I got back from Riga three days ago and impressions are still bouncing around in my head. The last few days there I had two interesting conversations I would like to recount here.

One was with one of the women in the coat room. I have always wondered about those coat room jobs. How miserable is that? They sit there all day reading some newspaper and taking coats from the dozen or two dozen people who come into the library or archive or wherever it is. I noticed that one women has had that job at least since 1999 at one of the places I visited. Anyway, in the evening, another woman was there. She and a friend, who was simply down in the coatroom to "be" because she didn't have an apartment any more, engaged me in conversation. The topic started out about me - where I was from, what I do, etc., but quickly turned to comparisons between life here and life there and then to how terrible everything was. It was interesting in that I recall hearing it all before from Russians in Riga: I used to be an economist with an important and well-paid job in an electronics factory, I used to be able to vacation to the Black Sea every year, I used to have more time, etc. - Now I have to work several jobs - just look at this terrible job (coat room attendent) I have now. The other woman had been kicked out of her apartment for some reason (I suspected it had been failure to pay the rent as she is obviously unemployed as she sits in the library reading room all day). When I had that same conversation a number of years ago, I recall trying to explain where that earlier luxury came from: borrowing from the future, taking from other branches of the economy, primarily living off of oil exports, etc. I tried to make a real case for capitalism. But to do so in this case would not have helped much. I was not as freshly read on the facts of the matter and I would have had to argue, "What you did in the factory was probably not real work in the sense that it was saleable in a market. When the market came, what you do proved worthless." That is harsh - both for her and for those who consider "markets" to be a cure-all. She was a Russian, but one who could speak Latvian (the conversation went back and forth between the two languages, confusing me). She did not get on the Russian stump about about how terrible the Latvians had been to her and her people. That issue did not come up at all.

Another conversation I had one morning while out walking in a corner of the old town I had not been to before because it had always been in ruins, the part near the train station and close to the river, where the synagogue is. I went exploring there and found a kind of empty space that looked like it might have been a small park or perhaps a cafe or something. A woman was sitting on the wall sunning herself. I asked her what used to be there. She didn't understand, so I tried in Russian. There followed a long conversation in which she talked about growing up in wartime Novokuznetsk, coming to Riga when she was nine, and various aspects of past and current life in Riga. She was all a-flutter about how interesting Novokuznetsk was - a multi-ethnic city with an industrial base built on American know-how. Not only the multi-ethnic Siberian population had made it interesting, she said, but also the wartime refugees from besieged Leningrad. Apparently, the whole cultural elite of the city endd up in Novokuznetsk. Her teachers and friends of her parents were authors and muscians. She later mentioned the cultural fall of Riga over the past 20 years, but did not make a direct comparison.

I asked her if she ever had a problem relating to the Latvians, having come here with the big wave of Russians, not speaking Latvian. She seemed to have a favorable impression of them. She described the Latvians as shy, humble people who don't like the arrogant, self-centered attitude of many Russians. But if you approach them on their level, without barging in, without arrogance, as a normal person, there is no problem. I asked specifically about dealing with state institutions - getting documents, dealing with the mail, the police, etc. and she said it was never a problem.

She also described the Latvians as "hard working." That is in stark contrast to a conversation I had in Riga with some Russians 10 years ago. It was right after the attempt to blow up the large, Soviet monument in Victory Park in 1997. I went to see the monument and found a sizeable crowd of Russians gathered around it holding signs in protest. I spoke with them about how they understood their own history and whether or not they were "occupiers" here in Latvia. One man told me that he and his fellow Russians had built the city. It had been in ruins from the war. Nothing was going on here. When he and his fellows arrived they got to work and made Riga what it is today. The Latvians, he reported, "svetami torgovali" - "were busy selling flowers." When I later reported that to my hostess, a women who puts in long hours, year after year, sewing buttons onto shirts to pay the rent in her apartment, she was obviously a bit annoyed. She recalled that it was very difficult for Latvians to find decent work in the late 1940s because all the good jobs were being turned over to the Russian speakers being brought in from all over the Soviet Union.

While I was in Riga doing research on memorial sites, I visited over 90 of them. The picture here shows me standing in front of the final memorial I saw, about an hour before boarding the plane for my flight home. It is a memorial to the battle of Pinki, just outside Riga. This section of the front was the Latvian contribution to the liberation of the city from the Bolsheviks on 22 May, 1919, a date usually associated with a Baltic German victory over communism.

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.

Today I walked all over downtown Riga again photographing memorials. I re-shot some of the sites from yesterday under better light conditions. I also did a few memorials on the Pardaugava side of the river, including the memorial to the victims of communism at the Tornakalna station (Thorensberg was the old German name). It has a railroad car showing how the people were deported in 1941.

