Our Tartu trip has yet again coincided with the Hansa market. We shopped for honey and artisanal karask bread, and browsed all sorts of other interesting stalls.

There are things that are a natural part of life in Estonia that barely exist in Sweden. I spend the entire year missing some of them.

Honey is one of them. Technically, yes, of course you can buy honey in Sweden. Except that most supermarkets offer you “solid honey” and “liquid honey” with little more detail, and both are from “a mixture of EU and non-EU sources”. Whereas an Estonian supermarket will have an entire end shelf with several brands of artisanal honey gathered from specified plant species, and fresh honeycomb, and flavoured honey, and more.

Women’s clothing is another such thing. And again, yes, Swedish stores sell women’s clothing, but it’s all either very dull or very “fast fashion”. It doesn’t take many minutes walking around Tartu to notice the differences in how women dress here. They wear colour and patterns! Of all my summer dresses, only one is Swedish. The rest I’ve bought in either Estonia or London. Every single clothing-oriented market stall has all kinds of interesting dresses. Linen dresses with embroidery! Spiral cut skirts! Dresses with lace detail! Sadly I have all the dresses I need right now and can’t justify buying any more.

On the ferry to Estonia. Taking the cheaper and faster cargo-oriented ferry again this time, from Kapellskär to Paldiski.

We keep going back and forth between our two travel alternatives. One year we take the Tallink ferry, effectively a floating hotel which leaves from Stockholm proper at six in the evening and arrives in central Tallinn at ten in the morning and does their best to sell us expensive buffet meals and tax-free shopping in the meantime. The next year we think of all the wasted time onboard and all the expensive meals, and we swing for DFDS, which has a bare-bones ferry (though clean and tidy and in good shape) which leaves at nine in the evening and arrives at eight in the morning, and puts all the focus on just getting us there. And after those trips we sigh about having to drive all the way to Kapellskär, and the thin cabin walls and the fact that there aren’t even any lounges to hang around.

The so-called sun deck is in reality a smoking deck.

The last meter of the deck before the railing is roped off and marked as “restricted area”. Did people use to, I don’t know, spit on the car deck below? Can’t have nice things because some people are idiots.

We had a team lunch with the Sortera team today, and walked from the office to the restaurant, with nice views along the way.

During dinner, our project manager – very clearly the most “people person” among us – kept the conversation interesting by throwing out questions. One of them was: what major event in your life has affected it the most?

Lives are, of course, full of pivotal events that make it change course. Had I gone to a different university, things would be different. Had I not met Eric, had I taken a different job, had I not quit my finance job for software engineering, had I not moved here and there – all of these changes would have ensured that I end up in a different place.

However, with all of those counterfactuals I can still imagine what life might be like. But there is one event so pivotal that, had things gone differently, I cannot even realistically picture how my life would be, and that is moving to Sweden.

The move was not my decision – I was only fifteen at the time and it was more or less just decided for me. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, because I wasn’t thinking in such terms, but the move was traumatic. As a teenager – a sensitive time in life – all of a sudden leaving behind my father, all my friends, what little extended family we had, everything that was familiar. New town, new country, new language, new school system, new teenage culture, new everything. And that in an era without internet or email or video calls or even normal phone calls back to Estonia (because international phone calls were prohibitively expensive). I remember regularly collapsing on a bed and sleeping for a few hours after getting home from school in the afternoon, because it was mentally so exhausting.

I coped, and I managed, but that one change has surely coloured everything that I have done since. Without it, I imagine would have lived a much steadier life. It took many years for me to feel fully confident and comfortable in Sweden, to stop feeling like an outsider trying to fit in. Plus for years we only had temporary residence permits, to be renewed every year or two, so there was always the threat of potentially being uprooted all over again and having to start over. And there was nobody to lean on. I had friends at school, but they were all new and thus superficial relationships, and I didn’t feel that I had much in common with most of them. I was very alone. I don’t think I can even pick out all the ways that this fundamental lack of security and support has affected my choices later in life.

There’s no control group to compare to. Have the challenges made me stronger in the end? Or would I have grown more if I’d had stable ground to stand upon? Who knows.

The move did of course broaden my horizons. One move led to another, and another – I spent a term in Belgium as an exchange student, seven years working in London, and months New York. I’ve travelled more and experienced more than I would have done if I had remained in Estonia. I doubt that I’d have climbed the Kilimanjaro, or gone diving in the Red Sea, or seen Yo-Yo Ma live in concert.

I realized I had forgotten to post photos that Ingrid took of me at the climbing park in Otepää. She got some great angles, especially of the Tarzan jump, since she was ahead of me. I’m always the one holding the camera, it’s nice to get some memories of me also being there.

These two are from the first obstacle on the last course:

And this is the Tarzan jump:

Just some climbing.

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.

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.