Turkey Day from Far Away

Since I'm not in the US, Thanksgiving was not a day off for me. I had classes and other things to do. Luckily, since I don't have classes on Fridays, I could put off some of it. I watched Babylon 5, did some shopping, thought about my homework, and worked on my plans for our group Thanksgiving here (which took place Friday night).
     Thursday night, however, I got some snacks to tide me over while I waited to Skype my family and eat some of the things from my Thanksgiving box with them. I even made egg nog from scratch, having purchased the necessary equipment I didn't have at the dorm (i.e. a big bowl, a whisk, ingredients).

Here's my Thanksgiving dinner of champions: egg nog, canned turkey breast, loaded mashed potatoes, and chocolate marshmallow cookies from my gramma. I didn't want to eat everything in the box (and I'm not sure I could have in one sitting, but hey, isn't that the Thanksgiving challenge?), that way I could share it with my friends during our dinner Friday night.
Due to some technical difficulties, my chat with my parents ceased. But on the upside, I got to Skype with my second family in Washington, though technical difficulties ended that fairly quickly as well, though they did get to see my neon green walls.
We started Thanksgiving cooking on Friday early afternoon. Since everything I was bringing was dehydrated, adding water isn't difficult and doesn't take long. I was helping Anna and Jordan make pies from scratch. We made five in total, two pecan, one lemon meringue, one chocolate silk, and one apple. They all turned out really well, though the pecan did end up a bit burned, and the silk wasn't quite solid. Despite that, they tasted great.

A bit of the huge mess we made. Anna's got serious egg white whipping skills. Should make egg nog a lot easier to make if I can master her epicness. She christened the top of our apple pie with a Zorro style Z.

Pie on the window sill, story book grandma style.

All our pies.

I tried to get a picture of a slice of each of the pies, but with all the rotations, I ate much of it before I got the chance, but I did get a picture of all the pies sliced.

I rehydrated the sweet potato soufflé and the green bean casserole. Both went over really well and several people asked for the recipes. 

Here's all of us, surrounded by our Thanksgiving-worthy amount of food. Pies, soufflé, casserole, Estonian style mashed potatoes, mini pizzas, sliced veggies, ham and onions, sushi, and more that I'm not remembering right now. Everyone left appropriately stuffed for the holiday. Our lovely crew consisted of Germans, Americans, a Pole, an Italian, a Latvian, a Czech, a Georgian, a Hungarian, and an Ukrainian. After dinner, we spent hours playing Mafia, learning all sorts of different rules for the game around the world. And more than a few Italian Mob jokes were made. 

Several of us walked some of our meal off in the wee hours of the morning, strolling through Tartu's parks in the 15˚ air. While I may not have been home for Thanksgiving, this was certainly an evening worthy of the holiday with plenty food, friends, and good times. 

My Father: The King of Dehydration

I just received a box from home, and walked to the post office to pick it up with another American. We discussed the Thanksgiving style items we're bringing to dinner on Friday (there's a group dinner happening Friday anyway, and no one will care that 'Thanksgiving' is a day late). I get home and pop open the box and find a dehydrated Thanksgiving dinner, courtesy of my father. Each bag comes with instructions as well, which is good because other than the mashed potatoes and maybe the turkey with gravy, everything would end up either watery or crunchy. (I know this too be true because it's happened the last several days with some instant mac 'n' cheese and oatmeal.)

A) Turkey with gravy
B) Butter & Herb Mashed Potatoes
C) Green Bean Casserole
D) Sweet Potato Souffle
E) Cranberry Sauce
F) Cornbread stuffing with sausage

(The box also contained a bag of chocolate covered coconut almonds [AKA "crack"] that broke open during shipping so... those are in my stomach already. As well as a tray of marshmallow cookies (from my Gramma) that I will definitely be eating during my Skype call home tomorrow. If I wasn't spoiled enough, the box also contained Season 1 of Babylon 5,  so if you need me, don't.)

