Dear Customers,
As the situation with COVID-19 is slowly but constantly improving, our letters will come not as regularly as before.
Since the 11th of May the situation in Latvia has improved a lot and hopefully there will not be any fall-backs:
- COVID-19 tests done in the country – 48 816 per million inhabitants (92 751 in total)
- COVID-19 positive 535 per million inhabitants (1016 in total)
- We have 21 reported death cases
- From May 12 till May 18 the number of infected people varied from 27 – 1 a day (with an outbreak in a social healthcare centre with 24 people infected in one day)
From the 13th of May we have slowly started returning back to our previous life style – restaurants opening, some sports centres re-starting their activities. There are more traffic and more people in the streets and in public places. From the 20th of May Air Baltic has started flying to OSLO (7 times a week!), Frankfurt, Tallin and Vilnius. From the 25th of May new flights will be added to Helsinki and Munich, followed by Berlin from the 1st of June.
These are good news but we hope our employees will still prefer staying home and travelling around Latvia in their free time.
This Monday the first technicians from Heidelberg arrived (not from Germany yet, but from Lithuania!) to continue the installation of our new printing presses. We have also re-started refurbishing and repairing the new factory premises to be able to move more equipment over to the new location during our collective vacation in June. Of course, it depends, if technicians from Heidelberg or Muller Martini will be available.
Otherwise we continue working full speed, also June is filling up rapidly and we kindly ask you to move forward those books, which you do not need in June to mid-July, thus letting us produce really urgent orders before our vacation.
To finish this week’s letter I would like to introduce a new multimedia project by the Latvian Institute ‘’THE LATVIAN ABC - Your guide to Latvia and the Latvians’’ (also available on-line). I chose the letter “H’’ which stands for ’’Hockey’’ and read below why:
LATVIANS HAVE BEEN CHASING THE PUCK OVER THE ICE SINCE THE 1920S, AND TODAY HOCKEY IS THE COUNTRY’S NUMBER ONE REASON TO SCREAM WILDLY, WIN OR LOSE.
Every May, the national team goes to the world championships (best result- seventh place) accompanied by an army of fans who are rated the most colourful and dedicated on the planet. Back home, there’s an ice rink in every city and town, producing NHL stars like Teodors Bļugers (Pittsburgh Penguins), Elvis Merzļikins and Matīss Kivlenieks (both playing for the Blue Jackets in Columbus), Rūdolfs Balcers (Ottawa Senator) and Zemgus Girgensons (Buffalo Sabres). They follow in the skate tracks of Helmuts Balderis, a phenomenally speedy, skillful attacker who played for Soviet teams and Latvia’s national side and was the first-ever Latvian in the NHL. Riga Dinamo competes in the KHL, continuing a tradition when this team dominated Soviet hockey. And we are truly proud of our legends of NHL, playing recently such as Arturs Irbe, Sandis Ozoliņš, Kārlis Skrastiņš and Sergejs Žoltoks.
We all feel sorry this year’s Championship was cancelled, but hope to get best possible results in 2021!
Have a lovely spring!
Livonia Print Team
