The true stars, however, were the Latvian-Swedish band Stokholmas Spēlmaņi and Minnesotan-Latvian band Lini. These musical performers inspired guests young and old to dance along expressing their joy and love for traditional Lativan music. 

The celebration continued through the week with a wide variety of song and dance events, including the Grand Folk Dance Performance (Tautas deju lieluzvedum) on July 2. Hundreds of dancers performed carefully choreographed traditional Latvian dances for the crowd at the Xcel Energy Center. The dancers, clad in traditional Latvian folk attire, were encouraged by the energized crowd clapping along to the music. Latvia’s natural landscapes and the Daugava River came alive with large photos and sounds of the river. 
​
We also had the good fortune of attending the Grand Choir Concert (Kopkoŗa koncerts) at the beautiful Ordway Music Theater in the heart of Saint Paul on July 3. More than one hundred singers dressed in traditional folk costumes (accompanied by highly talented orchestral musicians) performed a wide variety of beautiful and powerful traditional folk songs. The nearly sold-out audience stood and joined the show by singing along to the national anthems for the United States, Latvia and Ukraine.

The XXVII Latvian Nationwide Song and XVII Dance Celebration will be held from June 30-July 9, 2023, in Riga, Latvia, marking the 150th anniversary of this unique national cultural movement that has inspired millions. Baltics & Beyond Travel will be offering special tours in 2023 to coincide with this not-to-be missed cultural opportunity. Check back soon for more information and to reserve your spot. ​

Baltics and Beyond is honored to be featured in the October issue of the St. Anthony Park Bugle newspaper. See the full article below.

Business news
​Baltics and Beyond Travel expands its service
30 Sep 2021
  
By Scott Carlson
Baltics and Beyond, a St. Anthony Park-based travel agency, is deepening its niche travel business.

Company owner Cindy Bielke recently announced that beginning in 2022 St. Anthony Park resident Peter Kalnin will lead the agency in developing and conducting new European travel itineraries and tours in the Baltics.

“Our travelers will benefit from the deep knowledge and on-the-ground connections that Peter will bring to every Baltics and Beyond tour,” Bielke said. “As a former language teacher and student of European history, Peter also is well experienced in making foreign travel and new cultures come alive in engaging and interesting ways.”

“The Baltics have not been over-touristed or overdeveloped and are a relative bargain for budget conscious tourists or people simply eager to get off the beaten path and experience a part of Europe that is entirely new to most travelers,” Kalnin said. “I’m eager to shape tours that highlight facets of European history, crystallized in real living places, that can still be experienced in meaningful ways today.”

Bielke, a St. Anthony Park resident, founded Baltics and Beyond Travel in 2018. The company’s first tour included 22 travelers to Latvia in 2019. That group visited much of western Latvia, in addition to several days in the Latvian capital city of Riga. The group included members of the House of Hope Presbyterian Church of Saint Paul’s youth choir, who performed in multiple Latvian churches as part of the tour arrangements.

Kalnin, a fluent Latvian and German speaker with a master’s degree in European history from the University of Chicago, will lead Baltics and Beyond tours in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and other European countries next year. He recently relocated to Riga, Latvia, and is doing translation and other projects for the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia besides his work with Baltics and Beyond.

Navigating the global pandemic has been challenging for Baltics and Beyond. The travel agency postponed tours in 2020 and 2021.

“Like most travel companies, we paused and waited to see what was going to happen,” Bielke told the Bugle. “The safety of our travelers remains a top priority. We did not want to encourage travel when things were so uncertain.

“Now that many are vaccinated, Covid has become a manageable challenge,” Bielke continued. “But we still need to stay attuned to the risks and we will adjust tour dates if infection rates warrant that.

“We offer a guarantee that travel deposits will be returned in full if a Baltics and Beyond traveler needs to cancel due to a Covid infection. We also provide travel insurance, just in case.”

The three Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are located across the Baltic Sea from Sweden, bordering Russia, Belarus and Poland on the northern European lowlands.

According to a press statement, Kalnin was born in Minneapolis and raised in Oregon. His parents were immigrants from the Republic of Latvia and spoke their native language at home. For the past 20 years Kalnin has been a teacher, mostly of high school German in Minnesota, but also English as a Second Language and primary grade German at an international school near Berlin, Germany. He has been active in the Minnesota Latvian community, singing in Latvian choirs and ensembles, as well as teaching the language to children and adult learners.

Meanwhile, Bielke has had a longstanding interest in the Baltics. Her father was a native Latvian forced to leave the country as a war refugee during WWII. And about 10 years ago, she began regularly visiting the Baltics.

“I decided to start Baltics and Beyond Travel to share this delightful, mysterious part of the world with other Americans,” said Bielke, a former marketing and event management professional. “Our tours are designed to give people a sense of that history and context, while also providing unique, fun and relatively affordable travel experiences.”

For further information on Baltics and Beyond and upcoming tours, visit its website at www.balticsandbeyond.net. For early bird specials and other information, email Bielke at [email protected]. 

Scott Carlson is managing editor of the Bugle.
     

The Pape [PAH-peh] Nature Preserve in Latvia, just north of the Lithuanian border, runs inland from the sea to include sand dunes, marshes, and forests within its 22 square-mile area. As you can see in the video, if you follow the wooden plank path through the mossy ground just a few yards away from a bird-watching tower in the trees, you will pop up on a dazzling sandy beach running north and south as far as the eye can see. In the fall, about 50,000 birds rest in the reserve.