Now, there's probably not enough to feed the roughly 10 people we have at our dinner parties, but I will certainly be bringing some American classic Thanksgiving tasters to dinner, hopefully alongside some home made egg nog, if that experiment goes well.

Stay tuned for my epic Thanksgiving picture!

Seeing the Sights: Stockholm

TL;DNR version: I went to Stockholm and saw things.

All right, with that out of the way...

I went to Stockholm this weekend and saw things. We took a ferry (AKA a cruise ship) from Tallinn after spending an awesome day there. In Tallinn we went to the Christmas Market, since it opened Friday and we were there Friday. It smelled fantastic with the traditional Estonian Christmas foods and drinks. There were a bunch of little stalls in the main square square surrounding a massive, decorated tree and a giant stage at one end which had Christmas themed scenery projected and music playing. It also happened to be the first day of snow, so basically it was perfect. After wandering a bit, we went to lunch at Taco Express (TACOS!!) and then headed for American style pie at the only American restaurant (the Texas Honky Tonk & Cantina) this side of anywhere. I found it as I was meandering back from London and so of course we had to try it. Especially being so close to Thanksgiving, pecan pie seemed the right choice. They don't serve pies warm, which apparently is a common custom in the South. But with the weather outside warm pie would have been nice. Either way, that pie was pretty dag on good.

The Tallinn Christmas Market, with the
Town Hall in the background.

We played in the snow in Tallinn. A lot. Jordan & I made
snow angels. Not a lot of snow, so they kinda sucked.

A tree made of tea cups. Uh, I think yes.

So pie aside, we headed toward the docks, picked up our tickets, and headed off. I've been on a similar ferry when crossing the English Channel, but it's still nothing like the ferries back home; definitely more like the cruise ship tour and lunch from, what, first grade? There were restaurants and shops and bars and a currency exchange, etc. We tossed our backpacks into our cabin and headed up a deck to the store to grab food before chit-chatting for a while. We met up with some members of our group in the lounge before heading back to the room to play word games. We played a geography game in which the challenge became determining spelling based on language (in Ukrainian it starts with a V, in English a W; in Hungarian it starts with a U, in Georgian a G, in Russian something else), and then the game where you ask questions to guess the word on your forehead. Lesson learned: If the question is, "Am I European?" and the answer given is "Uhhh...?" you're Russian or Soviet, depending on your time period. All in all, a fun evening, definitely helped fill the 17 hour ride.

The next morning we arrived in Stockholm. I got up to watch us pull in from the sun deck, and saw all the colourful houses of Sweden and some Swedish swans (that's for you, Mom). We had roughly 7 hours in Stockholm, which is certainly not a lot of time to visit such a large city. We had a bit of a plan but were willing to go wherever our moods and interests took us. The group we traveled with split in two, one group heading for the Metro to spend the day visiting museums, and the other (my group) decided to see the city on foot. Our dock was about an hour outside the city centre on foot, but we saw some awesome things on the way. Seeing more of Stockholm, if not maybe the most popular places, and less of the inside of buses and trains. We found some gorgeous buildings and parks, and generally just really enjoyed seeing Stockholm.

We crossed a bridge, since there are so many in Stockholm, and came across this park, at the entrance of which was this giant gate. It, among other things, sparked a discussion as to why the USA decided to go with the most bland architecture it could find. We don't have super cool buildings or bright blue gates with gold deer. What up with that?!
There were so many amazing buildings around that we started calling dibs for our European vacation homes, a game we started a while ago on another trip. Here are the two places I called dibs on:

 Google Maps; Looks a little Addams family, right?

This one is an apartment on top of a... church? with the most
incredible view of the city. Stay tuned & I'll show you...

One of the monuments in the park:
Jenny Lind, a Swedish singer. There are times
I really miss my dresses...

Old phone booth.

