Latvia

Actually true

• Riga has one of the world's best Art Nouveau collections

  Over 800 buildings in the Jugendstil style line streets like Alberta iela, designed partly by Mikhail Eisenstein.

• Latvia has an enormous archive of folk songs

  The Latvian Folksong Cabinet holds well over a million recorded dainas, verses passed down for generations.

• Amber genuinely washes ashore after storms

  The Baltic coast near Jūrmala has yielded amber for millennia, prized since Roman trade routes.

• The Singing Revolution was real and peaceful

  Mass singing gatherings helped Latvia and its Baltic neighbors gain independence from the Soviet Union without violence in 1991.

Commonly believed, wrong

• "Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are basically the same"

  Each has a distinct language (Latvian and Lithuanian are Baltic; Estonian is Finnic) and separate cultural history.

• "It's a cold, gray, Soviet country still"

  Riga's restored old town and Jūrmala's beach resorts are vibrant, colorful and thoroughly modern.

• "It's mostly flat farmland with nothing to see"

  Gauja National Park has sandstone cliffs, caves and a river valley nicknamed 'Latvian Switzerland.'

• "Everyone there speaks Russian as their main language"

  Latvian is the official and majority-spoken language, with a substantial Russian-speaking minority mainly in the east.