Hockey

No surprisingly, hockey is a big sport here. I went to a Riga Dinamo game earlier in the year, but more recently (or late April) I went to game featuring Latvia's national team. While the NHL playoffs are a big deal in the US, here it was all about the IHF World Championships.

National teams from several countries, even the US, compete to be the world champions! Here in Riga they set up a tent dedicated to showing the action- at least the Latvian games. Of course, the US and Latvia usually played their games at the same time, so we had to go to the sports bar to see both games.

Latvia didn't do so well, but the US won several of their games. The US made into the finals and played Russia for the championship game but lost. So in the end, Canada took first, followed by Russia, US, and the Czech Rep.

The games were fun to watch, but watching hockey while listening to commentary in Latvian is certainly a new experience! There was also one point when US played Russia and Latvia played Sweden that Sweden and the US scored At the Same Time. Naturally, I cheered! Only to glance over and see what happened while also hearing the rest of the bar moan and groan. I caught a few dirty looks until they realized what screen I had been looking at!