I first heard the term “LL” sometime in the early 1990s, not long after Latvia regained its independence. Back then the label simply indicated a fact of provenance and was yet to become a slur—a ghost yet to become spook. Latvijas latvietis: a Latvian from Latvia. A Latvian Latvian. A Latvian squared.

The LLs initially appeared as guest counselors at our summer camp in the Catskills of upstate New York, wearing thin gray socks with grandpa sandals, crudely cut-off jeans and flimsy short-sleeved button-down shirts—a full decade before the look became trendy on the hipster streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They acted pretty strangely, too. I recall one burly buzz-cut LL, with a penchant for sleeveless undershirts and shiny track pants, telling us why he never brushed his teeth. He hadn’t begun brushing them as a child, he explained, and since it was the act of scraping layers of plaque off your teeth that made all the difference, there was no way of making up for lost time. (I ran into this fuzzy logician years later at a bar in Rīga. He was working for the Ministry of Economics. Read into this as much as you like.)

These LLs seemed like an odd bunch to us, no doubt, and we took great pleasure in laughing about their foreign ways. But I know they got an equally big kick out of us campers. They enjoyed our funny and seemingly incongruous attempts to speak Latvian: es iešu apsēdēties and es tev redzēšu vēlāk and beidz pirdēt! They snickered at our sugary adolescent diets, founded on bags of chewy Starburst, packets of crackling Fizz Wiz and tins of orange powdered Tang. And since most of them hailed from the Latvian countryside, they were surely amused by our suburban American attempts to “get back to nature”: sitting around a campfire just yards from our cabins, obsessively spraying our sweatshirts with Off! and toasting jumbo marshmallows while bemoaning the horrible lack of chocolate and graham crackers. There was, as yet, no antagonism, merely a mutual feeling of good humor at the other’s expense—a force that has held together entire communities for millennia (see Strasbourg, France; Brussels, Belgium; Queens, New York) .

But then something changed. Perhaps it was because Latvians from Latvia began arriving in greater number, and their presence became too powerful to be appropriated by sheer mirth or bemused geniality. Or maybe it was because the Latvian-American community had not taken stock of how far it had come, or where it was going, and was unable to deal with the onslaught of people suddenly arriving from the lost homeland, which had not just been found, but was now totally in your face, looking for a job, a place to live and correcting your grammar. 

The change was that Latvians from Latvia became something to be feared. And, as everybody knows, the best way to deal with your fears is to demonize them. “LLs.” “Those goddamn LLs.” “LLs showed up at the camp and started drinking and getting in everyone’s face.” “LLs came up to Gaŗezers, punched some kid in the nose and started a brawl.” “LLs crashed the party and picked a fight with the Mexican wedding next door.” These things all happened, of course, and many LLs seemed intent on nothing else but provoking scorn from the Latvian-American community. However, the sheer contempt with which the new arrivals were treated seemed strangely reminiscent of something else: the antagonism reserved for the Communists back in the 1980s. It was almost like an aversion to the LLs had replaced the hatred for the Russians.

In fact, this wasn’t far from the truth. What seemed to be scorned most about the new arrivals was precisely their supposed lack of Latvianness and their total embrace of Russianness, or Sovietness. They cursed in Russian; they drank Russian vodka; they told jokes with Russian punch lines; they sang Russian songs when they got drunk; many of them looked like caricatures of Russian gangsters from the movies. Some even had Russian-sounding names, like Vitālijs and Igors and Oļegs. They weren’t like us—“real” Latvians. We had preserved the true Latvianness, whisked it away from the homeland during the war like the Holy Grail. These people were but fading shadows of a lost legacy. What had developed was the classic post-immigrant scenario, the “us vs. them” that signals a new phase in the life of every diaspora community, one that begins with the independence of the homeland and the inevitable meeting with the first wave of new emigrants.

