Back in Riga, Home and Another Home

The international bus station looks the same as last time, it’s Thursday afternoon and both the station and the nearby central market are very busy. The weather is nice and I decide to walk to my brother’s new home. First of all I get some typical Latvian ice-cream (it’s called marmalade, the best way to describe it is cream ice with pieces of different kinds of chewy fruit jelly in it) at my favorite ice-cream place – it’s sunny and quite warm, after all – and enjoy the walk past the Freedom Monument and all these familiar places in spite of the huge backpack.

 

I meet my brother at the corner of his street. He shares an apartment with two other students, a German from his course and a Spanish architecture student on Erasmus exchange, so the languages at home are both German and English. As they all just moved to the freshly renovated appartment some weeks ago with the 20 kilos allowed on a plane and one or two packages sent by the parents the rooms look even bigger than they are. My brother is glad to finally have bought a bed, a desk and two bookshelves. They got a used kitchen table, fridge and washing machine, so the basic needs are covered, three chairs thrown out by the hospital complete the furniture. The living room is empty except for a fireplace and a drying rack – we could play hockey there, they say. While the fifth floor gives you daily exercise and makes it tough work to acquire a washing machine it also gives a lot of light with windows to both the first and second yard and nice views across the roofs. The house also is part of a very good neighborhood and part of the medical faculty is just around the corner, so this flat is about as good as it gets.

On the other hand, of course, being thrown into a completely foreign country AND start med school at full speed at the same time can also be quite stressful. Luckily they have found a woman who helped them with finding the flat and the used furniture – and with all incidents when they meet the language barrier which happens often enough when arranging things like internet connections and other additions to thenew flat. The caretaker speaks a little German and is really surprised to one day meet someone who speaks Latvian in this place when he comes in early to fix something. “Ah, you are German? And you speak Latvian? You learned it within one year?? Well, that is good, some people live here for forty years and don’t speak it!” The usual reaction… I feel Latvian enough to be annoyed by Russians living here and at least pretending not to speak Latvian. And to ignore the fact that I really don’t speak enough Russian to understand explanations about heating systems. I also get irritated by some of my brother’s class mates’ annoyed remarks about what they think is typically Latvian. I understand, of course, that it can be a normal stage of getting used to a new place, but it still hurts my feelings.

And I see it is hard for foreign students studying in a program designed for foreigners to overcome this phase of looking at the country they live in from the outside without really understanding.
Through my host family my brother has at least some connection with Latvians apart from his teachers and the caretaker.  I also force him to sometimes say some things in Latvian – and realize some things for the first time myself, for example that “five” and “milk” are nearly the same word in Latvian.