I have been returning "home" each evening exhausted from walking and reading all day, so I haven't been keepinp here. For now, some observations.

Not only are men doing service jobs, women are now doing security jobs. I have seen several wearing the uniform of the local city self-administration police patrolling the streets. I was also wrong about bicycles. I see more and more of them. I think I missed them earlier because it was raining. Silly me. There aren't very many, but they are not rarities. I even saw a repair shop.

I took the car out for an early-morning memorial hunt yesterday. I tried to get back before the traffic hit, but I got caught in a real, capitalist traffic jam. It took me a whole hour to get the last two or three kilometers back to the house. What a nightmare. They really have arrived.

Yesterday in the early evening I took my first break. I met a friend who is teaching sociology here for an hour or so. It was just barely warm enough to sit outside. It was fun to sit and talk English and have intelligent conversation about complex and abstract ideas.

I have been bouncing around between four different research points: The Letonika building of the Latvian National Library, the Memorial Documentation Center, the Latvian State Archive and the Latvian State Historical Archive. I finished the latter three today, so it is just the library from here on out. The differences between the three are interesting. The Letonika and Memorial Documentation Centerthe are the most user-friendly. Copies are free in the Letonika if you use a digital camera, and cheap if you have them actually make a copy for you. In the Memorial Documentation Center they are cheap - 13 santims (about 20 cents) per page. If you think that is expensive, the Latvian State Historical Archive charges 52 santims per page plus 19 santims per document. It gets better. The Latvian State Archive charges 2.50 Lats (almost $4!) per document and 19 santimes per page. So if you copy some long document, it is just expensive. If you copy a stack of individual documents - like a collection of letters - it is horrendous. In every place, however, the people who work there are very friendly and helpful despite probably getting miserably low pay. They offer intelligent advice if you ask them and sometimes even if you don't and bring desired materials quickly.

I spent all day Sunday hiking around memorial sites on the edge of town. I am going to blog that over at sitesofmemory.twoday.net.