Yesterday one of Peter's business contacts took the day off to tour us around some sights. We went about 45minutes outside of Riga and visited a modest palace, a ruined&partially restored castle, and a seriously posh palace. It was a whirlwind, but fun! When Peter and I got back to the city, we headed out in search of supper. On the way we ran into three tiny kittens playing with each other (all rough and tumble) in the cobblestone street. I stopped and nearly died of cute overload. Eventually someone came by and scared the kittens away (all the cats here appear to be feral which means I don't get to pet them: sad face). We went into a random basement pub for supper - where we were the only customers (it's off season here now). The people who work at the bar had their friends over and they set up a projector to watch the Latvia-Russia hockey game. We told them to turn up the sound, because we're Canadian and love hockey (we like to support stereotypes wherever we go). We watched a bit of hockey - noticing that Baltic players seem less interested in physically pummeling each other, which was nice.
Eventually we had to leave to go to our next destination - a folk club that supposedly has folk dancing every wednesday night. And it DID. It was AWESOME. The bar was another basement bar (and I mean basement of a 150+ year old building) and it was full of people, mostly young'uns. And they were FOLK DANCING to live music. They were weren't performing in costume, they were just youth having fun by FOLK DANCING in a bar - hanging out with friends, dancing, drinking beer. It was the awesomest thing I've seen in a long long time. I totally want to start a Latvian folk dancing club in some bar in Vancouver. It just looked like so much fun. It's sad that our culture's version of dancing is mimed sex on a dance floor of a dark club with music so loud you can't possibly communicate with anyone. In contrast - this was energetic, fun, funny, you could still converse, meet up with friends, etc. Seriously, it looked like a ton of fun. *sigh* So jealous of the Latvian Folk Dancing Club members.
We eventually left the folk dancing club - and as we did it struck me as funny that after much training, Peter and I know 8 different dances and somehow found our way to a place doing a type of dancing we don't know. As we wandered back to our hotel through the Old Town, we came across a cello player set up in a square playing beautiful classical music. Just as one would expect in Europe.
Kittens on cobblestone streets, folk dancing hipsters, cello players in the plaza.... I love Europe.
UPDATE - I found some videos on youtube of the folk club we went to so you can get a bit of an idea of the awesome:
Posts
I've always been so sad that we just don't know how to "dance" anymore. With the exception of the two-step (I'm assuming, you used to be able to find places you could two-step, if you like country), you're right, it is basically mimed sex on the dance floor... very sad.
Amber, you just reminded me of country line dancing, which is probably the closest example to folk dancing. If I didn't hate country music with the passion of a thousand suns, these would be options. (I am occassionally forced to two-step at our studio. The dance is fine, the music kills me.)
It's sad that 60 years ago most people knew how to partner dance (how did they all learn?), and within one generation an entire method of social interaction was lost. Did everyone know how to dance back then? I want to say yes because of all the movies I've seen of wartime & soldiers dancing, but maybe that's not how it really was. ?