The Fans of Riga

A cat, a capybara, and the good side of national pride

First, some housekeeping:

We have a winner! In the first anniversary Unplugged Traveler new paid subscriber sweepstakes, Allison Kowalkowski has won Patron of the Unplugged status. Thanks to a kind gift from my brother Andy (whose Stories from the Field you should definitely check out), Allison gets to choose an upcoming unplugged destination for me. Stay tuned to learn where she decides to send me.

It’s been an unusually busy month, but with a big event and a big story now behind me, I’m eager to get back to unplugged travel. So, onward.

When did cities start installing giant versions of their names in public places? I’ve come across them now in Barcelona, Gdánsk, and Amsterdam, and always feel a slight cringe at the sight of them, like the city itself is trying too hard. Obviously, the 3-D names are made for tourist selfie-snapping, but the idea that Sagrada Familia or the Eiffel Tower are themselves insufficient to identify a city; that the average Instagram user quite literally needs the destination spelled out in order to prove they were there, is just depressing. And there’s something about locations inventing ‘attractions’ just so people will take photos of them that makes me queasy.

So, when I came across RIGA spelled out in Riga, my first inclination was mild annoyance. There was a bunch of tourists, impeding my way across the square as they waited their turn to pose inanely in front of the letters. When the crowd parted a bit, I noticed that, for some reason, there was a cartoon cat perched on the Riga, its black tail curving over the letter A.

Whatevs. I kept walking. But again and again throughout that first day in Latvia, I kept coming across the cartoon cat, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by a Labrador, a ring-tailed lemur, and what looked for all the world like capybara. The animals featured on posters splashed around the city. They were sold as figurines in souvenir stands. They towered overhead on billboards. The cat was even on the t-shirt of the woman behind the desk at the tourist office.

“What’s with all the cats?” I asked her.

You are no doubt more culturally informed than I, and will by now have deduced that the cat and other animals are the protagonists of Flow. And Flow is an animated film that, 3 days before my arrival in Riga, had just won the Oscar for feature animation. In fact, as I learned from the tourist office lady, it was the first time a Latvian film had ever won an Oscar. That very afternoon, the filmmakers were arriving back in the country, bearing their shiny new award, which would be on display to the public at the Latvian National Museum of Art. “You should go see it!” she urged. “It is very exciting.”

Of course I went.

The line snaked down the curving staircase and across the museum rotunda, and I passed the time by talking to Ričards and Ketrīna, who had added an Oscar-viewing stop to their date night in the city. “It’s a historic moment for Latvia,” Ričards said, when I asked him why they had come. “Plus we really liked the movie,” added Ketrina, who had seen Flow twice. “Even before it won.”

It took about 30 minutes to advance to the viewing platform, where not only the Oscar, but also the film’s Bafta and the Golden Globe stood on display. The statues themselves were about as interesting as you might imagine, and if I’m honest, there was part of me that had approached the scene with condescension, like: Historic? Really? Why are all these people getting so excited by an award they had absolutely nothing to do with?

But then I looked at their faces. Every person in that line went up to the Oscar and posed, beaming, with a pride that could not have been greater if they had written the script themselves. It was the pride of a small nation that had achieved the highest international recognition in something, but it was also the pride of transference, that way of feeling like if one member of your community does good, it reflects well on all of you. It made me wonder what it would feel like, in that moment, to be so proud of your country.

Walking home that night, I passed the RIGA sign again. There was again a crowd in front of it, smaller this time, but still posing for photos. This time, instead of huffily pushing my way through, I stopped and listened. The crowd wasn’t made up of tourists, I realized. They were Latvians.

I didn’t see Flow until I returned to Copenhagen. In it, the protagonists survive a catastrophic flood by collaborating, albeit in a non-anthropomorphized way that feels entirely true to their individual animal natures. It is a gripping, moving, utterly delightful film that is both an artistic achievement and a gentle political statement. I would have been proud of it too.