Another reason for the ambivalent reception of Latvians from Latvia—one that lies deeper and, perhaps, closer to the truth—was that they didn’t conform to our idea of what Latvians should have been like. After fifty years of reading pastoral novels like Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš‘s Baltā grāmata and Edvarts Virza’s Straumēni, we half expected the Latvians to arrive straight from the idyllic pastures where they herded glossy brown cows with a switch of birch, clad in leather moccasins, billowing white cloaks and woven ethnographic belts whose intricate designs concealed the secrets of the universe. We wanted them to come and reaffirm our faith in the ancient wisdom of the four-line dainas, to remind us that the great throbbing power of Latvian nature—which streamed up through the oak trees, electrified the mist in the primeval forests, and made the mossy boulders vibrate with primordial energy—was still very much alive. Instead they made a beeline for Chinatown and stocked up on cheap electronics, bootleg cassettes and fake perfume. It just wasn’t what we had imagined.

Back then, I don’t remember spending much time engaged in LL-bashing. Perhaps I was too busy enjoying other aspects of being a Latvian-American: waking up in hotel bathtubs at congresses and song festivals; trying to figure out how to get a picnic table to float in a lake; and musing, with my friends, about what Latvian folksong we’d teach to Neil Young if we ever met him. The Latvian-American experience was rich and diverse enough to accommodate a wide range of activities, of which cultivating a loathing for LLs was merely one small element—a telling one, but nonetheless small.

Years later, when I moved to Rīga after college, I had forgotten all about the notion of the LL. But then something somebody said about avoiding soap at all costs, because it clogs the pores and isn’t as good for your skin as a bath of chamomile tea, recalled to me my earlier bemusement at the quaintly bizarre ways of Latvians from Latvia, so different from my own American habits.

“Oh, you LLs, with your herbal tea remedies and berry infusions and bandages made of weeds!” I’d say, chuckling. “What century do you think this is?”

We’d all laugh, my friends would call me a brand-worshipping, trend-obsessed AL, and the joke stuck. The term had been stripped of all contempt and once again stood for what it was: a initialism that merely denoted a difference between Latvians from Latvians and Amerikas latvieši, American Latvians. A friendly rivalry between two leagues: the LLs and the ALs. The great international Latvian all-star game.

At home, as part of our regular domestic banter, my Latvia-born wife and I fleshed out the image of the LL, which no longer simply stood for someone from Latvia but now indicated a special breed or species of local, as in “today I saw a bunch of big-time LLs down in Vecrīga.” LLs were the men in socks and sandals, black leather vests and mustaches. LLs were the guys who worn white linen pants, tight-fitting pastel t-shirts, flashy jewelry and pointy leather shoes, which they kicked out from side to side when they sauntered down the street, clutching the obligatory man-purse. LLs were the callers who spent hours on public radio chattering about how to clean your house with nothing but lemons, baking soda and vinegar; the amount of strawberries to eat every summer to amass enough iron for winter (four kilograms); and how rubbing cucumbers on your face was great for moisturizing your skin. LLs were the parents who packed their children into scarves and hats even in June, for fear of subjecting them to a killer breeze. It was all in good fun, and was often countered by my wife with jokes about the families of stereotypical ALs spotted coming out of downtown hotels (girls in flip-flops, pajama pants and bulky sweatshirts; boys in full-out college sports gear; fathers in blue blazers and khakis; mothers in amber jewelry).

But as the years went by, and my freelance work in Rīga seemed to falter both financially and professionally, my joking changed its tune. I wasn’t making much money, and felt that the people I did work for weren’t giving me the degree of respect I thought I deserved. Like most people in their late twenties, I began to question whether my career, or lack thereof, was going in the right direction. Unable to buck up the courage to pursue options that did seem like possible alternatives, I got frustrated. This frustration came to rest on the Latvians from Latvia whom I worked for, via e-mail, from my desk at home.

“These damn LLs,” I’d complain to my wife. “Why can’t they ever say ‘thank you’ or ‘good job’ when you work your ass off for them? Could they possibly be a little less cold and unappreciative, a little less LL?”

