Velēna church
The Velēna Lutheran Church is at the crossing of the Smiltene-Gulbene-Lizums roads. I would call this as one of the most beautiful churches in Latvia.
It's said the first built church here was a wooden church with a turf roof. This is where the place got its name from – Velēna (Torf). Visitors can still enjoy one of the most beautiful organs in Latvia, built in 1898 in W. Sauer Company, they are considered as one of the best preserved organs in Latvia.
My mother, a Latvian Evangelical Lutheran Church pastor Sarmite Fišere served here back in the 1980-ties and again briefly at the end of 1990-ties.
One Day in Micini
Micini has a very special place in my heart - I spent a brief time, about two years here, back in the 90-ties, living with my grandmother. Back in the days - there was some life here - a farm with more than 100 cows, few families, and even a public bus twice a week connecting to Valka.
My relatives from gradmother's side have been living here for a few centuries (at least) - and the scenery was much different here before WW2, when here lived my great grandfather with my great grandmother and their family.
A lot has changed ever since, mostly all the older generations have passed away, and what is left - is just ruins and beautiful scenery. In today's Piece of Life series - one day…
Cafe Papes Vēji
Cafe Papes Vēji is a summer cafe located next to the Pape channel in Western Latvia near the Pape Lighthouse.
This place serves traditional Latvian cuisine, and cold beer and some can buy smoked fish (apparently in the season)
I have been fond of this area for a few years already and first discovered this cafe about a year ago, now in Summer 2022 we made a stop here, had a hearty dinner, and bought some smoked fish. Awesome
Seems there is also a museum on site available. During our visit here, many tourists from Lithuania, Germany and of course Latvia were present.
Sup boards are gaining the momentum in Latvia and are present almost everywhere.
Seems this is the one and only…
Listing Vilgāle apartment for sale
After some thinking, I decided to list for sale our Vilgāle apartment.
I bought this apartment about two years ago in an online auction, paying about EUR 4,000. During the past two years, we have done some serious renovation with a total investment being closer to EUR 18,000.
Today I bought my first flat on an online auction site
I decided to list it for EUR 25,000 on local ss.lv website, here is the advert:
The owner is selling a renovated apartment in Vilgale - double glazed windows, Estrich warm floor tile/laminate covering. Installed pellet central heating, unfinished bathroom / sauna construction. Water on meters. Registered in the land register.
Low payments -…
Summer Cafe Kazbārs in Kazdanga
Summer café-bar “Kazbārs” is located next to the watermill in the heart of the scenic park of Kazdanga.
This place serves freshly ground coffee, Italian dessert affogato, refreshing soft ice cream (including vegan options), cold live beer, and vegan soups.
Place is run by energetic couple from Riga, if you will be happy enough you could catch up with host Ernests and enjoy the conversation about the running restaurant, flying planes, local area and more
Top 3 Things to do in Kazdanga, Latvia
Kazbārs offers to rent sup boards (around EUR 5/h in 2022), as the lake is located across the street, this seems quite attractive.
Sup boards are getting the momentum in Latvia. Smart…
How to Sell a Car in Riga / Latvia
We bought a used Mercedes Benz ML 400 Diesel car in Riga a few months ago. We hoped the car would suit us for the years to come, but in the end, the vehicle was faulty even before we bought it. So the car died (or almost died) - with the problem being - a timing belt, which needed to be replaced.
I asked to a few handymen how much it could cost, and understood that I'm not willing to take the extra burden on this already old car, so we decided to list it on the local ss.com website. After talking with several handymen I decided to list it for EUR 1,800 just to test the waters.
In my advert, I was honest and said, that the car needs its timing belt to be replaced while all the rest seems…
Cafe Pāvilostas Enkurs
Cafe Pāvilostas Enkurs is located on Dzinstaru street 69 in Latvian Summer Capital Pavilosta.
they serve fish and chips, pizza, and traditional Latvian cold soup here.
