Don and Nina in Tartu

I am having fun this weekend hosting Don and Nina who are visiting Estonia for 5 days. Their time in Tartu coincides with the annual 'Student Days' Spring festival, a weeklong prelude to the holiday on May 1st which involves various outdoor activities, concerts, drinking competitions, etc. The picture above shows Don and Nina sampling local cuisine in the beer tent that has been set up in Tartu's main square. Below is an example of one of the eccentric competitions happening during the Student Days, this one involving seeing who can sit on the tallest tower of plastic crates without falling off. The guy in the picture was the best one we saw, managing 22 boxes before everything came tumbling down.


And this is Don modeling the local handicrafts ... .


arb

Adventures in Estonian (Part Four) -- and Latvian!

I'm just back from an enjoyable 3-day trip to Riga, capital of Latvia, and largest city in the three Baltic countries. The excuse for the trip was to give a philosophy talk at the University of Latvia, but I also managed to fit in a lot of sightseeing too.

It was also interesting to compare the languages of Latvian and Estonian. They are completely unrelated to each other, but Latvian -- like Estonian -- is very distant from most other languages spoken in Europe. While wandering around Riga I saw lots of signs on windowfronts saying 'Pasta'. Also lots of pizza places, but no signs saying 'Pizza.' It turns out that the Latvian transliteration of 'pizza' is 'pica'. (This works because c is pronounced 'ts' in Latvian.) Meanwhile the pasta signs were actually post offices ('pasta' is post in Latvian)!

On the topic of transliteration, as I mentioned in a previous posting Estonian lacks various letters from its alphabet, including w, x, y, and z. Also the j is pronounced as a y. This means that one word which is particularly hard to give an Estonian version of is 'jazz'. Their solution is to write it 'dzhass.'

After my seminar last night we went out to a Chinese restaurant, reputedly the best in the whole of Estonia (not that there is a whole lot of competition). The name of the restaurant is 'Tsink Plekk Pang'. The joke is that this sounds Chinese but in fact all the words are Estonian. It means 'zinc plated bucket' in Estonian (and the light fittings inside are indeed made from zinc plated buckets with holes in the bottom of them).

arb

Visiting the Twins

I thought I'd post some of the pictures from a couple of weeks ago when Shelley and Chloe visited the twins in London on their way back to the U.S. I'll leave Shelley to add any commentary of her own. The above picture shows the twins modeling the hats that Shelley knitted (taking just one week for each!)

And below are Chloe and Shelley taking turns holding Lucy.



arb

Chloe's cooking gallery

With Chloe having left Estonia I can't take any more pictures of her for this blog. Luckily I have a large archive of 'Chloe in Estonia' pictures that I can raid from time to time. Today's theme: cooking.





arb

France vs. Estonia

I was amused to stumble across the following piece while browsing the Web the other day. It's from the blog, “Letters from a Broad”, written (so it seems!) by an American living in France:

WEDNESDAY, MAY 10, 2006
I should have moved to Estonia instead...

That's what I tell myself every time I see yet another book by an American or other anglophone about how hilarious it to live in France surrounded by those outrageously wacky French people!

By contrast, I doubt that there is even one single book about how humorous it is for an American to live in Estonia surrounded by those lovably quirky Estonians! Estonia even has a funny-sounding name. Say it a few times. Estonia. I could be writing that book! If only I hadn't followed every other pathetically unoriginal American on the planet to France, the country that comes up first when you google "travel -- been there, done that."

Still, even though it would be more original, I'm not sure that "Letters from a Broad" would be funnier if these missives were coming from Estonia instead of France. I can just picture myself spending the whole morning giggling while crafting the perfect line that is a subtle riff on some typical stereotype about Estonians. And then I picture my American audience reading it and going “Wha...? I don't get it...”

Helsinki Trip (Part Three)

This is a final post of pictures from our trip to Helsinki over Easter weekend. Above is the main harbor, with the Lutheran cathedral in the background. Our hotel was beside the harbor, to the right of this picture. There is no subway system in Helsinki, but there is a convenient network of trams. Here are Shelley and Chloe, on their way to the 'Rock Church', with the harbor in the background:


Here is the cathedral again, shown just after sunset on Easter Sunday evening:


And this shows Chloe and I reading a book on the ferry back from Helsinki to Tallinn. This fast, small ferry (which does not run in the winter because it cannot get through the ice) takes only about an hour and a half to make the trip across this narrow bit of the Baltic Sea.


arb

Saun(a) Time!

The sauna (or 'saun' in Estonian) is an important part of Estonian culture, but -- for obvious reasons -- visitors to Estonia often remain unaware of this fact. Most apartments here, including ours, have a built-in sauna, as do all hotels and apartment blocks, and even some restaurants! The Estonian saun is part of the Finnish sauna tradition. The basic elements appear in the picture above: heated coals (usually heated by electricity these days), benches to sit on, and a bucket of water and a ladle. Water is periodically scooped from the bucket and poured onto the hot coals. This produces an invisible cloud of steam which makes things a lot hotter for half a minute or so.

I've used our apartment sauna a couple of times, following instructions that I read on the Internet. The Finns and Estonians like their saunas hot (even by sauna standards), typically in the range of 70 to 100 degrees Celsius (i.e. between 160 and 212 Fahrenheit). According to the thermometer on the wall of our sauna, the second sauna I took reached around 170 Fahrenheit -- plenty hot for me.

Anyway, yesterday I gave a lecture to some professors and students in the Department of Mathematics in Tartu. It was my first time in their building so I was given a tour. Up on the 6th floor is a faculty lounge and adjoining the lounge is a sauna! Noting my interest, the professor who hosted my talk yesterday invited me to their weekly Mathematics Department sauna party. So it was that I headed across campus this afternoon carrying my towel and not knowing quite what to expect. I was excited because I knew from talking to people that being invited to take a sauna in Estonia is a big deal.

It turned out to be a very interesting cultural experience. People (it was an all male group) arrived at different times, undressed in an adjoining changing room and then headed into the sauna itself, which could fit up to four people at a time on its upper bench. Distinguished professors to whom I had been lecturing the day before were sitting around naked in the steamy haze. I'll leave you to imagine the scene. Suffice to say that it didn't look like this:


From time to time someone would throw more water on the coals. After a few minutes of sweating you would go out for a quick cold shower, wrap a towel around you and head out into the faculty lounge where beer and snacks were consumed. After drinking a while, and cooling down, you would head back in for another blast of sauna heat. I managed three rounds of the sauna-shower-beer rotation before calling it a night. It was a memorable occasion and I plan to go again at least once before I leave Estonia next month.

arb