I had soon developed my own personal image of the LL, which I would loudly declaim to anyone unlucky enough to listen. Tellingly, the bulk of this conception centered on people who wouldn’t answer my e-mails, give me praise or pay me on time. I falsely believed that things like this never happened back in the States—land of the free compliments and home of the brave big check—and that only Latvia was hopelessly mired in an utter lack of tact and a total subservience to cronyism. This didn’t conform to what I imagined was true professionalism, which, I believed, was the defining feature of the adult world.

I now realize that becoming an adult is nothing like I imagined it to be, and professionalism is just an idyllic fantasy. You work hard, for inadequate pay, and get little respect from your peers―—that is what it means to be a grownup, no matter where you live. Perhaps these things are merely magnified in Latvia, where the layers of polish have been wiped off the surface of life and things are revealed for what they are. Luckily, I soon discovered the ancient panacea for the malaise of adulthood: having children. Now I don’t have time to harp on injuries and injustices, imagined or otherwise, nor do I care much anymore. The unanswered e-mails, the late payments, the terse responses—all of these simply fade into the din of Lightning McQueen roaring on the laptop in the other room.

On recent trips back to the States I haven’t hear much about the LLs. When I prompt my friends, the only information I get is that some work in the moving business upstate, and others are teachers at the local Latvian schools and daycare centers, which their own kids attend alongside children of parents born in the U.S. Many of them have lived in the U.S. for so long that they know less about life in Rīga than those Latvian-Americans who regularly travel back and forth. Others have married Americans and are now living quietly in the suburbs near where I grew up. In fact, the last time I drove through my old hometown, my wife heard the guy behind the counter at the local pizzeria speaking Russian. He was originally from Moscow. They struck up a conversation about the ways of the East and the ways of the West. He used the distinctions “we” and “you,” meaning “you Latvians”—my wife and I—and “we Americans”: the guys from Moscow who now owned the shop. I spent my childhood around the corner, scribbling “Ruck Fussia” in the margins of notebooks. Things are all mixed up now. Our old fantasies are fading. I guess we’re all growing up.

One morning in early April I found myself on a shuttle bus bound for Brussels, that brave new center of 21st century Europe. Behind me sat a group of proud Baltic parents who had just flown in to visit their sons and daughters employed as translators and bureaucrats deep in the halls of the European Union.

As we pulled away from the airport, and the Belgian landscape streamed by outside the window, I noticed the changes in foliage—much different from scenes I had left behind that morning in perennially autumnal Rīga.

“Look,” I said to my wife, “the bird cherries are in bloom! Back home they won’t be flowering until at least May!”

My wife tossed back her head and laughed.

“You’re turning into a real Latvian!”

I cringed and sank into my seat, waiting out the rest of the trip in gloomy, mock-adolescent silence.

This was becoming something of an unpleasant trend. The previous fall, I had sat in a Manhattan bar with a friend who, emboldened by a couple glasses of red wine, hollered over the din of organ music: “Your voice, it has this strange accent. You sound almost like… like a Latvian!”

I winced, and struggled to swallow the giant lump that had formed in my throat. But later, when I got back to Rīga, I began to analyze my speech patterns (resulting in an uncanny sense of disembodiment) and did notice something amiss. When I spoke English, acquired and mastered in the gilded heartland of suburban American, my sentences would come out in a jumbled mess of syntax.

“I’m now this interesting book reading,” I would hear myself saying. “Author he grew up in Russia, but living he’s now in New York.” I was beginning to sound like those bad translations of Latvian texts that I often spent my days editing.

“That politician he’s a cretin, but that’s just normal, simply normal,” I would say when trying to explain local politics to friends from abroad. “It’s not anything concrete, actually, but it promotes his… um… his recognizability. Normal. At the same time, these processes are driving us into the swamp. And you definitely won’t find any berries there, my friend. Definitely not. Like running naked through the stinging nettles. No thank you, not in any case, no.”

