After a visit to the aviation museum (with aircraft and helicopters of all sorts to look at and climb into) my father and his wife treated us all to a sushi making and eating session. I’ve only made temaki at home before; here they were rolling proper maki and nigiri pieces together with the kids.

Our annual visit to Otepää adventure park with a bunch of friends and kids. Ingrid on all five trails; Adrian on three; all three of us on the ziplines.

Rain seemed again to be imminent several times but never actually materialized.

Ingrid doing the “Tarzan leap”:

The skies continue to threaten us with rain so we looked for indoor activities today. We went to the Palamuse school museum with my father and his wife.

This museum is built in and around an old parish school, which is famous in Estonia because of a book & movie (“Kevade”) that takes place here. We started planning this visit with my (step)parents already some months ago. I read “Kevade” with Adrian in the spring so that he would understand all the references and know what the story is about.


We visited both the schoolroom with its benches and blackboard etc, and the rooms where the parish clerk / school headmaster lived – bedroom, kitchen, living room etc. In the schoolroom Ingrid practised writing with a nib pen and ink. Adrian tried writing on slate, and ringing the school bell. Meanwhile I browsed old schoolbooks. I loved the maths problems, very practically oriented!

The kitchen maid gets a salary of 96 rubles a year; after 8 months of service she left her job and got 29 rubles from her master. How much salary had she withdrawn during the year?

A farmer sold 8 chetverts of wheat and 12 chetverts of rye, for the wheat he got 72 rubles. How much did he get for the rye, if 9 chetverts of rye costs the same as 5 chetverts of wheat?

There was also a modern annex with an exhibition that has information about the book, schools in Estonia in the late 19th/early 20th century, the history of parish schools in Estonia, etc. Quite interesting and well-presented, I thought. The annex also had hands-on exhibits, based mostly on memorable scenes from the book. You can spin Toots’ red wooden globe and find all the landmarks on it, and dig through all the stuff in his pockets, and climb the pantry shelves to get to the “Lati pats” wine bottles.

In the afternoon we did a quick tour of Tartu’s latest and greatest graffiti paintings.

In Tartu. In the afternoon & evening our friend group hung out in the garden of one of said friends. In addition to three bunches of children of various ages, there was also a young, very friendly playful dog.

Ingrid was very hesitant to begin. She doesn’t like dogs jumping up on her, and she definitely doesn’t like them licking her and getting dog slobber on her face. Being young and fond of people, and frankly not very disciplined, of course this dog greeted us all by immediately jumping and licking all over us.

Neither Ingrid nor Adrian have much experience with dogs and don’t know what to expect, or how to read a dog’s mood. What if it bites? So it’s natural to be cautious around a large dog like this. But the others clearly had a lot of fun playing with the dog, so Ingrid hovered there indecisively, torn between wanting to play and not quite daring to. As the evening passed, she dared more and more.

This year’s song festival was the festival’s 150th jubilee. I can’t say whether it was grander than the “ordinary” ones, I haven’t been to enough of these to have anything to compare to. But it was pretty darn impressive. 100,000 people on the festival grounds, 30,000 performers and 70,000 in the audience. Around the 100,000 person mark, ticket sales were simply stopped for security reasons.

I heard that there were plenty of people who had come from afar and hoped to buy tickets at the gate, and were then turned away. Initially the weather forecast had promised really crappy weather, so people had made other plans and then changed them last minute.

The forecast promised not just rain all day long, but pouring rain all weekend, and the days before and after. The grounds would have been a morass of mud in that case! But the closer we got to the event itself, the less rain the forecasts contained, and in the end we didn’t get a single drop. It was pretty cold though. We’re not used to 12 degree weather after our week in Mallorca.

Even with the ticket sales stopped, the grounds were absolutely packed. We sat up at the very back like last year, and even up there it was cramped. Luckily we were early and had no trouble finding space for our picnic blankets. But towards the end, we had to pull in our blankets to make space.

After barely two days at home, we’re off again, this time to Estonia. I had initially planned for more rest between the two trips, but due to hotel availability one of them had to be rescheduled, so there we are. If we want to squeeze three trips into a single summer vacation, there isn’t an awful lot of time left over for other things.

Tomorrow we’ll be attending the song festival, so instead of heading straight to Tartu as we usually do, we stay in Tallinn for the weekend. Today we strolled around Tallinn’s old town, which we haven’t done in many years. The town was was full of visitors for the song festival, and plenty of foreign tourists as well. Just like Prague, and Valldemossa. I wonder if central Stockholm is the same.



Tallinn is all about medieval cobbled streets, and churches and towers and walls. We sampled some of each, and even toured defensive tunnels under the walls.

Having been under the earth, we climbed up into Oleviste church tower, which – back in the 16th century – used to be the tallest building in Europe. Or maybe the whole world, I can’t remember for certain.



Lunch at Tallinn’s market hall was a nice surprise. The range of eateries was much wider and more varied than I had dared to hope, and so were the choices of vegetarian food.

After decades of a TV free life, we’ve bought one. We’ve been watching movies and playing games on a computer monitor until now. But for various reasons we needed to separate the movie-watching and game-playing from the computer. Hence, a TV.

The novelty of games on a large screen is mesmerizing.

The cherries have mostly ripened while we were gone. The kids are now practising spitting cherry pits as far as possible.

We’re home again! 12 degrees and rain. Hoodies, cardigans and thick socks.

Day 7 of 7. Today was a travel day really but we had a late flight so we got to spend half a day in Palma de Mallorca. We left our luggage at the station and just walked around, aiming our steps vaguely towards the old town and the cathedral.

Mostly we were hot. Then we found a museum, I’m not even really sure what its name was but it had things (mostly art) from Mallorca throughout the ages. The particulars weren’t important, the main thing was that the museum was blessedly cool.