There were only a couple of things on our "must see/do" list, so we basically wandered around the city, taking pictures of all sorts of things, like really awesome looking movie-style alley ways. I've got a few of those, but others have pictures of nearly every alley in Stockholm. I suggested they build a map with these. We also saw the Stockholm Christmas market, which was surprisingly smaller than the one in Tallinn.

As happens, the hungers struck. We asked at the tourist office for some recommendations on restaurants serving traditional Swedish food, and while they were surprised by the question, we headed over and had lunch under the streets of Sweden. Here's my Swedish meatball sandwich, specifically so people could see the pink-ness of the sauce. It was actually really good, though we did get it because it was one of the cheapest things on the menu. The restaurant wasn't as cheap as we'd hoped, and we had to contend with understanding the Swedish kroona. 100 kroona is roughly 10 euros. I don't understand currencies with conversions like this; anything that says 125... for dinner sounds nuts! That's such a big number!

Anna read somewhere about a viewpoint at which we could see all of Stockholm. While it was a bit out of the way, it was the last stop we made before heading back to the ship. The view was spectacular. Old and new, hustle and bustle alongside quiet and calm (and off to the side there you can see my Stockholm apartment); all the lights of the city. I wasn't there long, I didn't do much, but I do love Stockholm.

On the trip back we watched some really really weird Estonian cartoons. So weird they cannot be explained, but they're by Ülo Pikkov. And! I learned to finish one side of a Rubix cube. (Kudos to Lela for that one.)

One of those alley ways, up near the viewpoint.

Light up moose stampede through central Stockholm.
 We didn't get very close, but they were
either life-size or bigger than.
(This picture is a lot more blurry
than I thought it was. Apologies.)

The Royal Palace. We're pretty sure this is not the front,
but it was the prettiest side.  

Adventures with Becky & Sydney

Hmm, that looks like a train. Are we taking a trip?
Where are we going?

Pretty sure that one didn't need translation.
But... is that an airport?

On a plane? It's been two months since I've
been on a plane, but before that,
the last month I didn't fly anywhere was January.
Strange... Where could we be going?

Another train? Seriously, where are we going?

Oh, gotcha.

Weekend in London!!

With Becky studying in London, and it being my favourite city (rivaled only by my love of home) I figured what better way to spend a weekend than flying over to see her. And it was actually much cheaper than trying to visit her when we're in the States.

Where can you find anything and everything
a chap can unload... by the barrel?

First up was Portobello Road! We got there just before closing and wandered up and down the street. There was definitely lots of variety, but I'm not sure I would have gone with "anything and everything." We also watched "Guardians of the Galaxy" which was much funnier than I was expecting. Movie tickets were more expensive than I was expecting, especially after spending 3 months in an Estonia that is cheaper than home, especially in food.

The next morning, I was up a bit early and headed just down the street from my hostel to the London house used in "The Parent Trap!" Oreos and peanut butter and my day would have been perfect (though the day was pretty incredible)! From there I met up with Becky and Sydney and we headed to Camden. I've never been to any market like the Camden market. We were there for 3 hours, I think, and didn't even cover half of it. It's just so massive!!

With unpredictable whether, we headed next to the Tower of London to see the poppies. There had been lots of warnings on the Tube that the station nearest the Tower was packed, but we took a chance. Seeing the massive line outside, we opted against going into the Tower and to just look at the poppies outside. However, that seemed to have been everyone's plan. It was absolutely packed. We stood in a mob, tip-toeing forward inch by inch until we could get a decent view of the poppies. This would be the picture I got with the least number of people in it. :) When we left, we headed up the street to find a different Tube station. Not going through Tower Hill again!

I'm not sure what I expected from the Sherlock Holmes museum, but I don't think its reality was it. It definitely had that Victorian feel, creaky floors and all. The third floor had waxworks from various adventures, even one of the giant Hound of Baskerville. Certainly a lot of people in a small space takes away from the effect of the building, but it was still interesting to see, especially the recreations of bits of evidence from the stories. 