I went into a computer store today to buy a flash memory stick. I noticed two things. My impression from Riga in 1995 especially was that all the young men who were seen to be working had security jobs. There was a guard of some kind in every store just standing around while the women, who were not guards, were doing the real work. In this computer store, there were men and women working - and no security. The young men were stocking shelves and serving customers.

The other thing I noticed was how I had to buy the flash stick. I pointed to what I wanted behind the glass. The guy filled out a little form for me. I took that to the cash register and paid. Then I took the receipt back to the guy who had, in the meantime, gotten the stick out from behind the glass. He checked my receipt and then gave me the stick. I told the woman at the cash register that the system reminded me of the Brezhnev years. Even though she was probably about five to ten years too young to remember that time well, she knew what I meant. Back in the Soviet Union, you had to wait in line to see what they still had in stock and decide what you want. Then you went to the cash register, waited in line again, and paid. Then you waited in line again to turn in the receipt for the goods. The only differences today were that there were no lines (there was more personnel in the store than customers) and there was no danger of the desired product being sold out by the time I showed up with my receipt, forcing me to pick new products for the same price or wait in line again to get my money back.

I went into the Riga Maritime and City Museum and talked to one of the guides there. It was like striking gold. She had all kinds of ideas for my research to keep me busy the next several days. I will go back to there to talk to a colleague of hers on Monday or Tuesday. That colleague has catalogued a lot of what I will be looking for. Also, I will also go to the monument inspectorate where I have been told to expect all kinds of records in their archive. That, in addition to the sources I found during my short visit to the library today, have made me quite confident that I will find more than enough material for my work.

At the Occupation Museum I also struck gold. They are, by pure chance, having an exhibition now about memorials to the victims of communism in Latvia. The exhibition showed the exact location of all such memorials in Latvia. I photographed all the lists for Riga and environs. It is unbelieveable how dense the memorial landscape here is.

In several conversations I was quite pleased with how well I am doing with the Latvian language.

Today I landed in Riga and saw the city for the first time in six years (minus about two weeks). I am here doing research on the transformation of the memorial landscape in the city since the fall of communism. I will be talking to people and going to archives and libraries to dig up all I can about how the communist memorials fell or did not fall and how new memorials have sprouted up or old ones revived and what people who think about that think about that.

When I arrived, I was surprised how little has changed. After visiting Tallinn last spring, I thought Riga would be much more developed. Instead, it made the same impression on me it did in 2001. The changes I saw between my visit in 1991 and 1995 were enormous. The changes I saw again in 1999 were also significant. I saw more and more renovated buildings and repaired sidewalks, more and more shops. Now, my superficial, first glance impression of the city is that they are still where they were in 2001: an odd mix of delapidation and new or renovated real estate down town, with the ratio about the same as six years ago. The sidewalks are the same, some of the shops have survived, others, including my favorite used bookstore, are gone and have been replaced.

It is odd, and perhaps unfortunate, to have seen all the new construction going on out on the edges of town while flyng into the Riga airport only to discover that there are still ruins of 20th century architecture within the old city itself.

In the bookstores, it looks like much has improved. There is a wider variety of literature available, including the historical literature I am most interested in. There are also lots and lots of foreign authors of both fiction and non-fiction available in Latvian translation. The books are quite impressive for such a small market, including lots of hardbound books with color illustrations and photos. I didn't go into any other shops yet.

My Latvian is working better than I expected after such a long hiatus, but I am still glad my hosts speak such good German so that I can at leastcome home in the evening to a language I am much better at. I am staying in a renovated old house on the Pardaugava side of the river, right down the street from the St. Martin church (a congregation which is featured in my dissertation, by the way), very near the archives.

I photographed several memorials on my first expedition into town, including a memorial to the christianization of Armenia of all things! I am serious. In downtown Riga they have one. It also recalls the Armenian genocide of 1915. I will be reportng more thoroughly on memorials in a few weeks, after my return, over at http:\\sitesofmemory.twoday.net. Here, I expect to be posting first impressions of those and updates on other things that life throws at me while I am here.

Today I was standing in front of one of the main memorials, a communist-era memorial to the Latvian Riflemen, and picked a woman about my age out of the crowd of people waiting for the bus to ask about the memorial. We had an interesting conversation about her memories of various events and memorials. It turns out she has met the designer of one of Rigas most prominent war memorials, which I had just photographed, and might be able to put me in touch with him.

I will be in Riga from 31 August to 8 September of this year doing research on several projects. I will be photographing local memorials for sites-of-memory.de and working on an article on Riga memorials for an edited volume on post-Soviet memorials to appear next year.