Simone de Beauvoir

To my astonishment there was a feminist conference on Simone de Beauvoir held at the University of Latvia this weekend. There were some very famous feminist scholars from France there, along with the few Latvian academics who are not afraid to call themselves a feminist. (When I tell people here that I am a feminist they look at me like I have a contagious disease that might spread to them and then slowly back away). The conference itself was very interesting and it gave me the chance to meet and speak with a number of people on my interview list.

But that isn't even the most exciting part. I was chatting with the head of the Gender Studies Centre (in English) and a woman came up and starting talking with her in Latvian. Then she turned to me and said (in Latvian) Laura this is Laima Muktupavela. I seriously couldn't believe it because this woman is my second favorite Latvian author (the other one is Aspazija and she died in 1943). It was like meeting the John Grisham of Latvia (in level of fame not type of content). Then I told her (in horribly nervous Latvian) that I read her book at my university in the US and that it was one of my favorites, that I even just saw the play based on her book a couple of weeks ago and that I had just read the story about her in this Latvian magazine. She probably thought I was a total dork but I seriously couldn't believe I was meeting someone I admired so much.

This is one of the reasons that I love studying Latvia because in a small country like this it is possible to just randomly be introduced to people like this and it happens all the time. If I studied Spain or Russia this type of thing would never happen but in Latvia people are genuinely interested in what I am doing and helping me succeed.