Got home from Estonia. Now I’m tired. Lots of driving yesterday, lots of driving today (to take my brother back to his home in Uppsala), lots of boring waiting in between. No photo for today. Instead, here are some more photos from Estonia.

From our visit (one of several) to our favourite restaurant, Veg Machine. Its combination of vegan food, flavours we like, low prices and great location, has made it our recurring favourite.

From ice skating at an indoor arena in Lõunakeskus, which is a nice way to pass time together with friends. Kids skating – with a lot of horseplay and monkeying around – and adults chatting.

From my late-night walks with one of my best childhood friends and her dog. More opportunities for leisurely talking about everything between heaven and earth, while getting fresh air and stretching my legs.

We walk along local streets and paths rather than any fancy parks, so this has also been a great way to see how Tartu and especially my old neighbourhood has changed. Where new supermarkets have popped up, where an old meat processing plant has been torn down and replaced with greenery, where the railway serving the plant has been converted into a path for bicycles and pedestrians, and where the scruffy industrial underbelly has remained as it ever was.

The ferry trip with Tallink from Tallinn to Stockholm is made up of hours of boredom – cycling between various somewhat-uncomfortable places to sit and make time pass – and the buffet dinner.

For me the highlight is usually the array of pickled herring. The best one today was one flavoured with elderflower, dill and fennel.

Adrian loves the dessert buffet best. This time there was a chocolate fountain, in addition to all the cakes.

After dinner Ingrid and I spent some time simply roaming the corridors, for lack of a better pastime. The guests on deck 9 got arts posters in their corridors, with Miró and Kandinsky and other abstractionists.

The carpets in the corridors had an odd pattern that made everything look just slightly skewed. Almost giving me hints of seasickness without any waves at all.

Ingrid and I went to ERM, the Estonian National Museum, while Adrian was off with a friend playing video games.

The main draw was an exhibition about surrealism in Tartu and Prague, a collaboration between museums in the two cities. Some of it was interesting, but some works looked more like “general weird” than surrealism to me.

The other current exhibition was about the city at night – one part about nightclubs and bars (most underwhelming) and another about the city at night through the eyes of animals. A wall about people’s encounters with foxes was somewhat interesting, but not much.

A third one was about Bling, which seemed to be an Estonian equivalent of Burning Man. Great for the people who had been there, but I’m not sure what the rest of us were supposed to get out of photos of them having fun.

The entrance to that area was a cool installation of textile and light, though.

We finished off our visit by strolling through my favourite permanent exhibit, Echo of the Urals, about our “cousins”, all the other Finno-Ugric people. I especially like the visual design of the exhibition space, and the icons and signs derived from traditional Finno-Ugric decorative patterns and old Estonian house marks.

Repeating a favourite activity from last year – canoe rafting from Taevaskoja to Kiidjärve.

We were slightly fewer people (and dogs) this year, so we fit on a single raft. Which made things simpler and somewhat easier, because not everybody had to paddle all the time. On the other hand I had fewer photo opportunities, because I was right on top of people all the time.

Except when we made a stop to walk the dog!

The paddling itself is not much of a challenge these days, with lots of young, strong people who’ve all done this before. It got more exciting the further upriver we came, as the river narrowed and the fallen trees grew more numerous.

One of the things we did together with my father today was look through some very old family photos, trying to figure out who was who. I got to hear some stories of my long-dead grandfather and great-grandparents. We drew a family tree for Ingrid and Adrian to keep all the names straight.

Here’s my great-grandfather Eduard, in St Petersburg, then Petrograd, with my grandfather Peeter (born 1911) and my great-aunt Aino (born 1913). Guessing from the children’s approximate ages, I’d say the photo is from 1914. Peeter died well before I was born, but I met Aino several times. I remember her as a large-boned old lady with a loud, happy laugh.

And this is my great-grandmother Gertrud Agathe, with Aino and Peeter again, and their younger siblings Paul and Ott. Ott died young in WW2. Paul emigrated to Canada at some point; I remember him sending gifts to us after the fall of the Iron Curtain. (Including my first jigsaw puzzles ever. Soviet Estonia did not have jigsaw puzzles. I had some home-made “mosaic” puzzles – that great-aunt Aino made and gifted to me, actually – but the jigsaw puzzles from Paul were an exotic treat.)

The boys all have the Toomik family protruding ears. I had the same; I remember having surgery to fix them when I was still in pre-school. Neither Ingrid nor Adrian has inherited them.

Another day in the countryside with my father and his wife. More stacking and splitting of firewood, in between sudden rain showers that make us hurry inside. And the stack of firewood we moved last time made possible a whole queue of other tasks, including repairing and painting the woodshed wall that the old stack was pushing against.

Afterwards we made sushi, which has become a yearly tradition by now.

Same procedure as last year?

Same procedure as every year.

I was a teeny bit worried that Ingrid and Adrian wouldn’t find this exciting any more, after climbing a via ferrata, but this poses a different kind of challenge and was still fun.

The last obstacle on the last climbing course, the “Tarzan jump”. Was pretty scary the first time, a little bit scary the second year, and barely makes us pause now.

Ahhaa science centre.

About two thirds of the space holds a permanent exhibition, while the remaining third is used for temporary ones. Past exhibitions have ranged from “spies and detectives” to “nutrition”. Currently the theme of the temporary exhibition is “adrenaline”. In effect, it was a small-scale amusement park for older kids.

There was a “rocket chair” for acceleration…

… and an extra steep slide, with a thick mat to land on…

… and a 360 degree loop bicycle ride. All three of us tried it, but Ingrid was the only one to manage the full 360 degrees – there was something wrong with the pedals on the bike that sometimes made them go backwards forcefully when the bike itself rolled backwards, and when that happened, we kept losing our footing and got hit in the shins by the pedals. Ingrid somehow got past that and beat the day’s record of most consecutive loops.

The permanent exhibition also has plenty of hands-on experiments. Like using a rope and pulley system to lift up your friends, and learning how the number of pulleys affects the force required…

… or riding a bike on a tightrope, and learning how a counterweight makes balancing trivial.

We brought a pair of dumbbells with us to Estonia so that Ingrid could get some workouts in. And since I was just sitting doing nothing in particular, and the dumbbells were also doing nothing in particular during the pauses between Ingrid’s sets, I joined her and did the same upper-body workout.

Spent the day at my father’s country house.

My father’s body is wearing out (due to a combination of age and childhood diseases) and his wife is shouldering all of the physical work around the house and the yard, so we made ourselves useful and moved a stack of firewood. Doable alone, but much faster with three or four people.

Once that was done, the next two-person job was to climb up into a tree to cut up a branch that had fallen there due to winter snows and gotten stuck. Ingrid did the climbing, I did the ladder-supporting.