One of the best fish and chips I've tried in Latvia
Seems like a popular place in Pāvilosta, many tourists
Give it a try once in Pavilosta
Friends Hub village Guest house review in Vazisubani
Friends Hub village guesthouse is located in Vazisubani, near Gurjaani in the region of Kakheti, Georgia, some 2-hour drive from Tbilisi.
Oskars, the host, invited me to visit his new place at the start of May 2022. After a few stops at McDonald's, Sighanghi, and Bodbe monastery we finally reached Vazisubani, where we were greeted with traditional Georgian supra and a lot of chacha.
Here I made a short video from our trip: Sighnaghi & Vazisubani trip
Friends Hub village features a restaurant, bar, garden, and BBQ facilities in Gurjaani. Featuring family rooms, this property also provides guests with a terrace. The accommodation offers evening entertainment…
How To Tile Kitchen / hallway floor
The time had finally come and I was ready to tile the kitchen and hallway floors at our Vilgale apartment.
A year ago I would say - no way I'm going to do it myself, but here you go, I did it all on my own, with some research on Youtube and a lot of encouragement from friends who have done it.
As it is in our Tbilisi apartment - I decided to go with large 60cmx60cm tiles, which I bought at the local DEPO store (in Liepaja) In total I purchased tiles to cover 21m2, which turned out too much, but I did put my margin of error as I didn't know how well it will go. Surprisingly it went very well, and I did break just one tile, which I still managed to reuse. Awesome. My biggest concern…
New Investment Project - Summer House with Garden in Latvia
Welcome to another interesting project in the home remodeling series. - summer house with a garden in SouthWest Latvia. It turns out this is already the third, ongoing home remodeling project featured on the blog. Exciting.
This is the project my fiancee actually bought, without first seeing it - the price seemed very good, not to take this property. I was a bit skeptical at the start, as we still have another ongoing renovation project with the apartment in Vilgale, but I found this offer a value deal.
We learned about this project about a month ago, as we still were in Georgia, we decided to buy a cat in the sack and transferred a 10% deposit to the seller. At the end of June, we…
Pearl of Tbilisi - Gardenia Shevardnadze Flower Garden
Gardenia Shevardnadze is a lovely flower garden in Tbilisi, where you can buy seedlings for your yard, balcony, terrace, home, or office.
The place is popular among photographers, tourists, gardeners, and enjoyers of life.
After visiting this place so many times, while living in Georgia, I wouldn't hesitate to call this place a Pearl of Tbilisi and include it among the top 10 must-visit places in the Georgian capital.
It was an early Saturday morning, at the start of June 2022, we decided to visit Gardenia just to catch some inspiration and I decided to use my good, old DSLR camera, which I wasn't using since our Sri-Lanka trip (where the camera stopped working because of…
Hiking Likani, Sunday school Rustavi
Another awesome weekend in Georgia 🇬🇪- with some elements of offroad riding, hiking, camping, horseback riding near Likani station, and a few skulls at Green monastery Saturday.
Back to Rustavi scout center for a lovely Sunday with fellow Latvians.
Our last weekend trip with VW Touareg.
Eagle canyon in Georgia
The bear went over the mountain .. or last weekend we went hiking at the Eagle Canyon near Dedoplistskaro, Shopping at the Dezerteer market in Tbilisi, and exercising at Lisi Lake... another fabulous weekend has been put on our tapes and post-processed.
Enjoy the video and thumbs up!
Sighnaghi & Vazisubani trip
At the start of May, Oskars invited us to visit his new hut in Kakheti.
After a few stops at McDonald's, Sighanghi, and Bodbe monastery we finally reached Vazisubani, where we were greeted with traditional Georgian supra and a lot of chacha.
Now, there is one more cool place where they speak Latvian to visit in Georgia. Enjoy the video and Thumbs up!