Farther inland you will find wild meadows and dense undergrowth. In addition to moose, deer, wolves, and lynx which are native to the area, European bison, feral cattle and horses have been introduced to the preserve, partly to graze for conservation purposes. But most visitors who are drawn to Pape by the natural fauna come for seasonal birdwatching. The area is an internationally significant breeding, migrating and wintering site for many species, some endangered, of birds and bats. 

Whenever I describe places along Latvia’s western coastline, I can’t emphasize enough how important the legacy of the Cold War was in shaping what you see in front of you. For centuries this coast was an east-west crossroads: for Viking traders and raiders, the native seagoing Curonian tribe (Latvian: Kurshi), late medieval crusaders, the towns of the Hanseatic League, and so on. Tsarist Russia treasured the Baltic region as its window to the West and as an educated, economically developed part of its empire.

​But after the Second World War, with all three Baltic countries annexed to the USSR and undergoing full Stalinization, the entire western coastline became a militarized zone, with beachside residential or commercial development forbidden. Some small fishing villages were emptied of their inhabitants, and travel to and from coastal cities was strictly controlled. At night, tractors would drag wide rakes down the beach to detect footprints in the sand, whether from people hoping to escape westward, or spies landing from the sea. While no one misses the days of Soviet drabness and suffocating surveillance, the result now is a beautiful open seaside terrain-- especially now that the area has been cleared of stray landmines and similar hazards.

Elsewhere in postwar Europe, as in the U.S., attractive beachfronts were steadily built up with houses, hotels, and condos, and restrictions were added later in order to salvage what was left for public access. By 1991, when the Baltic countries regained their independence, everyone understood the irreplaceable value of an unspoilt shoreline. And so in remote seaside locations like Ziemupe, Jūrkalne, and Kolka, the overnight accommodations constructed in the past 30 years are tucked behind the pine forests, away from the dunes and the beach bluffs. 

Seaside locales like Pape are favorites for vacationers from Estonia, Latvia, and especially Lithuania, which has a much shorter coastline relative to its population. As you stroll around the Pape Nature Preserve, the license plates outside the nearby beach houses, vacation apartments, and modestly priced hotels will often mostly be Lithuanian (LT). But even in peak vacation season, this corner of the Baltic coast is clean and uncrowded, with plenty of room to wander undisturbed.

Baltics and Beyond Travel is delighted to announce that Peter J. Kalnin will be assisting with the development and presentation of new travel itineraries in 2022 and beyond.
 
Kalnin, a fluent Latvian and German speaker with a master’s degree in European history from the University of Chicago, also will personally lead Baltics and Beyond tours in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and other European countries beginning in 2022. He is relocating to Riga, Latvia, in September and will perform translating and other projects for the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, in addition to his work with Baltics and Beyond.
 
“Our travelers will benefit from the deep knowledge and on-the-ground connections that Peter Kalnin will bring to every Baltics and Beyond tour, not to mention his ability to speak multiple languages in addition to his native English. As a former language teacher, Peter also is well experienced in making foreign travel and new cultures come alive in engaging and interesting ways. I’m especially pleased that he will help to design unique tours that travelers will only find with our company,” said Baltics and Beyond owner Cindy Bielke.
 
Peter was born in Minneapolis and was raised in Oregon. His parents were immigrants from the Republic of Latvia and always spoke their native language at home. For the past 20 years Peter has been a teacher, mostly of high school German in Minnesota, but also English as a Second Language, and primary grade German at an international school near Berlin, Germany. He also has maintained an active involvement in the Minnesota Latvian community, singing in Latvian choirs and ensembles, as well as teaching the language to children and adult learners.
 
With his own two daughters now grown and independent, Peter is excited to take advantage of an opportunity to live and work in the Latvian capital of Riga, and to join forces with Baltics and Beyond to help create and present unique tour opportunities in the entire Baltic region, as well as combination tours with other European countries such as Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Poland.
 
“The Baltic countries are a great travel destination. They are physically beautiful. The gently rolling landscapes, filled with lush fields, forests, and wetlands, are peaceful and much less densely populated than most European countries—and they offer great opportunities to travelers that enjoy active vacations. The cities and towns are filled with charming, centuries-old buildings, but are also open to the 21st-century world. Unique cultural and culinary delights on par with more well-known European destinations are also available,” Peter said.
 
“The Baltics have not been over-touristed or overdeveloped and are a relative bargain for a budget-conscious traveler or simply people eager to get off the beaten path and experience a part of Europe that is entirely new. I’m eager to shape tours that highlight facets of European history, crystallized in real living places, that can still be experienced in meaningful ways today,” he added.
 
 Check back soon for a post from Peter!
 

Latvian public television writers are a clever bunch. Here’s their plug for a story about Latvian Christmas and Solstice songs: “Increasingly grateful that it isn’t Christmas every day? If your jingle bells have shriveled up in the cold and your chestnuts have burned after leaving them roasting on an open fire, you have our sympathy. . . But help is at hand, courtesy of Latvia, a land that sings at the drop of a wooly hat.”  Click here to listen for yourself

Riga and Tallinn—the capitals of Latvia and Estonia—have been waging a friendly feud for nearly a decade. Their beef? Who deserves bragging rights over which city was the site of the world’s first decorated Christmas tree. Riga says it was first, in 1510. Not so fast says Tallinn city fathers. They believe (with a little coaching, no doubt, from their municipal promotional team!) that Tallinn first publicly displayed a decorated Christmas tree in 1441. (For the record, most of the rest of the world credits Germany with this yuletide invention.) But this is a friendly feud and the winners are happy Christmas travelers who flock to Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius—capital of the third Baltic country, Lithuania—to savor the stunning Christmas trees, markets and all manner of seasonal sights, tastes and sounds.