Day 16: That's a wrap!

After eating a mini banana and spraying almost half of the mosquito repellent on me (I have to be safe!), I was off to hit the town. And by hit the town I mean buy postcards, visit museums and look at art exhibitions.

I posted my postcards to England, went to the museum to get a stamp towards getting my Valmiera Culture Card - read Day 14 if confused - and then decided to visit the Valmiera Culture Centre. There was a photo exhibition in the main hall called Overseas Biodiversity (trans. into English) in collaboration with French Institute, which I thought was pretty apt seeing as I am probably going to France in September. The photos were wonderful, capturing nature from sea creatures to rainforest animals in their prime.

This is one example:

By Pierre Labout

 And another:

By Loïc Charpy

That starfish and crab really look familiar... Is anyone starting to notice a Spongebob Squarepants theme here?

So after I got my stamp from the Culture Centre (only 3 more to go now), I started to head back to the supermarket when I heard the roar of a car behind me. Someone decided to drift 360 degrees around the roundabout. They might have thought they looked cool, but they didn't... at all. I then met my filming partner to buy ingredients needed to cook chicken wraps - wraps, chicken, lettuce, red and orange peppers, salsa sauce, sweetcorn and a few other things. It was the first time I had cooked in our dorm's kitchen. Quick, simple, easy, very yummy and much nicer than the usual student staple food of pasta.

I took a bite and then remembered to take a photo.

Our friend from Estonia, a participant of the game we were filming last week, has come to Valmiera for 2 weeks. We invited him to join us and he brought scrumptious chocolate ice cream for dessert. We ate it too fast for me to take a decent photo of it!

After two days of cutting and editing our film, we now have a bit of a break until our next film planning starts, so we visited the brewery again after we ate. It wasn't just a crazy spur of the moment idea to get Latvian beer. There were events happening there in preparation for next weekend's big celebration of St John's Day, the midsummer festival, or Jani, and we turned up just in time for several concerts of traditional singing, drumming, beer ice cream and fire making.

And it was still burning at 2am.

Despite drowning myself in repellent, I've got even more mosquito bites but it was worth it!