixed the misspelled name) She asked me whether I had made my decision—was I coming back to Westside or not? I thought I had posted about it, but I haven’t written any sort of thoughtful explanation or reflection. …
WARNING! This is likely to be the most boring thing I have ever written. DEDICATION: I dedicate this to my older brother, Paul, who loves data and odd collections of numbers and bits of information that others might not think twice about. I live a few blocks away from the Turgenev tram stop, and tram …
16. Marts I just read a pretty good explanation of this holiday here… so I don’t need to completely rehash it. The basic idea is that this is a Veteran’s Day march for the specific group of Latvians who fought in World War II. The problem, of course, is that those men who were drafted …
14 March 2018 The Dentist Before I left America, I went to all of my doctors to make sure everything was okay while I still had insurance. After seven months and some prodding, I decided it was time to visit a Latvian dentist. For some reason, getting back injections and having my ears cleaned here …
What is “žetonvakars”? The closest translations seems to be “badge night.” Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it. I will do my best to explain another new Latvian tradition I have learned about since moving here! I first heard about this celebration, a month or so ago when my colleague and I were planning …