Following my failure in the first citizenship examination, I had four months to prepare myself for the re-take.
The day of my citizenship test was a strange one.
Having decided to apply for Latvian citizenship, my next step was to do very little for a couple of years. Rather, I quickly obtained most of the necessary documents and assumed the rest would take minimal effort so could be put off until that mythical moment we all dream of "when I have some free time."
I looked at the dead body on the sidewalk just ahead of me.
As part of Latvia's centenary celebrations, the Latvian Institute produced a book called Latvia 100 Snapshot Stories. We are reproducing a selection of the entries to give you a few flavors of the country. If you would like to read the whole thing, a free downloadable PDF is available at the Latvian Institute website.
In the summer of 2019, Latvia’s parliament will elect a new president. In this article, we will briefly explain the process and history behind presidential elections in Latvia.
How many representatives does Latvia have abroad, how much does it cost, and why is it important for a country like Latvia to get involved internationally in the long term? Clear enough questions, but ones which are perhaps taken for granted much of the time. So here at LSM we decided to establish the actual facts and figures - and the results may surprise those who regard Latvia as an insular nation.
I have always preferred minor character actors to A-list film stars. They might only get a scene or two, but the presence of these strangely-shaped, broken-nosed, odd-looking and heavily-accented figures gives a film a human appeal and variety that can never be conveyed by the handsome and beautiful leading men and ladies.
As part of Latvia's centenary celebrations, the Latvian Institute produced a book called Latvia 100 Snapshot Stories. Over the next few weeks we will be reproducing a selection of the entries to give you a few flavors of the country. If you would like to read the whole thing, a free downloadable PDF is available at the Latvian Institute website.
Krišjānis Kariņš took over from Māris Kučinskis as Prime Minister of Latvia on January 23, 2019. Now one month into the job, he spoke to LSM about his background, his reasons for accepting the position and his future plans for his government.
As part of Latvia's centenary celebrations, the Latvian Institute produced a book called Latvia 100 Snapshot Stories. Over the next few weeks we will be reproducing a selection of the entries to give you a few flavors of the country. If you would like to read the whole thing, a free downloadable PDF is available at the Latvian Institute website.
As part of Latvia's centenary celebrations, the Latvian Institute produced a book called Latvia 100 Snapshot Stories. Over the next few weeks we will be reproducing a selection of the entries to give you a few flavors of the country. If you would like to read the whole thing, a free downloadable PDF is available at the Latvian Institute website.
As part of Latvia's centenary celebrations, the Latvian Institute produced a book called Latvia 100 Snapshot Stories. Over the next few weeks we will be reproducing a selection of the entries to give you a few flavors of the country. If you would like to read the whole thing, a free downloadable PDF is available at the Latvian Institute website.
As part of Latvia's centenary celebrations, the Latvian Institute produced a book called Latvia 100 Snapshot Stories. Over the next few weeks we will be reproducing a selection of the entries to give you a few flavors of the country. If you would like to read the whole thing, a free downloadable PDF is available at the Latvian Institute website.
This is the last Thing of Latvia. Looking back, we have written about more than 30 different Things of Latvia. Some have proved popular, some not. Some have been well written, some less so. But of one thing we can be certain, in one thing we can take some pride: we have never stooped to writing about the "caurvējš".
While we may not have much in the way of oil reserves (excepting Norway) or gold deposits, the Baltic states and the wider Nordic region do have other valuable resource on which to draw. One of them is not even a physical thing, but is instead a concept: trust, says Ulf Andreasson from the Policy Analysis Department at the Nordic Council of Ministers.
Markus Meckl is a professor of history at the University of Akureyri in northern Iceland. He formerly taught in Rīga at the Latvian Cultural Academy, arriving in the year 2000 and staying for two and a half years. He still teaches each year at Rīga Stradiņš University in the media department.
By year-end, Latvia is to publish a trove of KGB (Soviet secret police) files that remained in the country after the collapse of the USSR. The process, known as 'lustration' and similar to that undergone in other countries with a communist past, will conclude with the index cards concerning about 4,300 agents being published, and researchers working with the documents have hinted that many well-known people are on the list.
In the 1970s and 1980s the United Kingdom had an amazing list of colossal and incomparable rock stars dominating the charts: David Bowie, Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury et al.
Following parliamentary elections on the October 6, a record number - 31 - of the 100 seats in Saeima will go to women, which is above the EU average (30.4%) and well above the average in the rest of the world's parliaments (23.6%).
If you happened to notice there was no ''Thing of Latvia'' last week, and you were in the mood to guess why, it would be reasonable to speculate that we at LSM were ill, lazy, drunk or out of ideas. Such surmises might be correct in one, several or all respects. However, we could quite easily maintain our dignity and reputation by answering that there was no ''Thing of Latvia'' last week tehnisku iemeslu dēļ or due to technical reasons.
A great deal of research has been done on the behavior of crowds, their psychopathology and their tendency to express the more regressive aspects of the human psyche, but as far as I am aware, none of these studies have focused on clapping in Latvia.
Pope Francis visits Latvia on September 24. The day has been declared a public holiday by the Latvian parliament. So here's a quiz about our visitor, the history of the Catholic church in this part of the world and some other Popetastic facts.
A couple of weeks ago our colleagues at the LSM Latvian-language service unveiled a new project they had been working on for a long time: a multiple choice quiz devised to give voters in the forthcoming Saeima elections some idea of their general political affiliation.
A bar-room acquaintance once told me that while travelling many years ago in Eastern Anatolia, he made the mistake of "tut-tutting" during a conversation. While a local was complaining at length about the difficulties of life in a remote village, he delivered what may even have been a tut rather than a full tut-tut as a gesture of sympathy and understanding at the many trials with which life likes to torture us.
LSM brings you another piece from the #3 issue of the Centenary Magazine made by the Satori.lv culture website and paid for by the Culture Ministry. In this one, poet and culture connoisseur Aivars Madris looks at Latvian drinking culture as recorded in local literature.
We bring you another piece from the #3 Centenary Magazine made by the Satori.lv portal and paid for by the Culture Ministry. This article by Jeļena Solovjova looks at ten Latvian startups - from the early 20th century to the present day - unearthing Latvia's diverse manufacturing history.
In cooperation with the Satori.lv culture portal, LSM is publishing pieces from their recently published centenary magazine. This piece probes one of Rīga's most colorful neighborhoods, the Maskavas priekšpilsēta or Moscow suburb. With a dark past and high crime rate in the 80s and 90s, it remains very much a "a city within a city", as described in this neighborhood profile by Agija Ābiķe-Kondrāte.
Seemingly without care and without anyone to care about them, street cats are legion across Latvia's cities.
In cooperation with the Satori.lv culture portal, LSM is publishing pieces from their recently published centenary magazine once a week. This piece, which appeared in the magazine under the title, On Latvian Parenting, delves deep into the search of what constitutes a Latvian upbringing. Author: journalist Santa Remere.