More photos

More views of forest and water in Latvia (the lake and surrounding forest of the Ethnographic Museum)...

And lit by the setting sun...


Here I am feeding the swans (which is also what the people are doing in the distance of the lake photo from the previous post).

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The first snow (it was already a few weeks ago, before the first snow in Boston, but now not so exciting...) covering my "courtyard." The apartment I live in (it is too much Yuliya Leonidovna's apartment for me to say "my apartment," but it definitely feels like my home) is in a relatively poor, industrial area. It is the next street after čaka, a street that functions like the metaphorical railroad tracks, and I live on the "wrong side of the tracks," one could say. So the windows in my room face the Staburadze factory, which makes various sweet goodies. I can see the ladies at their work tables putting cream decorations on the cakes, and taking smoking or tea breaks. And when you walk down the street, sometimes it smells sweet (though I can't smell anything at home, since it is cold and I keep the windows closed). Also when you walk down the street, often there are homeless people or visibly poor pensioners, and sometimes suspicious-looking bodyguard-like gentlemen getting out of their cars or smoking outside of the local gambling/computer game joint. Here is a slightly snowy view of the street with this gambling joint, Tallinas, which connects my street (Krāsotāju) to čaka.


Actually čaka is not at all so terrible, just aesthetically displeasing. It doesn't have trees, except for a small park at one point, and it has strip clubs, gambling places, boarded-up buildings, broken windows, and lots and lots of traffic. It isn't homey. Which was at first difficult to adjust to, especially after calm and beautiful, foresty and distant Imanta (the part of Riga where I lived for the first month). But now I am quite adjusted and Krāsotāju feels like home.

The last picture is of a residential area near the TB clinic where I work most of the time - typical Soviet apartment buildings and birch trees (hopefully to feed someone's Soviet or Russian nostalgia : )). Also after the first snow, with still some green leaves on the trees.