Here I am going back in time. As I left Latvia I took a tour that essentially moves me to Estonia via knowledge and space. But first, BOBSLEDS!!
The Jamaicans notwithstanding I got to see and actually walk down my first bobsled track. Apparently it is a Latvian claim to fame. Here is the first Bobsled, and you thought the current people are nuts.
The track itself is interesting as it starts wide for the running and the mounting and then narrows precipitously. I tried to get a picture of people inside the narrowing (there were 9 of us) so you get some idea of scale.
It is a matter of feet before this sharp curve happens.
The way the sport works is that the smallest person–who was me by far as I was with mostly huge Dutch people–gets upfront and has two levers to steer. This is BLIND as you fold yourself into a ball with your head tucked under the dashboard. Of course I had to try this. It was HORRIBLE. The “seat” is a metal bar and you are sitting on a metal floor literally encased in this machine. You can’t see a thing. I came out crampy and wet but knowing once again that something in life would be taken off my list of choices. No Bobsled for me.
We wended our way through the countryside. Estonia and Latvia both were established as sort of nation states by the early medieval crusades. The pope blessed the merchants who went over from England and Germany to subdue these pagan rascals, In actuality it was all about money. Without all of the rules and customs governing trade the merchant class was getting nowhere with these folks. A conversion to Christianity to give some structure to the dealings was called for. Over went the knights and they converted by sword. But they left some nifty “ruins” behind. This is in Cesis.
And of course dont drink the medieval water.
This area of the world is very lush and the locals enjoy many natural parks and sites for recreation. As Latvia they are well behaved, no one leaves litter or jay walks to makes like miserable for anyone else except for the smokers of course. This park is the home to some beautiful sandstone cliffs which have become carving walls for lovers. You know there are places in the world like Paris where lovers lock a padlock with their names to a fence and throw away the key. Here they carve their names. Oh BTW no fence riding allowed.
Because Estonia has such a good coast line they were a prosperous bunch with easy access to trade. The extreme cold meant that houses were made of wood and for some reason wood is an element which readily retains heat and holds it off in the Summer as well. You can see by the size of the houses they were grand.
There are still water towers scattered in the towns and this one made a single posh apartment out of one.
In an area of the world that is so cold there is always a challenge in terms of getting heat. In the soviet era everyone used shale which is a high polluter. Now they are moving to wind. In the mean time they are using ceramic stoves. In Mexico the native people just go cut down the trees and burn the logs. In Europe they created these ceramic heaters in the 1800s and onwards. We had a small beautiful French one in our upstairs in Spain. It took very small logs, like six inces, but the ceramic retains the heat all night. They are very efficient and very effective. Some, like the ones in Versailles, are ornate decorations as well. This one is plain but large and likely keeps the whole house warm without using too much wood.
All the countries in the world love games. There is a tribe in the triangle between Burma and Thailand where the young people play catch. This signals ‘let’s go out in the jungle and have sex.” It is not uncommon for a young girl to have multiple kids before she finally marries and the husband takes on all the kids. The men and women live separately in huts and if you want sex you go under the hut and poke your honey to go have sex in the jungle. So games count.
Here there is a sport which is literally called, and is, “Wife carrying.” You race around with your wife attached to you in various ways–in your arms, fireman’s carry, upside down with her head all the way down your back. This is taken very seriously. Weights must be at least 50 kilos no cheating with light women like me.
They also play this game which is a four-person swing. The winners are those who can make the swing turn the most 360 degree rotations. This is much harder than it looks. The most difficult swing has bars that are 21 feet long. As the swing gets to the top of its arc it stops and then flips to the other side. Not for me Take that off the list too
If life wasn’t hard enough for the earlier Estonians it got worse in the 20th Century. They finally got rid of Russia in a hard-fought war for independence after WWI. But hardly had that happened with, as with Latvia, Russia was “given” the Baltic States by Hitler. So a re-occupation occured until Hitler changed his mind and took back the Baltics. After the war without our help the Russians just took them back again. There was a whole KGB thing here too. Interestingly the Latvian men were conscripted into the Soviet army to defeat the Germans. So sometimes they fought the Soviets and sometimes they fought alongside them. There are military museums all over the place with weapons of soviets and germans. You can pick up real “souvenirs” at the gift shops of this little places because local people have this stuff and use the museums as consignment shops. If I were still in the Collectibles business I would have bought a lot as these are prizes in ths USA. I know some of you would like to go out decked out as a Soviet General—come on admit it.
Who can’t find a good use for a KGB envelop steamer?
Around this time while Russia was helping itself to the Baltics they thought they would take Finland too. But the Finns weren’t having it and in the bloody Winter War they killed 200,000 Russian soldiers by skiiing down hills and surprising them, blowing up their supplies, commandeering their planes etc. Russia finally backed off but left a lot of hardware behind.
Fast forward to 1944 where the Russians were brutally bombing Tallinn, Estonia. The Finns could see the flames coming from Tallinn. They waited until the Russian planes returned to bases in Russia to re-fuel preparing for the next onslaught. As the Russians left the Finns, in commandeered Russian bombers simply joined the procession back to the Russian bases. When they arrived they used their surprise strategy to wipe out the bombers and the base. No more attacks against the Estonians. I am getting a sense that no one should mess with the Finns.
