Latvia
In upper secondary school my best friend Roman had roots in Latvia, and once at a break we stole a huge sack of potatoes and then sold it to our teacher. When she asked where we had got them from, we said Roman's dad was a farmer in Latvia and that we helped him sell them and she believed us. She even recommended us to other teachers and that's when we thought it went out of hand. Roman was my only vague connection to Latvia when I many, many years later set out on a cruise by myself to go see the capital Riga. It was the last of my three cruises in a week departing from Stockholm, I had already been to Finland and Estonia . The boat was maybe in the worst shape of the three and my bed was even tilting so it felt like I was going to fall off at any minute. Instead of complaining I just thought of it as a part of the experience to go to a poor country like Latvia, and I had a really nice time on the boat with going to the spa and watching the Stockholm archipelag...