Chinese food (Hiina köök) is my favourite, and I haven't been to a Chinese restaurant since before I left (and I don't remember if I even went to Canton House as part of my "I'm leaving, eat all the things" menu). So for dinner we went to a little, completely legit Chinese restaurant and I filled myself with wanton and sweet and sour pork. So happy. 

It just so happens that I returned to London for the Doctor Who season finale, balancing out my being in town for the premiere, though Doctor Who didn't appear on all the Tube screens like last time. So we had a night in, complete with chocolate oranges, and had a Doctor Who marathon before watching the finale. I can only imagine what we sounded like to Sydney in our reactions to that last episode. I can't wait for Christmas!!

The next morning started with a walk through Hyde Park to visit Kensington Palace. We saw swans in the pond, archery on the green, and kids playing all sorts of games. Clearly it's the place to be on a Sunday morning. We went into the gift shop and looked around for a bit, they had the most gorgeous tea sets. Becky and I talked about the gifts we had gotten and were planning to get for family back home. How time flies; it's closing in on Christmas! Especially in Europe where there's nothing standing between Halloween and the winter holidays. 

 The most exciting part of our English walk was this squirrel. We'd watched it cozy up to a small child, but was chased away by another. It headed straight for us and sat up on it's hind legs to beg, evidently well-fed by Londoners. Leaning down to take a picture, it must have thought I had food and crawled right up on my boot. It headed for Becky next, and I caught this picture, otherwise nobody would believe how close the little guy got.
    Afterward we headed to brunch at a little tea shop Becky had been to. We had to wait for a few minutes as the place was packed (Sunday brunch crowd, completely non-existent in Estonia). BLT Panini, Devon cream and jam on tea cakes, and a pot of Earl Grey. I knew I'd been missing having tea all the time, but I hadn't realized how much. That probably added to the taste, since those were the best cups of tea I've ever had. Might have to go out more frequently here and test the tea water.
  We picked up Sydney and headed to Platform 9 3/4. It was not at all where I expected it to be. You'd think that it would be somewhere near any kind of platform, if not actually between Platforms 9 & 10. But no, it's in a place easily accessible to the public, in the general open space of Kings Cross. Just around the corner is a Harry Potter spot, so of course we went in, but managed to not spend all the money.

The Natural History Museum was right across the street from my hostel, and somewhere Becky and Sydney had been wanting to visit. We'd been hoping to go skating out front, but didn't get around to it. We did go through the dinosaur exhibit, and I saw a few more while Becky was working on schoolwork. Here's us an a T-Rex head!

 I spent some time wandering, moving from Tube to Tube, and came out at Westminster, looking for a good shot of the Houses of Parliament. I came out at the base of Westminster Tower. Completely unexpected, I literally stepped out of the station and looked directly up the side of Westminster Tower, which had falling poppies projected on the side.

The last thing we did was head to dinner. We went to an American diner, where I piled up on American food, of which Estonia has only one known location... in Tallinn. Coconut milkshake, pile of cajun fries, and mac & cheese. Mac and cheese isn't even a thing here. :( Once again, so happy.


All in all, a fabulous weekend in London. I love the city, and I loved getting to see Becky before she heads back home. It was nice to hear English (not that there isn't English here, it's just much more stunted), and not have to worry that I'll be addressed in a language I don't understand. I did have to overcome the urge to start and end every interaction in Estonian like I've become accustomed to doing here. I certainly did more cross-European comparing that I did against America this time. Maybe I'm starting to get the hang of European life. Thanks for showing me around, Becky!

Halloween & November One-th

Author's note: will break up le blocks-o-text with some pictures later, when my laptop comes out of its candy coma.

Halloween is not a holiday celebrated in Estonia. They have a sort-of-kinda-of-not-really similar holiday in November, but not a Halloween in the American-Irish-English sense. There were a couple of clubs hosting costumed parties, demonstrating some Western influence on this small Eastern European nation. My friends and I got together for another dinner party, which was originally planned to show off the cuisine of our nations of origin. So after a quick shopping trip to pick up the ingredients for quesadillas (because they're easy, cheap, and I know how to make them) as well as a pretty dang decent amount of candy, I cracked open a big chocolate bar, some gummy bear packages, and cued up Hocus Pocus, my all time favourite Halloween movie, which I watch every year.

