Field Trip

I was a lousy student; the kind who is constantly trying to usurp the attention of the class. I never did my homework, came in late and had a smart-ass comment for everything the teacher said. Still, some teachers handled this better than others. Mrs. G., my ninth grade history teacher, took my interruptions personal and, a few weeks into class, it was obvious to me that she hated me with a passion. Initially, I shrugged it off, but inevitably, I began to reciprocate and my comments in her class grew mordant.

For a semester, Mrs. G. and I battled in the particular way of students and teachers. I’d made a comment, she’d kick me out of class. I’d come back from seeing the principal defiant, head raised like I was happy just to get out of class. She’d give me detention and I’d ostentatiously look out the window while she lectured.

I had Mrs. G. in ninth grade. I don’t know how I managed to pass her class, but I did and entering tenth grade, I never saw her again. I don’t know if she left the school, or just hid in her classroom. By the time I graduated, I hardly remembered her, yet one detail, one small facet of her personality, I have never forgotten. Mrs. G. was from Latvia.

Well, not originally. It must’ve been her grandparents. She had no accent and seemed way too interested in the place of her forbearers to be a first generation immigrant. Mrs. G. took pains to evoke Latvia in class. This wasn’t an easy task, given the country’s relative obscurity, especially in America’s public school History curriculum which, if I remember right, consisted solely of lessons on ancient Egypt and World War II and the latter, not in great detail. 

Latvia was Mrs. G.’s blindspot. She had such an incredible affection for the country, when she’d start talking about it, she’d get carried away and ramble off the country’s GDP, the population, time zone and anything else that came into her head to an entirely disinterested classroom. She talked about Latvia so much, she came to embody the country for me. Before Mrs. G.’s class. I’d never even heard of Latvia. This was 1997. The Soviet Union had only recently collapsed and left the three little Baltic countries free to look about themselves and realize their European identities, but for me, it was not the USSR or the EU that cast a shadow over Latvia, but the face of Mrs. G. In the decades to follow, any mention of the place, would immediately invoke her frustrated, porcine face. I imagined Latvia as an entire country of vindictive, miserable history teachers.

As you can imagine, it wasn’t a place I was enthusiastic to visit, but when you’re in Lithuania, and heading north to Estonia, it would be foolish not to stop off in Riga on the way. Riga, the capital of Latvia, is the largest city in the Baltic region and boasts some impressive churches and one of the world’s largest libraries. Reluctantly, I booked a ticket, but to underscore my lingering bias against the country, I limited my stay to slightly less than 48 hours.

In Lithuania, Gina and I had travelled around the country quite a bit, going nearly all the way out to the coast, seeing the hill of crosses and a cat museum before returning to Vilnius and rambling through the old town, its former ghettos and Christmas markets.  I liked Lithuania. The sights were interesting, the people were friendly, the food was good, but I was excited to be moving on. Despite my bias, I expected to be happy to land in Riga and be in a new country with a new language and different traditions. After all, it would’ve been absurd to think one high school History teacher could ruin a country for someone.  Landing at the airport, we managed to find the bus into town easily enough and it wasn’t expensive; Latvia was off to a good start. It was late in the evening when we got downtown, but I figured we’d go out and find something to eat before calling it a night.

But getting off the bus and seeing a TGI Friday’s, crowded by a mob of tourists, I felt my irritation with the place rising. In a short time, I was surprised to find myself openly criticizing Riga. Either I was more tired out than I thought or, even two decades later, I still hadn’t forgiven the place for its relation with my History teacher.

 “See,” I told Gina, gesturing to a Starbucks. “In Vilnius, they didn’t have all these chain places. I liked that. Vilnius was an interesting place. Now you take this place, this Riga. Look. It’s a mall! It’s an airport with churches!” Gina had no time to remind me we’d only just walked into town when a three guys, yelling, arm-in-arm, and acting in that annoying chummy way guys act when they’ve have a few drinks together walked past and bumped into me. Recovering my balance and watching them go, I started in again. “This place is too touristy. Look at those morons. They probably just stumbled out of that that TGI Friday’s. Tomorrow morning, they’ll be nursing their hangovers at that Starbucks over there. Cities like these encourage this kind of loutish behavior. This is a place for consumerist neanderthals!”

Gina just rolled her eyes. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever told her about my bias against Latvia, but she knows when to let me rant. She feigned interest in my harangue, while keeping an eye out for the first mulled wine stand. We hadn’t even been in the capital for an hour and I had already deemed the entire country unworthy of a visit.

