All Creature Comforts Great and Small-Part Two

Clog Blog

In addition to adjusting to the shower and the Russki washing machine, we also have had a very interesting request from our landlady concerning the toilet. Two days into our stay, she called and Baiba answered. There was a brief conversation and then Baiba hung up the phone. “That was Inga.”

“What did she want?” I inquired.

“She say we need to not put toilet paper in toilet.”

“What?” I asked, certain that Baiba must have gotten this wrong.

“She say we not put toilet paper in toilet. It’s not very big and it will clog, so we need put in trash.”

I really wanted this to be a product of the language barrier but that notion was completely nullified by the fact that Baiba speaks Latvian and so does Inga.

You need to understand that I am a card-carrying germaphobe. Public restrooms are a challenge for me, and outhouses are completely out of the question. I am amazed at the miraculous capabilities of my body to ignore its basic needs if conditions aren’t just right. I delight in contemporary hands free public facilities, even if people do come off as bad mimes waving their hands incessantly in front of the automatic paper towel dispenser.

The Urban Dictionary defines a germaphobe as, “any person who is obsessed with cleanliness and defeating bacteria.” 

The landlady’s request was clearly going to be a very big deterrent in my battle to defeat bacteria. An unofficial germaphobe himself, David was no happier than I at this new turn of events.

We asked again if Baiba was sure. We somehow believed that if we asked enough times the answer would miraculously change. However, Baiba responded, “Yes, I’m sure. She said to be careful. She said it’s okay if we sometimes forget, but most times put in trash.”

David made up his mind right then and there that he was likely to “forget” pretty much every time. This is not really the place for details, suffice to say I’ve had to move into another dimension of consciousness, and the trash gets emptied often.

Coffee, Tea and Sympathy

David and I are not coffee drinkers and never have been. We enjoy tea of just about every kind, and especially the nectar of the gods, chai tea. My first stop the day after we return will be to Starbucks for a satisfying grande chai latte.

Here in Latvia, we have tea bags and a really great electric teapot that heats the water in an instant. This has been a very good thing since David spent the first five days here not feeling well. He caught a bad cold and really had trouble shaking it. The tea was some consolation as Baiba sympathetically delivered cups to him. 

Baiba likes red tea, and enjoys having her friends over in the afternoons to have tea with her. This is so cute I can barely survive it. Can you imagine American kids having their friends over for tea?

Agnese drinks coffee, and I was a little mystified by the fact that every morning there is about a half inch of sediment left in her cup. We thought she had instant coffee, but it never quite dissolves and always remaining is the sludge at the bottom. Not being coffee drinkers, there has never been any such thing for us as “a good cup of coffee;” but this looks over the top unappetizing.

I was concerned because I knew we would have social worker visits and would need to offer coffee. Since Agnese is a teenager, I wasn’t sure she was doing it right.

Then one day last week we went to visit Baiba’s school. Her English teacher did not want us to stay in the classroom during an exam, so she shuffled us off to the principal’s office and had someone bring us coffee.

David, who was not feeling well anyway, and is possibly the world’s pickiest eater, stared at the coffee cup like he had been sentenced to die before a firing squad. I was not much happier, but knew that with enough sugar almost anything can be made palatable.

We sat quietly in our prison sipping the hideous sugar packed brew, and there at the bottom was the familiar muck. David lifted the cup to his down turned mouth, choking down sip after sip. He could “hide not thy poison with such sugar…” Even die-hard coffee drinkers may have gagged.

I found the bright side in the fact that I now knew that Agnese was making the coffee correctly.  David garnered little consolation in this discovery. At long last, Baiba returned to take us with her to her next class. We left our half finished coffee on the principal’s desk, and tried to put the whole thing permanently out of our minds and palates.