Not sure about the Hocus Pocus 2 currently being worked on, but... I'd meant to watch Rocky Horror as my second Halloween movie, but forgot, and watched the Addams Family Musical instead. So funny, so Addams. <3.
We've had lots of coversations about what constitutes "American" food. Being a culture predominately based on taking pieces we like from other cultures, while typically credited with the hamburger and hot dog, we're pretty sure stole that, too. The evening started withe making pumpkin pie from scratch. Carolina boy has, of course, a family tradition of pie baking and we'll probably make a few more around Thanksgiving. Everything was made from scratch: pumpkin gutted and cubed, whipped cream hand-beat, cloves hand crushed under a glass bottle, and naturally crust from scratch. It certainly made the dorm smell like autumn, and ended up tasting pretty good, too, from a girl who's not that big into pumpkin pie. Eating it, we talked about the cultural palate of sweetness. It was too sweet for some at the table, justright for others, and not nearly as sweet as he pumpkin pies I've had, and Jordan from NC agreed.
Lela from Georgia brought these little wraps, and she had us guess what they were before and while we ate them. Turns out it was rolled eggplant with a walnut paste fillig. It was interestingly good; I only got as far as guessing it was nutty. And from Hungry, Patricia made goulosh, which was really good. There was German wine, ginger beer-soda, and tea of no specific cultural origin, along with a mound of candy. We were all so stuffed we didn't get to the quesadillas; fine by me. Meant I had food for breakfast, since I really need to go shopping. We played cards (a spoons-like game) and I taught them a game too complex to be explained in words, but you'd know it if you saw it.

NOVEMBurrr
Up very late, we all then rose early to catch a bus to Valga. The town name sounded familiar from one of my lectures, but I couldn't remember why, but an adventure's an adventure. It was certainly nippy outside, and while it slowed, it did bot stop us after the initial shock post-toasty bus. The goal had been to find an infopunkt and ask about opening times for a nearby castle. We found a church and a market (with cow & sheep skins)

before heading further into town, following signs to the elusive infopunkt. Turns out, info centre's closed on the weekend. However, across the street was (another church and) a map. Figuring "why not", I crossed and immediately remembered why Valga had come ip in my lectures. It's a border town; half the city, Valga, is in Estonia, and the other half, Valka, is in Latvia. Naturally, we headed that direction and walked from Estonia to Latvia.

Welcome to the Schengen Area, where it takes literally nothing to cross the border. Border control station was empty, there's no barriers, just a small bridge over a creek barely larger than the one on my gramma's property line. So... We crossed, passing from a signs we could take educated guesses at to signs we could hardly pronounce. Thus, we wandered Latvia, only slightly concerned at out lack of passports. We looked at buildings, used a Latvian worker outhouse, found a "bunker" which I rolled down, found their closed infopunkt, and walked into nearly ever open store (albeit, early Saturday morning, the pickings were slim) looking for postcards. We even went to a Latvian bookshop; definitely thinking about starting a multilingual book collection.

We ended up calling the castle to see if it was open, before taking the bus which would have left us stranded in the middle of no where, in the cold, for several hours. Good thing too, since it's open by appointment only. Honestly, not a whole lot to do, the border and castle being the most exciting parts of the town. So we continued our postcard hunt, picking up snacks along the way, and taking pictures. From there we headed back to Tartu, getting ready for another week, with another adventure at the end. 

The first church, and in Latvia, we found Nirvana.

Halloween & November One-th

Author's note: will break up le blocks-o-text with some pictures later, when my laptop comes out of its candy coma.

