Sophie’s July: In Which She Eats a Lot of Borsch

Dear Family,

I am pleased to present to you: an entire month in the Baltic states!

Now four weeks into my study abroad program in Riga, Latvia, I feel a lot more confident speaking Russian, navigating the city, and eating tomatoes. For those who didn’t know little Sophie, that last one might not sound very impressive, and that’s okay. You are allowed to feel that way.

To me, it actually indicates that I’ve taken the final step on a long path to being an undiscriminating eater.

Living with a host family has been a really good experience. Ezra and Anzhela are so kind to me and seem to actually enjoy chatting with me. They make sure to correct me when I use improper grammar and laugh at me when I celebrate speaking a complex sentence correctly.

They also feed me many many vegetables. This includes tomatoes. And they’re yummy! There are also many beets and eggplants.

Some of you may be familiar with the Ukrainian dish borsch, which is a hot beetroot soup. You may have thought it was Russian, but that’s okay. We all make mistakes sometimes.

You may have also thought it was spelled “borscht.” This can also be forgiven.

What you probably should know is that it’s not the only food people in Eastern Europe eat. There are lots of different foods here, and what I usually eat is a pile of vegetables and chicken, not borsch.

However, I think I led my dad to believe that we eat it a lot more often that we actually do when I called him on one Sunday evening and told him that I had eaten borsch for both my lunch and my dinner that day.

This was purely a coincidence, but a very pleasant one. My BYU professor here decided to have students over to her apartment on Sunday evenings to learn how to make borsch and enjoy a meal together. I grated a beet, and everyone agreed that it was the single best beet grating they had ever witnessed. Not bad for my first time.

We ate, we talked, we laughed. It was a good evening. I then took the tram (or streetcar) home to my host family, where I was greeted with, surprise, another pot of borsch!

We laughed good-naturedly at the coincidence and I happily ate my host’s borsch. It was the most delicious soup I’d ever had.

Don’t tell Professor Jordan, but Anzhela totally makes the better borsch.

And then, just a week or two ago, I tried another cultural marvel for the first time. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Cold Borsch!

Not from the same people who brought you borsch.

Who actually owns the cold borsch is a topic of light-hearted debate between Latvia and their sister to the south, Lithuania.

I’m pretty sure everyone knows the soup is actually Lithuanian, but Latvia likes to irritate Lithuania by telling them they make the soup better. I don’t know whether Latvia as a whole makes it better, but Anzhela sure makes a mean one.

I also had borsch again for dinner tonight. So maybe I should retract my previous statement about it not being as common as people think it is.

Dinner with my hosts is usually either preceded or followed by an hour or more of casual dinner table conversation. This conversation sometimes revolves around grammar, my family, questions about Russian vs American culture, economics, technology, history, or the recent assassination attempt on Trump.

I’m learning a lot of new words.

During one of these evenings though, Anzhela brought me a stack of children’s books in Russian and jokingly said, “Не ешь, пока не прочитаешь.” (“You don’t get to eat until you finish reading.” It’s funnier in Russian because it rhymes.)

We then sat and I read a Pushkin fairytale aloud to her for what was probably a whole hour. We didn’t even finish it, and I think Anzhela was tired of correcting my pronunciation of the old Russian words, because she suggested that we take a break and resume the next day and we never picked it up again.

During the day, I attend classes in Russian language, history, and conversation, usually followed by a few hours either gallivanting around Riga with my friends here or studying in the Latvian National Library.

I frequently need to perform with Hannah Malpage (my former mission companion and trainer) in front of the class…

And visit many beautiful vistas with friends.

I have so far managed to avoid paying for any of the city-from-above views that all major cities here seem eager to charge tourists for. Maybe I’m missing out, but the free ones work well enough for me.

I also learned yesterday that Europe doesn’t have termites. I thought it was funny that I learned this while my host was trying to describe to me what an ant is, and thought that I would best understand if he told me that they’re basically smaller termites. Understandably, the word “termite” is a cognate, so we figured it out from there. Hopefully though, he now knows that I already knew what ants are.

On the topic of American bugs, I feel the need to report that one of my classmates ended up flying home early after spending over week in the hospital with Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Of all the gin joints, Rocky Mountain spotted fever found its way to Riga, Latvia.

This poor boy went to the hospital with a fever and a stomach ache one night and then had to be transferred to the contagious diseases hospital, where one doctor recognized the spots on his arms from one picture he’d seen in a textbook back in medical school as being a symptom of the disease that is only transmitted by ticks in the USA.

The diagnosis was such a confusing revelation to everyone, but probably to none more than to the student receiving it. He had until that point assumed that he got sick from drinking Latvian tap water (which I can confirm, Dad, is drinkable, but most people choose not to drink it anyway), and couldn’t remember ever finding a tick or evidence of a tick bite anywhere on his body.

Since the disease is only transmittable by tick, we can at least be sure that my friend wasn’t introducing a brand new highly contagious illness to the country, which would’ve been a little embarrassing. Instead, he just suffered in a hospital for a week and then went home to finish his recovery in a place a little more familiar to him. Bless him.

It was sad to see him go, but it’s, uh, a pretty fun story to tell in all of its random glory. As insensitive as that sounds, I think my afflicted classmate would agree with me.

As much as we love him, we’re all having a good time in his absence. The girls get along especially well, and we all reveled in the special coincidence that one day occurred when we all showed up to class wearing green and black. Our male classmates found this situation pleasantly intriguing, but the women of the BYU Riga study abroad program all just about exploded with happiness when we realized our unplanned coordination.

Aren’t we so cute? Thank you, we think so too.

We spend A LOT of time together. Even outside of the several hours a day spent together in class, we explore, study, and spend our weekends in each other’s company. The weekends here are usually spent on some excursion, either to a historical city in Latvia, or to the capital cities of Estonia (Tallinn) and Lithuania (Vilnius). According to one of my instructors here, everyone in Riga is either team Tallinn or team Vilnius.

Tallinn:

Vilnius:

Photo credit to: pretty much everyone on my study abroad except me. Yay for google photo sharing!

After having spent a weekend in both, I’ll have to say I’m probably team Vilnius, just because it felt more like a real city than Tallinn. Fewer cobblestones, I suppose? But still a lot of really pretty churches.

I can now testify, however, that all three Baltic states are absolutely beautiful and have wonderful capital cities. I’ve loved spending so much time in Riga this month.

I’m feeling pretty excited to go back to Utah, give Luke a hug, and start working (and having an income) again, but Latvia is wonderful and I’m happy to have two more weeks here.

I hope that all of you are enjoying yourselves as well. I guess this letter comes off looking like one of those facebook posts that makes one’s life look perfect and way more exciting than yours. Don’t worry: I’m still stressed quite a bit of the time and am frequently worrying about relationships and education and what I should be doing to prepare for my wedding and aaah all of these things.

But I’m also happy 🙂 and I hope you are too! Even despite all of your aaaah things.

Keep in touch and be sure to check for ticks.

Love,

Sophie