Someone Special?

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Twins' Arrival

We were excited to hear the news on Tuesday that Chloe has two new first cousins! Lucy and Christopher were born a minute apart, around noon English time. Chloe has been on record for several months now predicting that in Auntie Tash's tummy were "one pink one and one blue one." Her track record on gender prediction had been poor up to this point (she incorrectly predicted that our neighbor across the street in Swarthmore was going to have "a baby who's called 'sister' ", and she decided prior to us finding out that her forthcoming sibling would be a boy), so we were happy to see from the above picture that Chloe was certainly right this time!

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Swinging with Pop Pop

Chloe is enjoying her second grandparental visit in a month. Since Pop Pop's visit has coincided with warm, spring-like, sunny weather here in Tartu, we have started exploring the previously snow-covered playgrounds. One of Chloe's favorite bits is the corkscrew slide, really for older children, but once I help her up the various ladders and walkways she is happy to shoot down it on her own ... .



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Its 'EE'

The Estonian for 'Estonian' is 'Eesti'. What about the web country code for Estonia? -- its 'ee'. And that is 'Eesti' backwards ...! This is all by way of preamble to an insight I had recently about why the Estonian language is so difficult. It turns out that a lot of Estonian words contain English words written backwards. For example, consider the sign on the shop just around the corner from our apartment;


Here you can see, in succession, the English words "dank", "desk", and "dirt", each reversed and placed at the end to hide what's going on ...! There are plenty of other examples I could point to in support of this theory, but the clincher for us is the jar (which, incidentally, contains mustard) pictured at the top of this post.

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Top Ten List(s)

                    TOP TEN THINGS I'LL MISS ABOUT TARTU
                                    (when I leave in a few weeks)

10. Chloe's school. (Above, a recent music lesson.) What it offers is perfect for her at this moment, and she is thriving there.
9. Kalev dark chocolate with cherries. Tender, delicious... a guilty pleasure hidden in my healthy pregnancy trail mix!
8. The variety of inexpensive muesli-type breakfast cereals. I wasn't a big muesli fan before coming here. Cold milk over cold grains... nah. Now I know how good it can get! Sweetened dried coconut, cashews, granola -- you can even get different kinds chocolate muesli, including one with chocolate granola and creamy white chocolate chunks that makes you feel like you just ate some mousse.
7. Some features of our kitchen design, like a convenient counter for cooking that can also be reached from the eating area -- and which Chloe can reach by standing on a chair -- and a hot, efficient oven that is an easy height to look into.
6. How affordable everything is. And that taxi drivers don't expect tips.
5. The Tartu Toy Museum Playspace. An airy, attractively designed wooden loft with arts and craft tables, a reading area with a comfy couch -- even if the books are in Estonian -- toys, blocks, trains, puppets, games, costumes, etc. Chloe has limitless fun here, as at Rüütli. (At right, she examines a jigsaw puzzle of Estonia in the museum itself, outside the play area.) I would have made it a tie with the Rüütli space (#4), but to get to this one you have to go through the real museum and up some stairs -- points off for making it more difficult to remove a recalcitrant toddler when it's time to go, especially when one is weighty with child.
4. The Rüütli Playspace. Ground floor only! Play kitchen and table set (high-quality, Scandinavian-style wood); indoor slides; Legos of all sizes (including shoebox-sized); a place to frolic amidst plastic balls; huge foam/vinyl blocks; hula hoops; countless tiny toys; a zillion high-quality jigsaw puzzles and memory games -- Ravensburger puzzle and game company, I love you! Clean carpet with warmed floors underneath. Drop-off afternoon babysitting in this child heaven at $3/hour. (No, that is not a typo!)
3. Having adjacent toddler playspaces conveniently available in places you need to drag your kid to, like cafeterias, cafés, and department stores.
2. Our bathroom. Cozy heated floors, attractive tiled walls, excellent shower, sunken bath, sauna. Its warmth makes it the best room for yoga! I read books to Chloe while she's in the bath; Chloe chats to us while we're bathing/dressing. Alan has tried the sauna twice so far and is a convert to its charms. (Google "Finnish sauna" for interesting information.) We have spent many quality family hours in this bathroom!
1. Alan, during the five weeks we'll be on separate continents.

