January 11th: After a few hours of sleep, I met up with friends for lunch. Afterward, a few of us took a trip to the shopping centre on the edge of town.
January 13th: The Russian Old New Year (yes, I see the antonym, but what can you do?) this year is January 13th, so we met up at a Russian friend's flat. She made some traditional Russian Old New Year sweets, and we all brought something, per usual. We ate, played Mafia (also per usual), before ringing in the Old New Year. Then we watched "Mushrooming," a highly rated Estonian comedy. We've not had much experience with Estonian cinema, just the slightly disturbing cartoons on the ferry from Stockholm, but figured comedy was a good place to start. Two things must ye know about Estonian comedy: First! It is Estonian! And second, it is... not at all funny. One of my friends said that Estonian movies are essentially plotless; they follow an actor around for a couple of days with a camera, and there's a film. Here's a summary of "Mushrooming":
A politician (it really doesn't matter that he is, but they point it out a lot) is gassing up his car before heading off to the woods to pick mushrooms with his wife. They find a hitchhiking rock star and the wife agrees that if he'll sit through their mushrooming, they'll drive him to Tallinn. So they go off into the woods while the rock star sits in the car. The couple, predictably, gets lost and starts frantically panicking after a very short time. They waste the battery life of the cell phone calling the campaign office to say they're lost. Night one in the woods. A random man breaks into the car and is scared away by the rock star. The random man then returns, planning to kill the rock star, for no apparent reason. Rock star runs into the forest, finds couple. The three run for another day, find a cottage. They eat everything inside. Everything. All the things. And they break things. Random man also finds the cottage and the rock star nearly beats him to death. Random man spends the rest of the movie tied to a chair. Eventually, they find their way back to the car, end up being interviewed by journalists and agree to never talk about their experience again.
I don't get why someone made this movie... or why it's a comedy.
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| Origami swans |
January 16th: Today we visited Otepää, the winter capital of Estonia. Unfortunately, we were there during the start of this skiing biathlon, so all the museum's were closed (Flag Museum, Ski Museum). We visited the Energy Column and acquired some hippie-style energy. We climbed the linnamägi (city hill) and saw the fortress ruins at the top. We saw a church and tried to find the tree planted by the last Dalai Lama, but were instead snarled at disapprovingly by a dog. We looked through maps in the Tourist Information centre and headed back to Tartu. It certainly is very suited to winter, covered in ski and tubing runs. There's even a little conveyor belt to take tubes & people from the bottom of this, admittedly rather small, hill back to the top.
Since it was one of my friend's birthday's, we went for drinks. I had "Limonaad", which you'd think was lemonade, but in fact tastes like bubble gum.
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| Lucia, Agnese, Michael, Tobi, & I in front of the Otepää town hall. Before it started snaining like crazy. |
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| Tobi at the Energy Column. Maybe I'll explain what it does, maybe not. |
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Trekking up Linnamägi to the castle ruins.
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| We made it! |
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| Ski jump from Linnamägi. I can only imagine the terror of skiing down that thing. |
January 17th: We had a dinner party. Proof I should have started writing this post earlier... I don't remember anything else other than the fact that this party happened.
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| Scrabble & Hesburger while we wait. |
I'd seen the first one at least once, maybe twice. But since the final one came out, we holed up in a dorm room with chips, popcorn, iced tea, and later a giant bag from Hesburger, and plowed through all three. Can we take a moment to appreciate Richard Armitage and Lee Pace...
...
...
Thank you.
January 19th: At 2am, we were loading into a bus headed for Vilnius, Lithuania. It would take us 8 hours to get to Vilnius, including an hour and a half bus-layover in Riga.
January 20th:
If any of you saw the UNICEF campaign the Alaska Rainbow Facebook was running, I managed that from the bus. Probably the most productive I've been on a bus to date. So glad the busses have Wifi, or things would have started much later.
***STAY TUNED FOR A VILNIUS POST***
January 21st: I don't remember if I've explained Name Days before, and if I haven't somebody can let me know and I will, but today was Agnese's Name Day, so to celebrate we went for lunch at Kung Fu, a probably racist-ly named Chinese restaurant. Afterward, we went bowling, and then played billiards. All in all, an excellent Name Day party.
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| Not a great picture, but it's the only one that didn't come out blurry. Johann & Agnese |
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| I was doing so well, and then Michal caught up with me. I definitely had freakish, first game luck. |
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| Didn't break 100, which was the plan. |
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| 1 point away! Dangit! |
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| Cake at Werner |
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| Agnese, rockin' the table. |
January 22nd: We had my Polish friend Anna's going away party; our first of several going away parties. One of my other friends had compiled a video of our trips, dinners, and adventures during the semester that we watched. It certainly had a few of us in tears. There's no doubt we'll see Anna again, when we visit Poland, of course! But knowing she wouldn't be on all of our trips, in our classes, around all the time was definitely sad. We did our best to fill the evening with games, and were pretty successful. When Anna left to pack, we went off to play billiards. Eventually we had to get a few winks before seeing Anna off at the bus station.