I had never planned on this happening. But it was the logical outcome of a course set in motion seven years ago, when I moved to Rīga after college. Back then, I spent hours listening to Latvian public radio, trying to get the accent, inflections, emphases and intonations just right. (Misplaced intonations are always a dead giveaway: English-speakers end their questions with rising intonation; a Latvian question goes up a hill and ambles down the other side, like a lost little shepherd in a folksong.) I wanted to avoid becoming one of those clichéd Latvian-Americans who walk around Rīga in polo shirts, chinos, loafers and clunky jewelry, exuding a glaring sense of entitlement and sprinkling their speech with “OK” and “so” and “well” as if they were flashing diamond-encrusted amber rings. I knew all too well that this technique—an attitude masquerading as mere diction—earned you either fawning acolytes ready to follow your every command, or disdainful critics who snickered behind your back. I wanted to avoid both groups, and merely continue where I left off back home: a broke college graduate looking for a job, a Latvian-American more American than Latvian, content to enjoy the best of both worlds.

But when I moved to Rīga, I didn’t realize that a dual identity was difficult to hold on to when you were being canoodled on all sides by one of the pair. Even Hugh Heffner has to choose which of the twins to take to bed, because his weak heart, like my weak will, simply can’t deal with the efforts of pleasing a double. In public, I masqueraded with my two prized possessions—on the left, in the sequined blue dress, Miss America!, and right beside her, in the elegant red gown, Miss Latvia!—but at home I secretly mourned the loss of my American sensibilities and watched with astonishment as Latvian inclinations came to dominate the ménage.

This transition has snuck upon me with cunning stealth, barely discernible at first but then so readily apparent it is almost shocking. The first thing to vanish was my trusty American palate. Like most people of my generation, the cornerstones of my diet had always been frozen pizza, canned spaghetti sauce, boxed macaroni and cheese, and Ramen noodles. When I arrived in Latvia, I was surprised to see that frozen and canned foods were more expensive than fresh produce—contrary to the situation in U.S. supermarkets. People in Latvia ate things like pumpkins, beets, cabbage and summer squash. Soon I, too, grew accustomed to these earthy orbs, served, of course, with a generous dollop of sour cream. Now, whenever I visit the States and gleefully sit down to heaping plates of my old favorites—pizza, burritos and burgers—my stomach churns and I feel queasy for days. Luckily, I’ve lived in Latvia long enough to remember to pack a little bag of coal tablets and dried chamomile buds to ease my troubled vegetable-craving belly.

Also quick to disappear was my American notion of money—how much to attain and what to do with it. As friends from the States moved up in their respective tax brackets, my own wages stagnated at the level of a graduate school fellowship. This is, in fact, the unglamorous side of the current economic recession in Latvia. Lately, foreign journalists have made the country seem like a land of fallen nouveau riche businessmen and greedy credit seekers, but the truth is, wages here have always been abysmally low, at least when compared with the United States. Even in 2007, the height of the so-called “years of plenty,” the average monthly income for workers in Latvia was a mere 398 lats, according to the Latvian entral Statistical Bureau, or about USD 9,000 a year. (The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the average earnings for full-time, year-round American workers in 2007 was USD 40,000.) What is more, many of the infamous euro loans granted by Swedish banks during those years—which are now being blamed for helping to bring down the Latvian economy—were for such commonplace items as lawnmowers, Opel Astras and tiny apartments in crumbling Soviet-era buildings, not Rolex watches, luxury cars and sprawling villas, as the feature news stories would have us believe.

In the United States, however, the prospect of ample pay begets unlimited possibilities for material procurement, and thus high salaries are matched by a never-ending stream of buyable stuff. But here in Latvia, there are no takeout sushi places, cavernous Swedish furniture warehouses or friendly salesmen urging you to upgrade; even in the center of Rīga, it’s difficult to find a restaurant kitchen open after 9 p.m. This makes it much easier to live off an American salary circa 1950. Those old folksongs about spending the evening listening to the corncrakes rasping in the bearded grass suddenly make much more sense: that form of nightly entertainment comes completely free of charge.