     TOP FIVE THINGS I WON'T MISS ABOUT TARTU
5. How our dishwasher always blows a fuse in the middle of a wash cycle.
4. How extremely costly it is to call the US, and even the UK. Skype, here we come! (Now we know why it was invented in Estonia.)
3. Pushing a stroller through ice and slush. Try doing this while pregnant.
2. The February cold, for worsening children's risk of ear infection.
1. The February cold, just because it's cold.

     TOP FIVE THINGS I MISS ABOUT SWARTHMORE
5. That people speak a language I understand. Usually.
4. Grape Nuts. Yes, I constantly eat cereal. Cut me some slack, I'm pregnant! Corn Flakes are good, but give me Grape Nuts any day for a serious crunch and a nutritional whallop.
3. Access to English-language academic journals and fast, free interlibrary loan. OK, so I happen to be working on a book.
2. The "Wiggle Library," our family name for a nearby public library due to its excellent toddler story-and-song time.
1. My own bed.

                         - sac

School Run

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, I stroll Chloe across central Tartu to get to her school by 8.00 am or so. Its a pleasant walk through the heart of the old part of town. After crossing the main pedestrian bridge we walk across the Central Square (see above) and then turn the corner and go past the University Main Building;


This is known to all Estonian because it appears on the back of the 2 Kroon banknote (worth about 20 U.S. cents, or 10 pence).


The last part of the walk takes us up and around the central (and only) hill in Tartu, and site of the original medieval castle that formed the core of the first settlement here. Once I've dropped Chloe off I head back down the hill to my "office in Estonia" (as Chloe refers to it), located a couple of hundred yards from the Main Building pictured above. Incidentally, the building in the foreground of the photo on the left dates from the late 18th century, and it is where I give my Wednesday lectures.

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Mystery Sign

We're not sure about what this sign (on a side street in Tartu) is prohibiting. Does it mean no playing soccer, no driving, or no putting your house on skis?

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Leeks and Soup

The range of fresh vegetables available in Estonian supermarkets in the winter is not great, but one of our standbys has been leeks. We had remarked on the impressive size of the average Estonian leek, and then a couple of weeks ago I read the following on an Estonian food website:
"I realised last week that 'thick leeks' in Scotland must be much smaller than 'thick leeks' in Estonia. ... The recipe prescribed 6 'long, thick leeks', which I dutifully bought. However, after halving and rinsing and slicing just three of these monster leeks, I realised I already had more than enough."

Chloe and I strolled up the left bank of Tartu’s main river, the Emajoe, on Tuesday and into the part of Tartu known as “Suppelinn” – literally, “Soup Town.” Historically, this was a slum neighborhood of Tartu, with poorly constructed wooden houses built on low-lying land next to the river that was prone to flooding every Spring. Apparently the name comes from the fact that all the streets in the area are named after vegetables – there’s Potato Street, Cabbage Street, Carrot Street, etc. The reason for this is that the area used to contain allotments (small vegetable gardens). In the picture below, “Hernes” means “Pea.” I’m not sure what “Marja” means.


The area still has a run-down feel to it – though it hardly qualifies as a “slum”. The houses are still predominently made of wood, and most of the roads are unpaved. But it has a picturesque, old-fashioned sort of feel to it, and it made for an interesting walk.



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Adventures in Estonian: Part 3

I've mentioned in an earlier posting that Estonian lacks 6 letters of the English alphabet (c, q, w, x, y, z), but adds several more accented vowels, which are considered to be separate letters, such as ä, and ü. (Incidentally, our Estonian dictionary has only two entries for 'W': Wales, and WC.)


We were intrigued when the bus passed a supermarket on the outskirts of Tallinn called Ülemiste, whose symbol is just a single Ü. We took the above picture of the sign.

Another previous post on a linguistic theme mentioned that the Estonian word, "jäääär", meaning "edge of ice", holds the world record for most consecutive repetitions of the same vowel in a single word. We were excited, therefore, when posters advertizing a performance of a band called Jäääär started appearing in Tartu last week. Unfortunately I was away in Sweden on the day of the concert, so we still don't know what they look like or sound like. In fact the rest of the poster (see below) proved to be a challenge to decipher.