Filmed with DJI Mavic Air 2 and Samsung Galaxy phone, Georgia May 13-14, 2022
Notes from Tbilisi: Abandoned Military sites in Latvia / Estonia; Sold VW Touareg car; #2 Bitcoin newsletter
Good afternoon from sunny and hot Tbilisi. The weather was scorching today, reaching +32 Celsius.
The morning started with an interesting message to the blog's contact form - an Estonian person was asking some questions about military sites in Latvia, we exchanged a few e-mails and talked both about Latvian and Estonian abandoned military sites.
Information about former Latvian radar base Skrunda-1
Hello, Reinis
I read your post about Skrunda-1 and also did some internet ''research''. And I've come to a couple of questions.
When did You visit this place? And was it closed? Because I read that it is now closed for tourists and the Latvian army has closed the area. Could You please tell…
International Scout Centre Rustavi
The industrial town of Rustavi, approximately 25 km southeast of the Georgian capital Tbilisi, offers a modern international scouting center.
The youth center offers space for a variety of indoor and outdoor activities. The facility is available for children and young people from Rustavi and offers comfortable and reasonably priced accommodation, seminar, and conference facilities for regional and international youth groups, schools, universities, and non-governmental organizations, as well as tourists and individual travelers.
I first visited this place at the end of May 2022, during an event organized by Latvian Sunday School in Tbilisi.
Should I say I was really impressed after seeing…
How to Fix "Unable to install bootstrap, bootstrap.settings already exists in active configuration"
As this was already the second time i faced the "Unable to install bootstrap, bootstrap.settings already exists in active configuration." problem i decided to share a quick and simple solution.
Background: I have faced this error when performing the Drupal 7 upgrade to the Drupal 9 version and trying to enable the bootstrap theme.
solution: in PHPMyAdmin open the database your Drupal site is running, in the Search tab enter "bootstrap"
Make sure you select all under tables and click the go button
You will get a result with rows showwin where bootstrap setting might belocated, in our case, table config
Simply click the delete on config.
that's it - now you should be…
Notes from Tbilisi: Caru.ge services our Car, new expats join language courses, PCR test
The morning started with the kiddo having a little fever (temperature 37 C). Decided to leave her at home and observe, as this Friday we have our first school concert. It would be very sad to miss. Sent a message to Ms. Nino.
Yesterday - the car just stopped working, or won't crank. Already for the third time, this year ordered caru.ge to service the car. As the car was parked in Vake I went to the office in the morning to meet the service guy in the afternoon. Traded a bit of bitcoin futures. Packed out robot cleaner for cleaning our apt.
Met with the caru.ge guy, he said, the problem is with the starter, had to order evacuator. I left the spot and come home.
We received a letter…
How To Upgrade Drupal 7 to 9 (With Multilingual Support)
In this article, I will keep notes on how I upgraded the multilingual Drupal 7 site to a multilingual Drupal 9 site.
Turns out I had originally built this website on Drupal 7 more than 10 years ago and it already felt that the exciting website's look and feel is a bit outdated and we wanted to get a fresh look.
I thought it wouldn't do any harm upgrading the database too. As I have already done a few successful upgrades in the past and as the website was not very complicated I didn't spend a lot of time on this.
As I'm using Linode VPS I decide to go the migrate path, and started with creating a new subdomain on the webserver giving it a prefix d9
As I already had configured the server…
Dashbashi Canyon & Waterfall with 240 meter long Glass Bridge
If there is a reason to visit Dashbasi canyons near the Tsalka in Georgia - the canyons themselves, cascading waterfall and the glass bridge hanging over the gorge should raise some interest.
Dashbashi Canyon Natural Monument is part of Khrami (known as Ktsia at it source) gorge near Dashbashi village, 3 km from the town of Tsalka
I first heard about this place a couple of years ago from an ex-pat friend, back then the place was pretty much not developed and unknown to the broader masses.
We first visited Dashabshi Canyon in 2020, back then it was still a pretty much-underdeveloped area, but some touristic routes were built. Back then we didn't climb down to the cascading waterfalls, but…