A perfect Latvian weekend! And a big turtle statue! Plus the national Eurovision semifinals and beachcombing for amber!→[More:]The whole area mapped in the link is called Jurmala, but my friends and I walked along the stretch of beach between Dzintari and Dubulti.

Last night we made an insanely delicious dinner chopping up a bunch of veggies and making a stir-fry thing, gabbed over a few bottles of wine, and roared - ROARED - when this pirate-themed band, Pirates of the Sea, totally won the first round of the Latvian semifinals for Eurovision. In just 15 minutes of SMS voting, over 10,000 votes were tallied for the band (no YouTube link yet - I'll keep you updated if I find one!), 5 times as many as the second-place finishers. This is in a country of just 2 million people.

In the morning we all got up and spent a few hours walking along the beach trolling for amber bits, and we actually found quite a few!

It was really nice to get out of the big city for the weekend, and I'm so glad that I wasn't hanging out with the same little klatch of people talking about the same stuff. And while the Gulf of Riga isn't exactly the Pacific Ocean, it was amazing to smell the sea air and hear the sound of the surf! Yay!

Since I don't have a camera anymore, here are a few images from Flickr of what the area looks like in the winter (though we didn't have the frozen sea this weekend!), and here's the Wikipedia article on Jurmala.

Big turtle, as promised, here (also not my image.)