Earth Hour yesterday, on 19 March - when people around the world were invited to switch off their electricity for one hour - we spent not only without light but in complete, impenetrable darkness, dining at a restaurant. It sounds slightly unusual, but such an experience is available in Riga.
It was a premiere for which the Smiltene People's Theatre actors had been preparing for approximately half a year and now felt a certain excitement, offering their work to its first audience. Commendable is the theatre participants' desire to come and work on a voluntary basis, to stage demanding plays, to seek answers to life's questions, to make both themselves and the audience think and feel along. For as long as a person continues to ask themselves questions, so long do they live.
On Wednesday, 2 March, we visited Latvia's 1st Rock Café to enjoy in person... a light-hearted debate between fresh-thinking people. The debate format: six speakers, three who agreed to defend the view that democracy has exhausted itself, and three who believe democracy is far from having exhausted itself.
When guests are over and you have absolutely no desire to knead dough and then stand by the oven, ingenuity comes to the rescue. And as is well known, the driving force of the world's progress is human natural laziness. So this time: desserts you can prepare in just a few minutes.
There were quite a lot of LEGO cars here. Both those that had been painstakingly built and placed on the exhibition table, and the simpler ones with little motors that took part in drag racing and line-following competitions right there in the hall. But the most interesting and the main attraction for visitors was the large LEGO city.
Alongside the jars of strawberry, cherry, and apple jam that Mum had carefully prepared from her own garden, I found a few that had been received as gifts or brought back from travels, as they had seemed exotic enough to warrant it. So at a home gathering I decided to organise a little attraction: tasting and rating less traditional jams together with the guests.
I decided to experiment a little in the kitchen and, after the substantial Latvian Christmas roasts with their rich side dishes, to prepare something seemingly lighter. Following an online recipe as a guide, I realised there is room to explore various variations of this dish. So this won't be quite a classic recipe.
One must agree with the lecturer's observation: if you look at a painting for one minute, you can notice only a pleasing composition or colours; if you look for five minutes, you already see the subject; but if for ten minutes - you can discern the conflict depicted in the painting.
A multimedia exhibition consisting of 9 large screens on which 100 paintings by Kristīne Luīze Avotiņa are projected in a set sequence, with 10 different musical fragments played to create the mood. A colour, sound, and light show repeated every 20 minutes, allowing one to experience four different moods, places in the world, seasons, and variations of tone.
This time the story will not be about a journey, but a story about a story about a journey. Last Thursday evening we went to the restaurant Annas Dārzs for a meeting with two young people who, over the course of 8 months, completed a roughly 5,500 km hike from the Polish city of Ustka to Lisbon in Portugal.