We continued walking down Riga’s version of Bourbon Street toward our hostel. Music pumped from the bars. Girls laughed, the guys leered at them and swore at each other. Everyone seemed to be speaking in English. “Uggh. What kind of crap is this?” I bemoaned shaking my head. “Where am I? Wrigleyville, for shit’s sake? I don’t know if I should be consoled or demoralized to find that people all over the world like this kind of crap.” We walked past a place called ‘Shooters’ where I distinctly heard someone yell ‘shots!’ “God. Tell me those people aren’t singing along to Cheryl Crow!” By this point, even Gina was shaking her head a little.

Our hostel shared an entrance with a bar. When I opened the door to the smell of spilled beer, urinal cake and half-eaten baskets of ‘wings,’ was so heavy I could’ve puked. The revelers were straining to make their obnoxious laughter heard over more Cheryl Crow. 

We climbed the stairs and checked in to our hostel just behind a squad of dudes positively reeking of Axe body spray. The brims of their backward hats clucking at me like aggressive roosters while I waited behind them. By the time they’d finished checking in, I was light-headed from all the ‘Axe.’ The guy at the desk was nice. He circled a few places he thought we’d be interested on the map. He handed over our keys and we headed up to the room.

The smell in the stairs seemed to ferment the further up we climbed until it was like a sewer pipe had ruptured. Someone, what looked like years ago, had left a damp towel draped over a fire extinguisher box and every surface was tacky like the floor of a movie theater. Leaving the staircase, I found, strangely, the ghastly cloacal smell seemed to be issuing from the showers which were separate from the toilets. I made the mistake of opening the door on one, hoping to locate the source of the smell and was almost knocked over by a smell so bad it seemed to induce synesthesia. Inside the shower stall, a reedy buzz floated up the drain along with the smell which, I was pretty sure, I was imagining, as a result of the strain the smell was putting on my senses. It was shocking the thing didn’t have it’s own color too. The carpet in the hallways was worn and stained. The common area consisted of a sink and an electric kettle. I opened the door to our room and found a bed, thinly made up, a window that faced a wall and cold to rival the temperature outside.

“Ugh,” I pronounced and we went out into the never-ending happy hour of the Riga night to find some food.

We ate some lousy falafel, had a look around and headed back to the  room. On the corner of our hostel, we passed a drunken Italian yelling ‘dio cane’ into a cellphone and staggering around the street. Going back into our hostel, I noticed a large spill on the floor that had obviously been there for years. It was furred with dust, lint and a few coins that looked like they’d been tossed into it in hopes of paying it to go away. We climbed the stairs, passed the gray fire extinguisher towel and the septic showers, climbed into our chilly bed and turned out the lights. Not five minutes had passed before I heard the same irate ‘dio cane’ I’d heard in the street coming down the hall. Our door handle rattled violently. Either the guy who so drunk he couldn’t find his room or he was going around checking to see if there were any empty rooms.

“Oh great!” I muttered into the freezing darkness. ”Those morons can’t even find their own room.” If Gina was still awake, she didn’t say anything and after listening to someone banging in and out of the bathroom and more Italian swearing (‘che cazzo!’), I eventually fell asleep.

I counted myself lucky when I awoke, realizing I’d slept through the night despite what I assumed had been a night of innumerable Italian curses, further doorhandle fumblings and all of this in the rarified atmosphere of the septic air hissing up from the shower drains. Gina was up and we talked a little about how profoundly we’d slept and exchanged dream details before I offered to go out into the common area to make some coffee. The shared bathroom was just to the left of our door and the first thing I noticed when I came out, was one of the Italian guys sitting on the toilet, head in his hands, pants and underwear around his ankles. The door was wide open.

“Ugggrrrrrhhhhhh!” He moaned.

“Hey!” I yelled, indignant at having this be the first thing I saw in the morning, “How about closing the door, huh?”

“Urrrrmmmmmm!” He didn’t budge. I considered yelling at him in Italian, but I figured even if he didn’t know a word of English, it should’ve been obvious I was trying to get him to close the damn door. When I finished making the coffee, he was still sitting there with the door wide open like he was in his own house. I couldn’t stand it. I went over the closed the door for him. The sewage smell and the slight of this guy on the toilet together was too much for 7am. I went back to the room with the coffee. Mercifully, when we finished our coffee and left the room, the door was still closed.

We spent the day ranging over the city. Riga, despite for first impressions and stereotypes furnished by Mrs. G. had some interesting things to offer. We went to a market, checked out the old houses on the other side of the river, went out to an old warehouse district that had been parceled out to artists for the apparent purpose of establishing expensive restaurants. We ate, drank the balsam Riga’s famous for and ate a bunch of local candy at various places before heading back to the room. It had been a pretty good day but back in the freezing, filthy hostel, I was worried about more late-night assaults on the senses. It was Saturday and I knew the revelers would be out in full force. I could only hope that the ‘dio cane’ guy and the toilet guy had checked out.

We were back relatively early and I was hoping to get to sleep before the hordes returned after last call. At 10 pm, the place was strangely silent. After the long day of walking around, it wasn’t hard to fall asleep.

