We made it!

It's May 22, we've been here three days -- and what an eventful three days it's been.  It started even before we came:

We got a call on Saturday morning from Mike, our landlord in Riga.  He started out the conversation with, "Hi, Chris.  Do you know Murphy's Law?"  I knew right then and there that something was up. The water heater in our soon-to-be apartment had caught fire that morning, so the apartment was not going to be available for a week.  Fine, no problem -- we'll just go to a hotel for the first week.  I made the reservations without a hitch.  We got to the airport, Mike met us and took us to the hotel.  After checking things out, Mike discovered that the fire was caused by a problem in the chimney, not in the water heater.  Consequently, his apartment wasn't going to be available for two to three months -- a real problem for us.  He was able to find us another apartment (a lot cheaper than his!), and we moved in yesterday.

It's a nice, roomy apartment that is located in "Old Town,"which is the oldest part of Riga. it is a lot different from American apartments.  It's not "cozy" -- there are wood floors, three bedrooms (although one has a love seat in it), and no true sitting room -- but it's big and roomy.  I'd like to take the bed out of the biggest bedroom (it would make a great sitting room!) that has a TV in it to the room with the loveseat and take the loveseat into the other room.   I'm hoping it will fit and that the landlord won't mind.  Now we just need to find a way to come up with some chairs so that we can have seats for everyone.

Our adventure continued this morning when I decided to take a shower.  When I stepped out, there was water all over the floor.  I had some clothes laying out to put on, and they were dripping wet.  We threw some towels down and got the water dried up.  Don contacted the landlord, and she got a plumber over here right away.  Nothing major was wrong -- just a hose that had come unhooked. Hopefully, my shower tomorrow morning will be rather uneventful.

Then, to top things off, we did not have wireless internet in the apartment.  We can't function without it, because we need to be able to get to our email and contact our kids.  I also can't do this blog!  I finally ended up calling Deanna on the mobile phone that was provided by our contact and given to us when we first got here.  I'm sure it was expensive, but, at that point, I didn't care.  I needed to contact them and let them know that our living situation had changed.  Our contact came over last night and installed the wireless internet for us, so we are going strong at this point.

I visited a secondary school today.  It covers grades 6-12.  I observed a couple of choirs, a music history class, and a couple of other classes.  I don't know what I expected -- things looked about the same as they do in any American school.  They sure didn't sound the same, though.  The 5th through 9th grade girls' choir I heard was wonderful!  They had full, mature voices and sang 3- to 4-part literature.  I was really impressed.  When the Soviets were in control of Latvia, they instituted an excellent music education program in the schools.  The high quality of music education today is largely due to that fact.  The students all know how to sight-sing, which helps immensely when it comes to learning new music.  That's something that I want to really work on next year -- teaching sight-singing techniques to my choir students.  I'm not sure how to go about it, because I have beginning students up to advanced students, but I need to come up with a plan of some kind.

I like adventure, but I really hope that tomorrow is a boring, uneventful day.  I am visiting a music publishing house tomorrow morning, and then Don and I are going on a tour of the area with a great guide tomorrow afternoon.  We are truly enjoying ourselves.  Don is itching to get some fishing done -- our landlord absolutely loves fishing, so he may end up going with her sometime.  There is nowhere in Riga to fish, but there are a lot of places throughout the rest of the country.  I'm sure he'll find them before we leave.

I have some pictures, but I haven't figured out how to add them here yet.  I will try and do that before long so that you can see what we see every day.   Well, I'll sign off for now.  I think we'll go out and take a walk and try and find some ice cream.  It won't be Graeter's, but at least it will be ice cream!