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| Agnese, reading "Little Prince" in Latvian. |
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| Johann reads a bit in Ga, before switching to the German-Estonian dictionary. Having so many languages around are table is 40% of the fun. |
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| The Slavs vs. The Germans |
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| Stan & Michal at Air Hockey |
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| Tobi & Michal vs. Stan & Johann Speed ball |
Side note: despite what it looks like, Agnese & I did play all three games, but it's hard to take pictures while you're playing. Then I watched a bit of the Australian Open.
January 23rd: At 6am, Anna's bus headed to Riga. I think she said it would take her a bit over a day on the bus to get back home. It wasn't goodbye, just a "see you later." After a late night and an early morning, those of us at the bus station were very ready for a nap. When I got back to my place, my roommate had a friend over, so I didn't immediately collapse, but the sun was definitely high in the sky by the time I actually got up for the day. I know I did something, but I don't remember what; probably just shopping or something mundane along those lines.
January 24th: I have an exam on Monday. My last exam. So, of course, my notecards accompanied me on our trip to Põltsamaa. Lucia had organized our trip, but hurt herself playing jalgpall (leg ball/football/soccer). Põltsamaa is the wine capital, and they make the juices, jams, and several other food items I eat a lot of. Unfortunately, even they close during the off season. We wandered around the town, with no plan in mind. We found the tourist information office by accident having wandered toward the castle ruins. Turns out that all the tourist attractions are within the walls of the ruined castle, and closed. Awesome. So the wine cellar and food museum were out of the question. We did stop into an art studio. The kids art school was pretty interesting and had some cool pieces. The "professional" gallery upstairs was... less interesting. They had a display of "emotions" on canvas, which were coloured stripes. The room was cool, the art less so, but then again I don't really understand art to begin with. We stopped into several stores (I picked up a creme brulee chocolate bar, which was fantastic!), crossed a few bridges (something else Põltsamaa is famous for), found a closed church, walked to the edge of town to the Sõpruse, or "Friendship", Park. We then had a deep discussion on how one might destroy a park. Remove the sign? Burn it? We still had some time before our bus, so we found a cafe, walked in, and immediately all eyes were on us. Apparently, we wanted into a birthday party. We found somewhere else to lunch, and I had my first Chai since leaving home and it was SO GOOD!
While we were gone, I'd had a brilliant idea regarding studying for my exam, so I went back to my dorm and rewrote my notes.
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| My friends, at Friendship park. |
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| Tried to get a picture with the Põltsamaa sign... didn't quite work. |
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| E-Piim. E-Milk. I need to know how to get digital milk! |
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| One of the chairs in the arts centre. |
January 25th: I got a message early-ish in the day that Lucia was making homemade pasta, and invited us over for lunch. I had a bunch of studying to do, not having any clue what to expect for my exam, but figured "A girl's got to eat." As usual, it was delicious. Everything Lucia makes is. It sparked the "What is 'sauce'?" discussion. One of the things I love about having so many languages at the table (and often I end up being the only person whose mother tongue is English) is having talks like these. English connotation, synonyms, which words each of us would use to describe the "sauce" Lucia served, etc. Linguistics, apart from the technical terms Tobi throws out that few understand, is pretty cool stuff.
Anyway, I had to bow out to return to my studying, and at the end of the night, while still not sure what to expect, was ready for whatever the exam could throw at me... within reason. And hopefully just the stuff I knew really well.
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| Agnese, Lucia, & homemade noodles. |
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| 98% of the pictures I have of Lucia, she's serving us food. Whatever will we |
January 26th: Exam day. I was pretty frustrated while studying having no idea what information of my 26 note cards and 6 sheets of A4 paper was most likely to be on the exam, what was more important that others. Or which of the 8ish poems my professor said would be on the exam might actually be there. Turns out, almost none of it was on the exam. It was 4 questions, 2 of which were poem analyses (neither poem was on my "these will be on the exam" list). I only felt like I had wasted A LOT of my life. Plus, all exam instructions were given in Estonian. Exam instructions are the same everywhere, so I was able to follow enough to know when I needed to raise my hand for my exam. The English department was giving exams for several classes in the same room, so I had to figure out which exam I needed and then get it. But the exam itself was pretty straightforward. I was in and out in about an hour and a half, having no idea if I'd written enough. Luckily, later that day my grades had been updated and I'd aced it. That's all I needed.
Lucia's going away party was today. It was our first party in Raatuse, probably the most popular of the dorms. A friend had just moved in and her flatmates hadn't arrived yet, so we took advantage of her large kitchen and empty flat. We had pels (Russian style, served only with sour cream... I'm going to stick with the American curry stuff), potato candy (potatoes, sugar, peanut butter. Not bad.), chips/salsa/awful canned guacamole, sausages, and several other foods. We ate by candlelight, because why not. We played Mafia, as usual, and created a new character, the Pope, which was a fantastic decision. And we had the first to female Popes, the first of which was Lucia. No shocker there. She's usually first on the Mafia chopping block, since she's Italian. Figures that, if she wasn't Mafia, she was the Pope.
