September 29th, 2008

Hi Everybody!

Blog entry #2 is basically our photo-diary of the tour we took of Old Riga. The leader of the DC orientation that Galen attended in July, Maruta, was nice enough to meet up with us and show us around. She has a PhD in Baltic Film Studies, and was here in Riga as a Fulbrighter in 2005-2006. I have captioned every photo with interesting details, so you can follow along and get a tour of your own!

Here's the link: http://picasaweb.google.com/sjyoungblood/Vecriga#

Since it's very late right now (we just got back from watching "Tropic Thunder" at the movie theater, so now it's 12:15am or so), I'll just fill you in on what it's like to watch a movie here... All movies here are shown in their original language. If it's an American movie, for instance, it will be shown in English, with Latvian and Russian subtitles.

When you go in to buy your ticket, the cashier shows you an electronic layout of the theater, and you actually select the exact seats you'd like to watch the movie from! Your tickets are then printed with your seat numbers, and you don't have to worry about getting a good seat.

Ticket prices and refreshments cost roughly 75-80% of what they do at home. On a weeknight you can watch a movie for about $7, and then for about $8.50 on weekends. One thing that's quite different from the US is that they sell draft beer at the theater! We each got a half liter of Latvian beer for cheaper than a coke! Pretty cool but admittedly it makes you have to get up to go pee more often during the flick.

The insides of the actual screening rooms don't look very different from in the US, except it's truly "stadium seating", so the heads of the two tall guys who sat in front of us barely overlapped with the bottom of the screen. And the seats are basically like 1st class airplane seats! They don't actually recline, but they are wide, and cushy, and they fully support the neck and head.

Since it took me so long to get this entry posted, and there's so many other random tid-bits I wanted to mention but don't have time right now, I will probably do a second installment of my blog-turn.

Tonight we start our Latvian classes!

Sarah