Great story, well told.
From 2012-2016 I taught investments, entrepreneurship and history at Riga Business School and went to several events at SSE. So we may have been there simultaneously.
At Olimpiskais I played basketball with my students and students from RTU and SSE and went to their Halloween parties. So, yes, the power distance was low. (https://medium.com/illumination-curated/the-multi-culti-elephant-in-the-class-living-room-4185274e9524).
When I taught history my students debated who was the worst occupier for the Baltics and the rest of eastern Europe, the Germans or the Soviets? Part of the course was to go to the March 16th Latvian Legionnaires' march and interview people showing them the Germans' Generalplan Ost postwar plan for the extermination of eastern Europe's occupied peoples. Only Soviet victory saved the Baltic peoples from this plan. To the Latvian students who couldn't stomach the idea of celebrating May 9, I proposed, as a pragmatic American, celebrating May 8. That they could agree on.
When one student heard me speaking Russian on the basketball court, he said after seven years in Latvia I should speak Latvian. I replied with, "who's the second most important woman in every marriage?" Answer: your wife's mother. Mine's Polish and knows Polish and Russian, but not Latvian." (Our initial common language was German from her five teen years in German-occupied Poland. She became Soviet when the border moved and she didn't). So teaching at RBS involved an occasional collision with Latvian language politics: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/polyglot-meets-linguistic-political-football-in-latvia-90a41e8a7ced Nearly a decade later I finally passed the state language exam to get permanent residence.
Your experience with Australian Latvians is a product of Australian openness. The Canadian and Australian Latvians I know in Riga talk about how the locals treat them as outsiders, and, especially in the immediate post-Soviet period, viewed all westerners as "wallets".
What Russia has done through its genocidal imperialism is to make "the Baltic States" more than just a geographic expression. These three countries with no common language or culture now know they hang together and with Ukraine or hang separately; exercise effective shared sovereignty through the EU and NATO or no sovereignty.
Best wishes from sunny Jurmala.
