Two More Stamps

That's right - two more stamps in my passport because I went to Latvia on Saturday! It was a random event - Evaldas, Regis and I had been sitting around my house wondering what we could do and someone suggested going somewhere and then somehow Latvia was decided upon. Do we have currency for Latvia? No! Do we speak Latvian? No! Do we know anything really about Liepaja? No! Sounds good, let's go!

So we did. It was great! The drive was not very long, only about an hour and we set about trying to find a place to park in the either 'you must turn right' or 'you most definitely may not turn right' small town of Liepaja. After some driving in circles, we parked and walked around and found that old town was about a three minute walk, total. We took some photos and had supper in a nice restaurant where they thankfully spoke English and prices were in Latvian lats (1 lat = 1.92 USD), so initially everything looks really cheap when a full meal is about 3 lats and drinks are .50 lats, but convert that and it's about the same price as Lithuania.

After supper we headed to the sea - or rather, the direction we thought the sea should be in - and ended up driving around random roads trying to find a sign or something directing us to the beach. The signs in Liepaja are ancient - surely not changed since Independence or even before that - many are still in Russian. As we looked for the beach, we came upon rows and rows of empty, not quite finished apartment buildings. It was just like the scene I mentioned from 'Everything is Illuminated' - When Elijah looks at a huge Soviet-style apartment building that has been left to decay and asks 'what is it?' - the Ukrainian young man looks at the same building and replies 'Soviets.' Elijah continues, 'what happened?' and the Ukrainian young man pauses and says 'independence.' The three of us were in awe that the buildings were just relics, left to stand unfinished and as a reminder of apparent Soviet plans for the area. After we saw the buildings, we saw the top of a Russian Orthodox church nearby, so we went to investigate and found to our surprise a huge, beautiful church in the middle of nowhere. We decided the church was built first, and then the apartment buildings which would house the potential congregation.

After our discovery, we again searched for the sea. We went down a very long, rural road through the woods and ended up at the shore. It was very, very windy and the sand was more than willing to fly right into my eyes. Evaldas was no sooner out of the car than he was running down the beach to the top of a nearby cliff overlooking the sea. That's great for him, but I was cold and retreated to the car to avoid getting sand blasted. After a few minutes, we headed further down the road and came upon more relics! This time, it was bunkers facing the sea that were in a state between 'pretty good condition' and 'ruined' - the ones on the cliff directly were torn apart, probably from the sea taking its toll on them year after year, but the ones still intact were surprisingly well kept. The ones I had seen in Klaipeda were always small, dark and full of beer bottles from teenage parties. These were deserted, open and I actually felt comfortable walking into them. It was really weird to imagine the activity associated with the site, with the construction of the bunkers, the soldiers who occupied them, and the people who had visited them after the war was over.

We explored the area some more - came upon a huge wind turbine and more bunkers, and then headed home. I told 'scary' stories on the way home in the dark and had both boys' attention whilst telling the stories that freaked me out as a kid reading those terrible books marketed to 5th graders (which I think are far too scary, especially the drawings, for a 10 year old). We stopped at Maxima and got some food and headed to my house to watch Se7en, since it was the only 'scary' movie I had...We all were too tired to finish it and rain checked it for later. The trip was wonderful though, shame we didn't do more excursions like this! There are pictures from the trip posted in the album on yahoo...