The key phrase is "Naistepäeva järelkontsert." From my scanty knowledge of Estonian, I already knew that "päeva" means "day", and that "kontsert" means "concert." But what day were they talking about? I knew it wasn't one of the days of the week, so I tried looking up "naiste" in our handy pocket Estonian-English dictionary. They didn't have that exact word, but the closest match was "naistepesu", which apparently means "lingerie." A lingerie-day concert? The mind boggles. It was not until several days later that the mystery was solved. The prefix "nais-" turns out to mean "woman". Estonia celebrates 'Women's Day' on March 9th, apparently a relic of the Soviet era, and this was what the concert was in honor of. Meanwhile, "naistepesu" in literal translation means "women's laundry", i.e. lingerie. (I might have been able to guess this if I had thought about it, because one of the first Estonian words we learned was "pesupulber", which means "laundry detergent".)

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Tallinn Trip (Part 2)

So now a Chloe's eye view of our trip to Tallinn. One highlight was seeing a performance at the Estonian National Puppet Theatre. The show we saw was aimed at the 2- to 4-year-old demographic, which was perfect for Chloe (and also meant that any Estonian involved was not crucial to following the plot). Various interesting animals were featured, as well as unusual supporting cast members like an animated rain cloud. After the show the puppeters came out into the audience with a sampling of puppets. Chloe had mixed feelings about this (as you can see from her expression in the picture below).


Chloe has an ambivalent relationship with fake animals -- on the one hand really excited in seeing them and watching their various antics, on the other hand quite scared when she meets one up close. For example, here is a flashback from last summer near Swarthmore when she met Cookie Monster in person ... .


Food (of course) was another highlight of Chloe's trip to Tallinn. She did very well on the ice cream front, and probably the most impressive thing she demolished was the chocolate sundae at Monday lunch. Here are two 'during' and 'after' pictures.



Perhaps Chloe's only disappointment was at the size of Tallinn. I told her when we got on the bus in Tartu that we were going to a big town called Tallinn and that it was the biggest city in Estonia. She asked what a city was and I reinforced the idea that it was like a town, just bigger. When we got off the bus in Tallinn and walked into the Old Town and to the apartment we were renting, Chloe said plaintively, "Where's Tallinn?" I told her that we this was Tallinn all around us, and she cried "I just want to go to the big city. Where's the big city?"

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Tallinn Trip (Part 1)

So, as mentioned in the previous post, we spent three days in Estonia's capital city, Tallinn, earlier this week. The city has one of the best preserved medieval centres in Europe and we rented an apartment right in the heart of 'Old Town', next to the main square (shown above at night, after a light snowfall on the first evening). We had the chance to explore the alleyways, churches, and fortifications, and got some nice views of the city roofscape from the hill on the west side of Old Town.


We ate well too, and Chloe joined us in our various culinary adventures. On our first night we sampled what was billed as the best Russian restaurant in town, and put away large quantities of hearty Russian specialties, including red caviar on pancakes (blini), pickles with honey and yoghurt, and meat dumplings under pie crust (which is what Shelley is eating in the picture below).

Chloe seemed to have a great time, walking the cobbled streets, pointing out dragon-shaped gargoyles on the side of the town hall, staying up late to eat interesting food, and waking up early and having books read to her by Granny.

More Tallinn stories coming soon!

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Bus Blog

We've been quiet on the blogging front for a few days because Granny has been visiting and then we all went to Tallinn on Sunday. In fact I am taking advantage of Estonian 21st-century technology to post this brief entry. We are on the bus on our way back to Tartu and I have my laptop plugged into an outlet on the ceiling. It turns out the bus has wireless internet access -- very convenient! Here is a 'live' picture taken over my laptop ... .

Hopefully we will be able to put up some pictures in the next day or so showing some of our Estonian travel adventures with Granny.

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Its a Wrap

So for the first time in a couple of weeks it is actually not bitterly cold. The temperature has risen to above freezing during the day, and the roads and sidewalks are turning to slush. But Chloe has got so used to having every exposed part of her body wrapped up against the extreme cold she still insists on leaving the house dressed as shown above. A further complication yesterday was that there was also light snow falling. Chloe complained about the snow falling in her eyes and asked for her woolly hat to be pulled down right over her eyes. This turned her into a kind of purple mummy.

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