When I was growing up, my community was filled with people who had emigrated as young children or teenagers and proudly declaimed their allegiance to Latvia— waving the red-white-and-red flag, belting out patriotic tunes and wearing traditional folk costumes. At the same time, they rooted for the local baseball teams and harbored a distinctly American love for Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Bounty paper towels and ice cold drinks on sweltering summer days. Many of these people, I’ve come to realize, didn’t really belong to either half of their identity. Those who emigrated as children were stuck forever with funny accents when they spoke English; but when they visited Rīga, they were immediately branded as foreigners on account of their distinctly American manner, speech and habits. These curious Kissingers spoke neither Latvian nor English with complete ease, and thus immersed themselves in the diaspora community, that strange world of credit-union board meetings, basement Christmas pageants, parking-lot Midsummer’s Eve celebrations, wooden-spoon workshops and post-church cocktail hours—the only place where they felt completely at home.

Eighteen years after the first wave of re-immigration to Latvia, the mirror opposites of the original Latvian refugees have appeared on the other side of the Atlantic—kindred spirits at a one or two generational remove. Now, Latvian-American children born in America and reared on Nickelodeon, Capri Sun and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut like a boat, walk the streets of the ancestral motherland, their adherence to the ways of the West gradually slipping, their speech laced with crude, American-accented Latvian slang rooted in Russian expressions that would make their grandmother’s hair stand on end: besī ārā and davai and moška and piļīt and bļaģ…

As for me, I’ve compensated for my growing Latvianness by quietly nurturing a boundless and unshakable love for the lost homeland, in my case America. What Rīga was to my grandparents, New York City has become for me, “idolized all out of proportion, no, make that, romanticized all out of proportion,” as Woody Allen says in the opening scene of Manhattan. This fantasy of an improbable Eden, far away and unreachable, balances the whole act and holds all the strings together. Without it I would be hopelessly adrift in Latvia: I’d start catching colds from drafts, drinking piping hot tea on balmy summer days, covering my television with a crocheted mat and burning the meadows of fallen grass in early spring. And so I dream, inexplicably, increasingly impossibly, of re-immigrating, of re-re-immigrating, returning again for the first time. Of closing the circle and beginning a new one.

Here in Rīga, there’s a notorious street called Čaka iela, which acts as a dividing line between the relatively posh Center with its Art Nouveau buildings, luxury automobiles and brand-name stores, and the more rundown outlying sections of town, filled mostly with stray cats, staggering drunks and dark slot-machine dens.

The street itself, which has certainly inherited more from the latter than from the former, was named after one of Latvia’s most beloved twentieth-century poets, Aleksandrs Čaks, who lived nearby and spent his days roaming the streets and frequenting the small taverns found there before the war.

Čaks, who died in 1950, is famous for crafting sublime little poems—in volumes like Apašs frakā (Apache in a Frock Coat) and Mana Rīga (My Rīga)—about the characters he encountered in the streets, courtyards and bars of his neighborhood, whose tragic beauty inspired his singular vision of the city, his muse.
 
During the Soviet period, the famous bars on Čaka iela, as elsewhere in Rīga, were shut down and the public consumption of alcohol was outlawed, at least for intermittent periods. The state considered bars and restaurants not so much dens of iniquity, to be eradicated in order to protect the morals of Communist society, but meeting places that could potentially foster and harbor anti-government ideas and bourgeois ideals. They were therefore replaced by kafejnīcas, a cross between a cafeteria and a café, which were intended to nourish the hungry laborer with meals that can still be found throughout Rīga today: sorrel soup, mayonnaise-covered pork chops, beet salad, potatoes and chanterelle gravy, buckwheat groats with sour cream, and, of course, those ubiquitous tall glasses of kefir and buttermilk and kvass. 
 
When the Soviet Union collapsed and Rīga was overrun with poverty and crime, Čaka iela underwent yet another transformation, becoming the city’s infamous red-light district. Much to the delight of men from Scandinavia and Germany, who came to Latvia to seek new business opportunities, prostitutes now sauntered up and down the street that the poet Čaks had once strolled, decades earlier, with his cane, three-piece suit and fedora hat atop his signature bald dome. Many of the prostitutes hung out in what was left of the old Soviet-era cafeterias, where they sat sipping bitter black tea and smoking acrid Prima cigarettes as they waited for clients to get up the nerve to come in.
 
