Latvija in brief

  • 2015-05-07

Good wishes

In honour of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Latvian independence, pupils from Latvian schools are starting to make flash mobs entitled “Latvia – our great country” to break the record for the amount of good wishes sent to Latvia.
One of the first schools to participate in the event was Ridze Elementary School in Riga. Pupils wrote their wishes to Latvia on paper, folded them up, and symbolically sent them into the air attached to more than five hundred balloons.
The aim of the project is to promote patriotism and pride about Latvia and to understand that even if Latvia may seem small in terms of territory or population, in other areas Latvia a country with a great power.
 
Changing time

The hassle of changing from Summer time to Winter time could be no more, if a petition launched on manabalss.lv gains a few thousand more signatures. More than five and a half thousand people have already signed the petition, and if a total of ten thousand people sign it, the petition gets submitted to Latvia’s parliament, the Saeima.
The initiative to collect these signatures was started on August 2013 and still has almost half way to go, however; and even then, there is no guarantee that Latvian parliamentarians will opt to change time. The idea of this petition is simple: to change the Latvian time zone from UTC +2 (GMT +2) to UTC +3 (GMT +3), which would negate the need of modifying clocks twice a year. Changing the time zone is an exclusive option for every country, and it isn’t disallowed by European Union directives. So time will tell if this petition succeeds.

Riga’s wild boars

In recent months there have been several wild boar visits in Riga, with one of the latest being their visit to Freedom Monument. After spotting them at around 5.30 a.m., police, together with veterinarians, captured the animals and transported them to wooded area outside Riga.
Because of the regular wild boar visits to Riga, Riga city Council has decided to create a hunting coordination commission where to decide what to do with animals and their visits in town.
Questions have also been asked on how to react if someone meets wild boar on a street. The answer is to turn the opposite direction and walk away and the animal will probably do the same.