Around 2, I woke up to a long drawn-out groan. It sounded like a plaintive call of misery rolled down the hallway, in the direction of our room, like a bowling ball. The cry crumpled and moistened into a retch.

“UuuoooooogggghhhRRRRAAAAAAALLLLLG!”

I waited for a splash, or at least a wet plop, but nothing followed the retch and the hallway was quiet until a man, presumably the same who had moaned and retched, began to make a sing-song sound, two notes, warbling and broken, easing in and out of each other, like someone spinning the dial on a stereo recording of a donkey braying.

“Eeee-ooooo, eeeee-ooooo, eeeee-ooooo.”

“What the hell?” I asked the darkness, not sure if Gina was awake.

“It sounds like a mentally ill guy.” Gina answered, not moving. We listened in the darkness for a while. The sing-song sound continued, interspersed with retching.

“Eeee-oooo, eeee-ooooo, URAAAAAAF!, eeee-oooo, eeee-oooo.”

“Seriously, what the hell is that?” I asked sitting up. “I mean if that’s just someone who’s drunk, they’ve definitely got alcohol poisoning to be making a sound like that. Maybe I should make sure they’re alright?”

“Yeah, but what if it isn’t someone who’s drunk? I have no idea what to make of that.” Gina whispered. “I haven’t heard a single intelligible thing since those sounds started.”

We listened for a while, trying to get some sense of what we were listening to. A sudden rush of water cut through the dual-tone moan.

“Eeee-ooo, foooooosshhh, eeee-oooo, eeee-oooo, BAAARF!, eeee-ooooo, foooosshh.”

“If there’s a symphony in hell, it must sound like that,” I said, now straining to speak over the faucet, the singing and the retching. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to see what the hell was going on out there. I pulled my pants on, pulled my shirt over my head and jerked open the door, having no idea what was going to be on the other side. As I opened the door, the sudden light blinded me. I shielded my eyes.

“What the hell is going on out here?” I grumbled. Hoping maybe someone would offer some logical explanation while I waited for my sight to return. The singing/braying had stopped and the common area was filed with the pathetic echo of my question. Through the lucent haze, I noticed a figure seated next to the sink. The figure gradually asserted itself as a kid in a green shirt whose head was hanging low enough to almost be in his lap, one hand rested on the faucet of the sink. By way of answering my question, he lifted his head, turned to the sink and retched again. 

 

“The fuck, man? Can’t you even make it to the bathroom?” I was too annoyed with this stupid behavior to be civil. This guy had woken me up with his half-assed puking. But, as I’d expected, he didn’t seem particularly penitent. It wasn’t until I saw that the kid’s fly was wide open that I realized I was talking to the same kid who’d been marooned on the toilet that morning. I shook my head.

“Man, you know, you really shouldn’t drink.” I told him. “You’re really bad at it.” I was beginning to feel almost sorry for the kid. He was really a mess. Both times I’d encountered him, he’d had no recourse to the power of speech (other than groans) and his crotch was uncovered. I began to wonder if maybe the kid did have some mental disability.

“Hey man, just try to keep it down out here, huh?” I told him by way of a good night and turned back into the room. I closed the door and told Gina it was the same kid. ‘Damn,’ was all she could say. It was quiet out in the common area for a while and then the kid started with the braying again. It sounded a little sadder than before, like even he wasn’t sure what he was doing it for. In a few minutes, I was asleep.

When I woke up in the morning, the common area was empty, and aside from one cup knocked to the floor and another in the sink, there was no evidence that a drunk pretending to be a donkey had even troubled our sleep.

While checking out, I considered telling the guy at the desk of what we’d put up with over the course of our two-night stay, but it was obvious from the towel on the fire extinguisher and the dusty stain at the bottom of the stairs that no one cared about the place, least of all the guy getting paid minimum wage to hand guests their keys and show them where they could leave their bags. In a place like this, it was a wonder we even had clean sheets. Even if I had decided to tell him, it wouldn’t have mattered, when we went to check out there was no one at the desk. We waited around a few minutes, yelled ‘hello?’ and finally put our key where it would be seen and left. 

Walking toward the bus shelter to take us back to the airport, we passed the TGI Friday’s but it was closed. The streets were empty and a bitter wind blew the napkins and plastic bags of last night’s debauche down the street. A few tourists were out, wandering around, as if uncertain how they’d gotten there and what they were expected to do now that they’d arrived. One woman, however, was all bundled up for the weather and snapping photos like mad. She seemed to be the only person listening to a guide tell an amusing anecdote of the Blackhead’s building and when it was over, she laughed like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. The tour guide directed her attention to someone else and they walked off, leaving us alone at the bus stop. It must’ve been Mrs. G.. There’s just no one else who could’ve been that interested in Latvia.