Lielvarde

Last Wednesday while thinking about what plans people had over the weekend, we decided to just suck it up and go to Lielvarde. And by "we" I mean myself and Ilze, since everyone else (as in Davids and Julija) had already made plans to do other things. We had been joking about going to Lielvarde for a few months, since we often see the listing for it in the train station. The joke with Lielvarde mostly revolved around the song "Daugavas krasta" and taking a trip to Lielvarde to act it out in a brilliant photo-montage. Which we ended up doing on Saturday. Ilze and I packed up our white clothes, cameras, and provisions and took the train to Lielvarde. Once we got there we bought some flowers from the market and headed to the river. We got to the shore, waited a while for people to stop suddenly and randomly flocking to the same area, and then finally got to business. Which equalled to me rolling up my pant legs , putting a skirt over my jeans and standing around in 46ºF weather white, summery clothing. This may be why I am currently ill.

The montage turned out ridiculous in a good way - things were less than historically accurate, as I opted to pair my weather-inappropriate style with grey Converse. As soon as the montage is photoshopped I'll post it up somewhere for all to see. Who knows - this may be the beginning to a wonderful side project in visual aid folk and choir songs!

After the montage and freaking out a local fisherman as I removed the white clothing (we believe he missed the part where I got dressed OVER my existing attire), we headed to Uldevena castle, which is a remake of the wooden Lielvarde fortress. Ilze had stumbled upon the fact that there was a wooden castle while we were trying to see if there was anything else we could do in Lielvarde other than just dress up in white and tag random photos; turns out that it was the same castle we had been taken to 10 years ago when we were on the Sveika, Latvija! trip. So it was a reunion, of sorts. The place had changed a lot - there is now a fancy tourist-trap restaurant across the parking lot from the castle, and the castle boasts a horse (we thought Lielvarde was going to be a one horse town until we saw 5 other horses in a field behind the train tracks). VERY up-to-date. The castle, in a sense, is like a playground for adults. We got more information than we could handle from a very informed, very "hip" older woman (that being said, she works Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. If you ever go to Lielvarde and to the castle, go one one of these days because she knows her stuff and is very entertaining in a kind of sarcastic way) and spent a couple of hours climbing around the area. It was a nice break from big-cityness and a nice blast-from-the-past.

Now I'm sick, have many much photos to process and upload (it still takes FOREVER for the photos to load on the blog site...), and have a lot of work for, well, work, to do. Peace.