Day 1 of a week of getting things done – baking day. Brownies for the freezer, a butternut squash pie for dinner, and Estonian-style rye bread with malt.

The bread dough looked like chocolate cake when it was done – until I put a tin with real chocolate cake batter next to it.

Dark, malty rye bread is one of those things that I always make sure to buy when I’m in Estonia, and from the Baltic store in Sollentuna as well. I have never tried to make it myself. I bought an Estonian bread book this summer, and then ordered malt flour online, and made my first attempt. Initially my hopes were low because the dough didn’t seem to rise at all. Then I just ignored the timings in the recipe completely and let it proof for about twice as long as specified, and it came out great. Tasted just like it should.

Back home.

I get a kind of emotional hangover after significant trips, and doubly so after any trip to Estonia. It’s physically convenient and comfortable to be back home – my own bed, a sofa to my own taste, proper meals – but emotionally I feel empty and bereft.

I find myself wondering what I am even doing here. Why do I even live in Sweden? I fit in with my friends in Tartu on a level that nothing in Sweden can compare to. In Sweden, I feel forever the outsider, looking in. I can be as fluent as anyone when it comes to the language, as informed as anyone when it comes to popular culture and current events, and still it doesn’t matter. On a very deep level, they are strangers. Or rather, I am one.

I wish I hadn’t been moved to Sweden. Or that I hadn’t integrated myself here so deeply. Moving back at this point would just make things worse.

I’m feeling it more than ever after the divorce. I used to at least have Eric as a strong anchor here. When that relationship ended, I lost more than the relationship itself.

Three hours of driving from Tartu to Paldiski (with a small detour to Kapsta to say good-bye to my father’s wife), broken only by a couple of gas station stops. We’ve somehow settled into a habit of stopping for meals at Circle K during our drives in Estonia – they’ve got a good range of burgers and hot wraps, as well as lighter meals.

And then the usual waiting in Paldiski harbour. Check-in closes an hour before departure, but passengers are really encouraged to be there two hours before. And then we just sit here in the giant staging area and watch as all the giant lorries get directed to board first. Boring.

We went mushroom-picking! My friend very generously shared her chantarelle spot with us.

We occasionally picked mushrooms in my childhood, but I don’t like most wild mushrooms much. Porcini mushrooms in particular have quite an unpleasant texture, in my opinion.

Chantarelles are different. They actually taste good.

They’re also quite pretty, with their bright yellow colour. Which happens to be exactly the same tone of yellow as fallen birch leaves, which are quite numerous in the forest. When the mushrooms are partially hidden under a layer of moss, they can be tricky to spot.

We got tons of mushrooms between the four of us. More than we can eat today (and Adrian and I are heading back to Sweden tomorrow) so we gave away almost half of our harvest to another friend.

The younger generation (= Adrian, plus my friends’ kids of roughly similar age) went to an escape room. I wouldn’t have minded joining them – it’s been years since I did that – but groups were limited to 5 persons, so us “adults” had to find alternative entertainment.

My friend and I went to the Estonian National Museum, primarily to see an exhibition about the dyes historically used for traditional Estonian clothes. An excellent exhibition, with plenty of archive material, as well as modern artefacts to illustrate the dying process, such as indigo-dyed wool showing how later dye baths give a weaker colour, and multiple batches of yarn dyed with the same plant but with subtle variations in the process. There were videos showing just how intricate the dye preparation process could be (how did they even come up with all those steps?) and more videos with deep dives into specific garments in the museum’s archives, that showed just how connected rural Estonia was to the global dye trade even several centuries ago. We spent hours there.

There were a few other textile-oriented temporary exhibitions. One was an embroidered tapestry, which was embroidered by volunteers during 2025 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the first Estonian-language book. The tapestry wandered throughout Estonia, different people embroidering different parts of it, and my friend even located the part that she had worked on.

(The first Estonian-language book was a protestant tract and was thus burned by the church. The oldest surviving printed material in Estonian dates from 1535.)

Speaking of firsts, one room held the first and original blue-black-white flag. It was buried at the start of the Soviet occupation, then dug up and hidden (in a farmhouse chimney) until 1991, its location known only to a handful of people through all those years.