As the nineties wore on and Latvians acclimated to the transition from a Communist state to a free-market economy, poverty and crime were gradually replaced by corruption and greed. The changes could be gauged on Čaka iela as well. The former red-light district moved farther away, to a more convenient location near a large park, and many of the old kafejnīcas were replaced by stores selling women’s lingerie. The majority of these establishments were merely money-laundering fronts for local mafioso, most of them former members of the Cheka, who had ingeniously conceived of a way both to clean cash and to occupy their girlfriends during the day. For this reason, many of the stores were presided over by immaculately made-up women, dressed from head to toe in Dolce & Gabbana outfits, who perched on stools in front of the register all day long, filing their nails, reading glossy magazines and chattering on their cell phones, ignoring the few stray customers who happened to wander in. 
 
After the turn of the century, a new era dawned in Latvia. In 2004, the country became a full-fledged member of the NATO defense alliance and the European Union; the year before, Rīga had hosted the Eurovision Song Contest, an event that seemed almost like a prerequisite for EU accession. Credit lines opened up, business blossomed, foreign companies moved in, tourism soared, and the city was treated like a lost gem that had been rediscovered by the world once again. 
 
Čaka iela, in its latest incarnation, became home to the sector that served as the middleman for this unprecedented growth, the oil for the machine: the translation industry. Signs advertising “speedy, high-quality, notarized translations” now appeared above the dusty sidewalks. Practically anyone with a college degree could get a job rendering texts from Latvian to English, or German or Swedish, at one of the tiny translation operations, which claimed “to solve all your translation problems,” located a few flights up from the street. As a result, everything adorned with the printed word suddenly appeared in multiple languages, making even the simple process of perusing a restaurant menu feel like the arduous task of studying a work of continental philosophy.
 
The great boom in translation had another role, much larger than the duty of accommodating foreign visitors or easing business transactions. Latvia is a small, relatively unknown country, and is therefore faced with the constant task of explaining itself, or justifying itself, to the outside world. There is this perpetual need to say, “This is who we are.” The translation industry, from its Čaka iela headquarters, became the pioneer dispatched to spread the good word about Latvia to the uninitiated.
 
It was the translators’ job to render, into inevitably broken English, the dozens of amateur guidebooks to the city, which now lay in stacks in the new bars and restaurants, extolling the virtues of “most wonderful ancient old city Rīga” and “dynamic thousands year heritages of magnificent peoples of Latvia.” These translators had to keep up with the strings of hyperbole spun by fledgling Latvian copywriters to describe the many entertainment establishments—throbbing clubs and faux Irish pubs, cheap pancake houses and sushi bars staffed by Chinese immigrants from Russia—that suddenly appeared all over town. They also had to translate the endless series of state-issued books and brochures about the history and culture of Latvia, which rapturously detailed the country’s many invaluable contributions to the world, such as the little metal rivets on the pockets of Levi’s jeans—those tiny achievements that small nations often revel in.
 
For translators, there was a perpetual stream of work to be done. In the first couple of years after joining the EU, Rīga won the right to host a number of international events and competitions, like the World Ice Hockey Championships and the NATO Summit in 2006. These events—gold mines for the translation industry, which rendered the Web sites, schedules, newsletters, leaflets, meetings and seminars into foreign languages for visitors and the press—were treated like coming-out parties for the new EU member state of Latvia. Rīga organized dazzling concerts featuring Latvian pop singers from reality TV shows, performing alongside folklore ensembles and symphony orchestras; elaborate fireworks displays accompanied by mass choruses, who belted out popular songs from the 1980s Singing Revolution; and huge crafts fairs selling an unlimited array of woolen socks and mittens, linen blouses, amber necklaces and ethnographic jewelry—all stuff that the locals never wear but are constantly being peddled to visitors, through the efforts of earnest translators, as genuine Latvian souvenirs.
 
