All About Latvia

RIGA - A slick, black and red bus rumbles along a motorway trying to do the impossible - to win a competition with a plane in a race to its destination. Thronged with passengers, the bus trundles through the woodlands of northern Latvia, carrying its passengers from one small Baltic country to the next.

Passengers can take the four-hour bus journey from Riga to the Estonian capital, Tallinn, in comfort and that is perhaps unique among EU bus lines connecting major cities in the 27-nation bloc. On the 310-kilometre journey, two Baltic bus lines offer an upgraded service which includes video programmes, free hot drinks, and for those who want to use their time wisely - free, wireless internet access on board.

A brochure advertising Eurolines services suggests that riding a bus between the two capitals is better than than boarding a flight. Business people can use their time productively as buses do not limit phone and internet usage.

‘The bus is rather luxurious. They have coffee here and everything. Four hours of travel without any hassle at the airport with delays and waiting,’ a passenger named Vladimir told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa during his recent trip to Tallinn.

The Baltic bus line, Eurolines, and its main rival, Estonia’s Hansabuss, offer a little extra in a bid to lure customers who normally would not travel by bus.

Eurolines offers deluxe services aboard buses from Tallinn to St. Petersburg and starting this month, it is expanding the service to another route - from Riga to Klaipeda, Lithuania, a town on the shores of the Baltic Sea.

In the Soviet era of poor customer service, travelling in comfort was considered a luxury reserved for the chosen few. Since then, the two tiny Baltic nations that broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991 and joined the European Union in 2004, are continuing to break the remainder of Soviet-style stereotypes.

Buses used to be bad, old, and extremely uncomfortable. The former Soviet way and Western way of travelling to this day collide at the central bus station in the Latvian capital, perhaps as a testament to the Baltics proximity to Russia on the outskirts of the EU.

Nowadays, you can still spend a three-hour bus journey standing and is no laughing matter when passengers literally ‘fry’ in the heat of summer aboard a bus without air conditioning.

However, Eurolines wanted to prompt travellers to reconsider taking a bus for their next journey.

‘So we offered them free use of the internet, hot coffee, an entertainment programme and more space between their seats,’ said the a spokeswoman Unda Bujane.

The new concept appears to be going down well among passengers.

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RIGA – I went to listen to the president speak yesterday at the Saeima and I almost fell asleep. If leaders are supposed to be inspirational, Latvia’s President Valdis Zatlers was not. It is best to listen to his speech before you go to bed.

But the speech was good. Zatlers called on members of parliament to heed to call of the electorate (yeah, right!), following the Saturday’s political circus, or to put it the boringly, the Referendum on the Constitutional Amendments. More than 600,000 allegedly apathetic Latvians for a moment set a keg of beer aside and went to the polls to tell the government what they thought of it.

The government told them they were wrong and it knew better.

The zoo-elected president, Zatlers now has another chance to earn some political capital that may even carry him into the second term. The silver-haired doctor has a chance to heal the nation. To fix political crisis in our little kingdom, Zatlers can dissolve the parliament and, I believe, he would keep his job in a national referendum. The question is how long it will take him to make that decision.

The president appeared to give the parliament until Christmas to decide on constitutional amendments drafted by a group of legal experts that do indeed give voters a right to call snap elections but with harsher restrictions so not to destabilize the country.

Stability has been a token of dictatorship though and I find it very interesting that we find ourselves in a similar situation as back in May 1934, on the eve of the Murder of Democracy when Latvia’s Prime Minister Karlis Ulmanis dissolved the parliament and became a de facto dictator. A day before his coup d’etat, the parliament voted in second reading on amendments to allow voters a right to dissolve the assembly. The bill never went to the third reading as the parliament was dissolved under the pretext of re-writing the constitution.

Chances of a benevelent dictator stepping out of the shadows in the modern-day Latvia is unlikely. What is likely, however, is the continual denial of those in power that people just don’t know any better until it is too late. Add a good dose of the economic crisis and you’ve got a good political and economic climate for a revolution.

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RIGA – A conversation that took place at an office building between me and a man named Ivars, who works for the building’s owner. Most of the conversation took place in Latvian.

Ivars: Jus esat no firmas? / Are you from a firm?
Me: Ja. / Yes
Ivars: Vai jus esat saimnieks vai klients? / Are you an owner or a client?
Me (with an accent): Es esmu gandriz ta ka saimnieks. / I’m almost like an owner.
Ivars: Тогда вам необходимо знать, что в здании не будет электричества в понедельник с 9 до 17. / (In Russian). Then you need to know that we won’t have any electricity in the building on Monday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Me: Paldies. / Thank you.

So, why would an ethnic Latvian switch to speaking in Russian after detecting an accent?

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RIGA – The Open House blog at UK’s Independent newspaper published interesting entry from Maris Sants, a gay pastor who left Latvia for the UK last month. Sadly, his story isn’t unique. Public homosexuality is still seen as propaganda of sexual deviance here in Latvia.

Here’s what Maris writes:

Before I came out in 2002, the rumours about my sexuality had already had huge ramifications on my life. I was a pastor in the Latvian church and I had a column in the church newspaper and that was stopped. My weekly radio sermon was taken off the air, and I was kicked out of the cathedral I served in.

On 22 May 2002, I was ex-communicated from the church. Back then there were only three openly gay people in Latvia. My story was on the front pages of all the Latvian newspapers and I have suffered dozens of personal attacks since then. I have been verbally abused, spat at and physically attacked. Last year, two guys ambushed me as I went to baptise a child. Since then my sight started to deteriorate, which my doctor blamed squarely on the stress caused by the attacks.

Read the whole thing. On the photo: protesters against gay pride parade pile up at the fence at the November 11 Embankment in Riga in June 2008.

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