Halloween is not a holiday celebrated in Estonia. They have a sort-of-kinda-of-not-really similar holiday in November, but not a Halloween in the American-Irish-English sense. There were a couple of clubs hosting costumed parties, demonstrating some Western influence on this small Eastern European nation. My friends and I got together for another dinner party, which was originally planned to show off the cuisine of our nations of origin. So after a quick shopping trip to pick up the ingredients for quesadillas (because they're easy, cheap, and I know how to make them) as well as a pretty dang decent amount of candy, I cracked open a big chocolate bar, some gummy bear packages, and cued up Hocus Pocus, my all time favourite Halloween movie, which I watch every year.

Not sure about the Hocus Pocus 2 currently being worked on, but... I'd meant to watch Rocky Horror as my second Halloween movie, but forgot, and watched the Addams Family Musical instead. So funny, so Addams. <3.
We've had lots of coversations about what constitutes "American" food. Being a culture predominately based on taking pieces we like from other cultures, while typically credited with the hamburger and hot dog, we're pretty sure stole that, too. The evening started withe making pumpkin pie from scratch. Carolina boy has, of course, a family tradition of pie baking and we'll probably make a few more around Thanksgiving. Everything was made from scratch: pumpkin gutted and cubed, whipped cream hand-beat, cloves hand crushed under a glass bottle, and naturally crust from scratch. It certainly made the dorm smell like autumn, and ended up tasting pretty good, too, from a girl who's not that big into pumpkin pie. Eating it, we talked about the cultural palate of sweetness. It was too sweet for some at the table, justright for others, and not nearly as sweet as he pumpkin pies I've had, and Jordan from NC agreed.
Lela from Georgia brought these little wraps, and she had us guess what they were before and while we ate them. Turns out it was rolled eggplant with a walnut paste fillig. It was interestingly good; I only got as far as guessing it was nutty. And from Hungry, Patricia made goulosh, which was really good. There was German wine, ginger beer-soda, and tea of no specific cultural origin, along with a mound of candy. We were all so stuffed we didn't get to the quesadillas; fine by me. Meant I had food for breakfast, since I really need to go shopping. We played cards (a spoons-like game) and I taught them a game too complex to be explained in words, but you'd know it if you saw it.

NOVEMBurrr
Up very late, we all then rose early to catch a bus to Valga. The town name sounded familiar from one of my lectures, but I couldn't remember why, but an adventure's an adventure. It was certainly nippy outside, and while it slowed, it did bot stop us after the initial shock post-toasty bus. The goal had been to find an infopunkt and ask about opening times for a nearby castle. We found a church and a market (with cow & sheep skins)

before heading further into town, following signs to the elusive infopunkt. Turns out, info centre's closed on the weekend. However, across the street was (another church and) a map. Figuring "why not", I crossed and immediately remembered why Valga had come ip in my lectures. It's a border town; half the city, Valga, is in Estonia, and the other half, Valka, is in Latvia. Naturally, we headed that direction and walked from Estonia to Latvia.

Welcome to the Schengen Area, where it takes literally nothing to cross the border. Border control station was empty, there's no barriers, just a small bridge over a creek barely larger than the one on my gramma's property line. So... We crossed, passing from a signs we could take educated guesses at to signs we could hardly pronounce. Thus, we wandered Latvia, only slightly concerned at out lack of passports. We looked at buildings, used a Latvian worker outhouse, found a "bunker" which I rolled down, found their closed infopunkt, and walked into nearly ever open store (albeit, early Saturday morning, the pickings were slim) looking for postcards. We even went to a Latvian bookshop; definitely thinking about starting a multilingual book collection.

We ended up calling the castle to see if it was open, before taking the bus which would have left us stranded in the middle of no where, in the cold, for several hours. Good thing too, since it's open by appointment only. Honestly, not a whole lot to do, the border and castle being the most exciting parts of the town. So we continued our postcard hunt, picking up snacks along the way, and taking pictures. From there we headed back to Tartu, getting ready for another week, with another adventure at the end. 

The first church, and in Latvia, we found Nirvana.