Met up with old friends in the evening. Went shopping during the day – a book store is always part of my Tartu itinerary, and a candy store is on Adrian’s.

I bought a bread book and an origami kit; Adrian found a Marvel graphic novel.

In the candy store, we focus on the chocolate-coated jellies. They seem to be popular – I’m pretty sure there were more flavours than even just a couple of years ago.

In the afternoon we went for a walk along the cycle path that replaced the old narrow-gauge freight railway past the slaughterhouse/meat factory and into the riverside industrial district. Adrian commented that it was an odd placement for a slaughterhouse, in the middle of town, right next to a nursery. That’s the nursery I attended as a child, and you could literally hear the noise of a mass of distressed animals being transported to the slaughterhouse from the yard.

I explained that this used to be right on the edge of town, and that the town has grown past the slaughterhouse. Back when I was a child, the town really ended here – on the other side of the nursery there was just some vacant ground with scruffy vegetation and a few odd low-slung concrete structures that I used to climb around on. (Not when I was nursery-aged but later.)

The meat factory went bankrupt in the late 1990s and was torn down in the 2000s. For some reason, a piece of it (or a connection an adjacent building) is still standing. The nursery is still there.

The meat factory may have been there before the nursery, but it was still an odd choice to put the nursery right there. Here’s an archive photo of the meat factory and the map next to the photo shows just how close to the nursery it was.

Visiting my father at Põlva hospital, where he is recovering from a back injury. His prognosis is very unclear, both in terms of how much recovery can be expected, and in what time frame.

On the ferry to our annual Estonia trip.

It’s just me and Adrian this time. Ingrid is off in Boden doing her military service; my brother chose not to come this year.

We drove from Stockholm to Kapellskär to take the DFDS ferry to Paldiski. It’s just over an hour of driving, and towards the end there are quite a lot of lorries which I presume are all heading for the freight harbour. For lack of better entertainment during the trip, we paid some attention to the lorries. A few of them were branded “AB G Persson”, which at first glance sounds like a Swedish limited-liability company (AB for aktiebolag, and “Persson” being a very common last name). A solid, reliable name. Then we noticed the link to a Latvian website, and concluded that it was actually a Latvian company masquerading as a Swedish one.

DFDS is boring but efficient. The only thing I truly dislike about them is the on-board satellite network that you get forcefully connected to without any meaningful choice. There’s an SMS you get upon connecting, but by that time it’s too late – in the two minutes it takes to disconnect, you can already have racked up hundreds of kronor worth of charges. Our new routine is to turn off all mobile connectivity the moment the ship leaves the harbour, and not turn it on again until we know that we have docked.

One of my favourite Estonian foods is karask, a barley bread with sour milk.

It wasn’t a staple when I was a child, but my mum made it a few times. Now it’s come back as a commercial product – not in every supermarket, but some do sell it, as well as some artisanal bakeries and food market stalls.

For some reason I’ve never tried making my own, until very recently. I made a first batch a couple of weeks ago, and another one this weekend.

What made this one even better than a standard karask was the addition of quark to the batter. Barley is great, quark is great, the combination is even better.

These days quark is a health food: all low-fat or no-fat, marketed for its high protein content, homogenized into a smooth, creamy mass for easy consumption. Back when I was a child, Estonian quark was a solid, dense, rich product. The richer version was 12% fat, I believe, while the skinny kind was 6%. It was sold in paper-wrapped pats, kind of like you’d buy butter today.

I ran across old-school tvorog at the Baltic store. Sold in one-kilogram blocks, grainy and solid, just like it’s supposed to be. Not Estonian but Latvian, I believe (didn’t look to closely at the packaging) but still – what a find. Half of the one-kilo package immediately went into a double recipe of quark karask. The other half is in the freezer for when I bake another batch.

Served warm, with butter and – by suggestion of the recipe page – honey. I never had honey on my karask before but why not.

Visited Tre brudar, a nearby shop that sells foodstuff from the Baltic countries. Ingrid was hoping for Merekivid candy, but they didn’t have any. Instead we came home with Estonian dark rye bread and Kohuke quark sweets.