As the layers of translation piled up, so did the various identities for Rīga—identities that were themselves mere interpretations, or translations, of the city. One of the dominant identities was Rīga as a paradise for so-called “sex tourism”: a capital for debauchery. Indeed, men of all ages packed into cheap Ryanair flights in Liverpool and Dublin and came in search of cheap booze and eager strippers. The public groused about being forced to endure these roving bands of blokes, whose belches reverberated at night through the streets of the Old Town. During the summer months, when most of Rīga was away in the countryside and there was nothing better to report, evening news programs carried special broadcasts about the problem, complete with shaky cameras hidden inside duffel bags capturing drunken men trying to hire prostitutes from burly strip-club bouncers.  Several times, inebriated tourists were arrested for urinating on the Freedom Monument—a sin roughly equivalent to pissing on the Eternal Flame in Arlington Cemetery. Sketchy clubs, with names like Mary, Monroe and Rolexxx, popped up all over the Old Town, and taxis idled on the corners ready to take fares to nearby erotic massage parlors. Those who had been opposed to the EU shouted, I told you so, as if having balding British bachelor partiers in skirts and halter tops puking on the sidewalk at three in the afternoon were the price of joining the New Europe. 
 
The other popular interpretation of Rīga during these years was the city as real estate boom town. Rīga’s famous Art Nouveau buildings, many of which had been abandoned since the early nineties, were suddenly snatched up and renovated into condominiums and office space. The compulsive buying and selling of properties quickly jacked up property prices to astronomical heights, though the steady supply of easy credit assured that homebuyers could keep up with the inflating bubble. Shiny new luxury automobiles, mostly S-class Mercedeses (for him) and Porsche Cayennes (for her), parked on the sidewalks in front of the city’s new gourmet restaurants and deluxe health spas. Rīga was lauded as the hottest city for business this side of the Baltic Sea, and everybody wanted a piece of the action. 
 
But neither of these interpretations of Rīga was ready for the economic crisis that came crashing down upon the region in the fall of 2008. Bachelor-party tourism has dropped considerably this season, and many of the old strip clubs have been forced to get dressed and close up shop. Now, instead of news reports about how stag parties are staining the medieval face of the Old City, Rīga has tried to coax back its former enemies by ensuring them how safe the city has become. The city loudly promises to crack down on crooked cab companies and to defend tourists against getting grossly overcharged for a bottle of champagne and a lap dance. But regardless of these efforts, the teenagers in the Old City who once handed out fliers for free drinks at Pussy Lounge or Mademoiselle Cigar Club now stand about idly, smoking cigarettes and eating pelmeņi dumplings with sour cream and horseradish from Styrofoam take-out containers.
 
Likewise, the bursting of the real estate bubble has left citizens with colossal mortgages to repay on apartments whose value has been cut in half. Entire office complexes and condominium buildings, completed just before the economy went bust, now stand empty, the labels still affixed to their window frames, strips of industrial plastic wrap flapping in the breeze. Those who can bail out of their properties move back to the sprawling districts of Soviet-era block-style apartment buildings, the so-called mikrorajoni that surround central Rīga, which are now seeing an unprecedented influx of luxury cars parked on their labyrinths of broken asphalt. Many of the gourmet restaurants and health spas have also closed, adding to the lines of empty storefronts beneath the sculptures of gargoyles and maidens that adorn the Art Nouveau facades in the center of town.
 
One evening not too long ago, I took a midnight stroll across the city and somehow ended up on Čaka iela, near my first apartment in Rīga. Gone are the prostitutes of the early nineties, who stood on the corners in fishnets and bustiers. Gone are the lingerie shops opened before the turn of the century, leaving empty shells spewing electrical wire in their place. Gone are the Soviet-era kafejnīcas, with their flies buzzing around plates of jellied meats and bowls of creamy salads. And with the current economic crisis in full swing, gone are most of the EU-accession-era translation offices, too. There’s not much to work on anyway: the gross domestic product is down almost 20 percent, and the government announces new budget cuts on a near weekly basis, which means there won’t be any texts left to write soon, much less to translate. The apache of Čaka iela has shed his frock coat and awaits his newest incarnation. In the meantime, Rīga is, as the countless signs in empty windows declare, “For Rent,” and merely lays there, untranslated, in all its tragic beauty.