One funny thing that I heard several times was that each person spoke in his own language.
So they could carry on a discussion like this for a while, in several cases, on the tram or once in a shop.

But then if a Russian-speaking person from Russia, Ukraine etc happened to visit they would have a hard time convincing the Latvian speaker that they genuinely could not understand Latvian and had never studied it. Obviously a bit awkward. Several Russian speakers mentioned that this happened totheir relatives from Russia were visiting.

My personal view is that both sides should make an effort to accommodate the other and try to leave the past behind. As a bilingual and Russian speaking EU country they have great opportunity to be a gateway between East and West.

In Liepaja (see below) the language groups got on really well and it was completely impossible to guess who was Latvian and who was Russian. In Riga, the two groups were a bit more segregated from each other - that was my impression. In Daugavpils, everyone was Russian speaking.



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