My Latvian blogger friend, Ilze, who I mentioned yesterday, said in answer to a comment I made on her blog that she was surprised by how much she had learned in a year of blogging. Not only can I say the same, though with me it’s just over five years, it is for me one of the delights of blogging.
Before I ‘met’ Ilze I knew almost nothing about Latvia, although I did once visit Riga briefly when the country was part of the Soviet Union. I can’t even remember why I went though it was on a trip which also included Helsinki and St Petersburg (then Leningrad). All I remember of the Latvian capital is the architecture.
Daily life
Not that Ilze writes specifically about her country; her blog title, a day in the life of a Latvian mum (though she uses the American version ‘mom’), sums it up perfectly. One day you’ll get a recipe, another her craving for a piece of porcelain, another preparations for a birthday party, another a blow by blow account of her constructing her kitchen, etc, etc. Overlaying all this is obvious love of her immediate family, husband and three delightful daughters (I’m a sucker for little girls!), and her extended family. It just gives me a warm feeling to read it each day.
I’m not looking for information
The point I’m making is that I don’t read/follow blogs for information, in fact if they’re too specifically informative I rapidly tire of them. Yet on the way I seem to learn a lot.
I could have picked quite a few of the bloggers I follow, writing on apparently different subjects, to make this point but it was Ilze who prompted it by her comment about learning. A small number I now sometimes correspond with on email, or Facebook messenger. Some have set the number of comments in a thread low (eg 3) so I have to resort to email if I have an address.
Females dominate
Also interesting, to me, is that among those I follow the females outnumber the males maybe by as much 10:1. The males that there are have something in common with the women: few of them are writers as such; they just write from the heart and it shows.
As most of my reading of blogs takes place early morning, UK time, it invariably makes my day.
Grumpytyke 
October 4, 2017 at 1:16 pm
Reblogged this on a day in the life of a latvian mom and commented:
It warms my heart! Thank you, grumpytyke!
October 4, 2017 at 2:54 pm
Wow! Thank you! x
October 4, 2017 at 3:12 pm
I hope your WOW is atleast 1/10 of my WOW when I read your blog post 😀
October 4, 2017 at 1:14 pm
Thank you, grumpytyke. I’m blushed! And don’t know what to say.The nicest thing about blogging is that there are readers. Thank you for reading! I had Latvian blog and that has only one reader and reached 5 comments in 1 year. That was sad.. but yet! Good for me – now I’m trying my best to write in English or American English – I even don’t know 🙂
October 4, 2017 at 3:12 pm
Your English is great. Much better than my Latvian 😂. Do you speak English at all with the girls, and Janis? In my experience the earlier you introduce a ‘foreign’ language to children, even a little, the easier it is for them to learn. Although I so enjoyed teaching English to all ages in Romania, my favourite was early primary school or preschool. When I first began to teach in Romania almost all the teachers of English, spoke/taught American English. In fact the first request I had to teach English, in a ‘top’ high school (from the county inspector of English who said they had never had a native speaker. When I arrived at school I found there were more than one American teachers 😉!
October 4, 2017 at 3:17 pm
🙂 Funny story! We don’t speak, but girls watching all kids movies in English. I like it better than translated, there’s always something lost in translation! I read in your blog, that you were a teacher in Romania. For 11 years(?)!
October 4, 2017 at 4:06 pm
Not for the whole of the 11 years but after the first six months, working with children with disabilities and their parents which is what I went to Romania to do, from 1994 till 1999 in schools then sometimes just things like neighbours’ children as I was managing other projects like the street paper (more or less the only one for which I was paid – the $10,000 over two years bought our flat there. It would cost €50-60,000 now!).
Somewhere on my blog you’ll find how I was persuaded to teach, on a train. Amusing.
Yes, many of the children there spoke some English, from watching Cartoon Network.