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.