My first almost-complete week of work is almost over! I’ve just finished my day’s project. Tonight I'll most likely head over to an acquaintance's Name Day party - in a breach of Latvian social norms, I was invited (rather, she invited everyone), but in her defence, she's not Latvian and I suppose can't be blamed for not following norms :) Either way, that's what's up for tonight, but not too late because I can't miss my bus(es), whichever one I end up needing to take home.
This weekend will contain some more organisation of life, maybe even some pushing-around of furniture (if I can’t buy wires and fasten them into my plaster walls so that I can hang curtains on them to make room divisions, I might as well corner my bed off with the only two bookshelves in my room). I'll make it work.
Tuesday and Wednesday we had gorgeous weather – Wednesday my friend Ilze and I took advantage of the second-day-in-a-row-niceness and went out to the beach (oh yes, the very beach that runs along the Baltic Sea) and took a very long stroll, ate dinner at an actually good Asian cuisine restaurant, and walked back. It was hard to get off of the train once I got home because my hips felt broken. Walking in the sand is a job for an entirely different muscle group.
Let me tell you about what I did LAST night (Thursday). You’ll appreciate this. Thursday night I met up with some friends to see another ballet (we’ve got tickets to pretty much every show until Mat) – this week's show was "Cinderella". All day Thursday I was thinking about how cool it would be to see "Cinderella" as a ballet - I imagined lots of muted and pastel colours, flowing ballet costumes, a light-hearted and romantic story.
Take that image and add to it what YOU know of the Cinderella story. Do you have it in your mind? Now take that story and replace it with a strip-tease. We're talking Cinderella goes interpretive-Moulin-Rouging. WACKED. OUT. Words cannot describe how confusing the first 10 minutes of the ballet were, how disturbing the following 50 minutes were, and how, once the male pimp (the king, perhaps?) gave Cinderella (Cinderella) a couple of crumpled bills for sleeping with the main younger male character (um..Prince?), did we finally get what was going on. The wicked step-mother was the owner of a brothel, the stepsisters traded for six hookers, and the "kingdom" a large group of dandy-ish men in zebra print coat tails. It was... let's put it this way, the “half-time” glass of champagne was well deserved, and we more or less laughed the entire way through. We got some nasty looks from a woman sitting to the left of us, but as we decided during intermission, how are you NOT supposed to laugh? How else are you going to justify sitting through a ballet that, though essentially terrible (I don't think these people are used to interpretive movements... learn classical dance forever and then try to break-dance = FAIL), is bad enough plot wise to be hilarious.
The most heart breaking part was seeing small children running around the halls during intermission – these kids were brought to the ballet by their parents in hopes of seeing something reminiscent of Disney and got nothing but thongs, fishnets, and chaps. At least one of the little girls had on a zebra print dress. Maybe her parents knew one of the dancers?
My computer is still not functional – I can only lean on the left side of the track pad for so long before my hand goes numb. This is being written and posted from the office, but don't get worked up, I've finished my work for the day. I've already been cornered for a large job that will, as I'm told, take up all of Monday. At least I have something to look forward to; otherwise I get in in the mornings and sit for an hour before anything happens. Not that I’m complaining – too much.
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