For whatever reason, I'd been wanting to call my gramma, so when I got back from Lucia's going away party, I did. Three and half hours later, we hung up. Usually, conversations with my gramma last a while; we'll sit around in her living room and chat. Never can quite tell when either of us are done talking, but I always love talking to her. I was already tired when I'd called, so when I finally hit the sack at 5am, I was out.
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| Lucia's so small! |
January 27th: Unlike Anna's, Lucia's bus left at 2pm. We'd said if she wanted to do anything for breakfast/lunch/whatever, we were up for it, but she had a few things to finish at the university, so we saw her at the bus station. We said we'll have to find a replacement to make us delicious food, though no one could ever replace Lucia. We're already plotting a trip to her place in Italy. Several of my friends have tissues on them, since the weather's pretty cold, but it's been funny watching the boys pull out tissue packets more frequently as the girls start crying.
After Lucia left, most of us were left as the only people in our flats, and Lucia's roommate especially didn't want to go back to an empty room. So we went to a cafe instead. We had a drink (Mango Chai!!), played chess, ran through all the German we could think of, etc. As the afternoon wore on we decided what we really needed was pizza and movies. We picked up a pizza and headed to the store for drinks and chips before ending up in my room. We wanted a comedy, and after looking through Netflix, ended up choosing "The Importance of Being Earnest." My favourite version is definitely the Colin Firth/Reese Witherspoon version, but I couldn't get the captions to work, so we ended up with a much earlier version on YouTube. I'd known that reading a language is easier than listening to it, but somehow had never thought that movies would be easier to watch with subtitles. I noticed it when we watched the Hobbit, after tracking down captions, but it's a pretty genius idea, especially with the Victorian-esque English in "Earnest." After the movie, we watched the 2nd episode of "An Idiot Abroad," which took place in India. That was... interesting? Disturbing? A bit hilarious? Agnese's favourite part was when the host met a religious man who'd had his left hand raise for 12 years; the host said something along the lines of "At what point do you decide, 'well, I don't need this'?". I definitely found the "ensuite shed" in his honeymoon suite near the Taj Mahal funny. Ensuite shed! (yeah... you might have had to be there/watch the episode)
January 28th: We went ice skating! None of us fell down, though we watched all the figure skaters around us do it. True, they were all under 10 years old, but whatever. It has definitely been a while since I've skated; the muscles in my feet protested. There was definitely a different skating culture on the ice than we have at home. Instead of moving out of the way of someone skating toward you, if you're not skating at the moment, the Estonians seem to expect everyone to get out of there way. Not a great explanation, but I nearly ran into a few instructors just standing in the middle of the skating area.
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| Yeah... that's my finger. |
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| Screen too small, couldn't see Agnese's blurry face. We'll have to go again & take a better one. |
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| She made it to the middle! |
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| Yes, we can skate on one foot. |
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| Cookie batter + Blackadder |
January 29th: Going away party for my Czech friend, Michal. I attempted to make chocolate chip cookies... I failed. My mother says it is probably the use of butter instead of Crisco like we use at home. Next time I think I'll just use lard, but we'll see. The cookies turned into cookie flavoured brittle, instead of cookies. We ended up eating a portion of it as cookie dough. Even the burned stuff didn't taste too bad, but they weren't good ol' soft & gooey American chocolate chip cookies. I blame Johann for the burned batch.
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| Not even the worst of the horror. |
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| "Cookie Brittle like thing" |
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| Just a couple of people... |
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| ...Who don't need their left hands. For 12 years. |
January 30th: Had to say goodbye to my Czech friend this morning; drug his two suitcases through the snow to a cab. Then I went home and finished up some homework before having a whole day of me time. I'd been meaning to meet two friends to do something after my homework was finished, but I ended up getting sucked into my book, and looked up several hours after I should have called them. Alas. So many things have been happening that this introvert needed a break. Tea, Blackadder, and books made for a good day. I was starting to feel a bit sick, too, which made staying home an even better idea.
January 31st: Didn't go anywhere today, but I did Skype with my family to finish mine & my brother's FAFSA. While I might not have left the dorm, I finished three books, so the day totally not a waste.
February 6th: Riga
February 7th: So far today, I've been writing blog posts. As you can see, we did get things done. Since lectures start on Monday, there's only one day left in my winter holiday, so even though it's not over, I don't feel bad about posting this already. The likelihood that I do something crazy between now and then is pretty small, but if it happens, there's always the option of another post. If nothing else, posting this now means I can cross it off my to-do list!
I hope everyone had an awesome winter holiday and is raring to get back in action!
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