The Things I Boughty with Four Little Lati

Sigulda is called the Switzerland of Latvia. Indeed the city is majestic with parks, a 13th century church, tree-lined roads, a cable car and four castles. Even the bottled water that bears the city's name shows a castle surrounded by greenery. The city sits on the lip of the steep-sided Gauja Valley. But I wonder if it's reference to Switzerland comes less from its scenery than from it's unassuming wealth. The thought crossed my mind when I walked into a small grocery store at the edge of town. When the clerk opened the cash register drawer to deposit my 1.56 lati, I noticed something odd. Beside the rows of worn lati notes were a stack of U.S. one hundred dollar bills, clean and crisp. I glanced at the young girl; I glanced at the store, at the old Soviet style railroad station across the street - it didn't fit.

Parting with one hundred dollar bills isn't something that we've found necessary in Latvia. In fact, we've found parting with any amount to be difficult. Everything is so inexpensive. At the flea market this morning we spent only 0.15 lati (the equivalent of US$0.30) on a big bag of potatoes, garlic and cucumbers. Parking in a guarded lot in Sigulda cost us 0.40 lati for two hours; a loaf of bread was 0.09, frozen peas only 0.30. The most expensive thing, a liter and a half of drinking water was 0.45 lati (almost double the cost of a liter of diesel fuel).

At first I thought that we would have to go to a money exchange office for more lati. When we'd crossed the Latvian border from Estonia I'd been handed four lati for my 98 Estonian EEK, three coins for my handful of bills. I'd held my hand out for more, but no, that was the exchange rate. We never did get more money and struggled with spending our last coins, finally deciding on two bottles of water and a banana at the Texaco station just before the Lithuanian border.

Other than visiting Sigulda, we spent our one day in Latvia driving through beautiful countryside. On the roads we saw horse-drawn wagons, in the fields haystacks built around framed wooden supports, in the air nests. Storks seem to have made this area their home. But home for many Latvians has a far less luxurious view. From their balconies they look at someone else's and beyond that at the next row of run-down, Soviet efficiency-style cement apartment building.

Unfortunately we didn't get as much opportunity to talk to the locals as we did in Estonia. I did ask the price of items at the flea market, I suppose that counts and there was one brief conversation after a man offered me for his half-finished cup of beer. He and a van full of his relatives had pulled up beside us and, with breath that almost knocked me over, he erupted with a toast and pushed the cup at me. "Thank-you, but no," and we pulled away.