Board game night, with Bang as the main focus. It’s one of the few games I’ve played that becomes much more interesting with more players, so we usually end up playing it when we’re meeting up with our friends in Estonia and have a big crowd.

Over the years they’ve added various extensions to the base game, and it’s becoming hard to keep up with all the additions. I kind of liked the base version better – with all the extras the game is more chaotic and less about planning and strategy. But he kids all prefer the over-the-top chaos version.

We visited my father and his wife, and made sushi together. I was mostly too busy talking to take any photos, so most of these are not mine. Ingrid photographed some of the sushi materials; Adrian photographed me from various angles.

The book I’m enjoying is Estonia’s most famous and well-known cookbook – the wonderful Raamat maitsvast ja tervislikust toidust (“The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food”) from 1955 which contains everything from very traditional Estonian recipes, to lots of Russian baked goods, to instructions for using all sorts of fish that I’ve never even heard of. It was strange and exotic already in the 1980s.

The annual trip to Estonia isn’t complete without an outing to Otepää adventure park. 11 years after our first visit (when I was pregnant with Adrian and not allowed to do any of the fun stuff so Ingrid was the only climber) and it’s still fun.

Both kids are now tall and agile enough to manage all the ordinary tracks. There used to be special track labelled the “path of suffering” but I saw it has been removed. I guess not enough people cared for all the suffering. None of us three had ever tried it; the initial rope climb straight up was more than enough to deter us.

The highlight of the last, fifth track is the rather spectacular “Tarzan leap”, where you hold on to a thick rope and swing from a platform about 10 metres above ground, to catch yourself in a net 20 metres away. (With a safety harness of course.) Scary but exhilarating.



After the climbing tracks you’re treated to two zipline rides back and forth across a wide meadowed valley.

We went canoeing on Ahja river with our Estonian friends.

Vesipapp arranged the tour for us and were very helpful. We met them at Kiidjärve, where we got our canoes and oars and life jackets – and instructions.

Also plastic jugs for scooping out water from the canoes, but my boat mate and I soon had our division of labour down so well (left side of the boat for her, right side for me, and swapping halfway through the trip) that there was very rarely a need to switch oars from one side to the other. Our canoe barely got a tiny trickle of water at the bottom – nothing you could scoop up. But the teams with more… ehum… athletic paddling styles got rather wetter.

We started at Kiidjärve and had a bit of lazy paddling down the river to begin with. Then a long dammed lake, which was easier to navigate but required more paddling. At the end of the lake at Taevaskoja a representative from Vesipapp helped us carry the canoes over the dam and get them in the river again. From there on it was easy but exciting going: a gentle river, but with constant bends, underwater rocks, logs both under and over the water, low-hanging trees, etc. And beautiful views!

Note to future me: the 12 km trip from Kiidjärve to Porgandi, which was supposed to take 3 hours, took us 4, even though we only had a short break in the middle at the dam. The shorter, 9 km route to Otteni would probably have been enough.

Credit goes to Ingrid for the photos with me in them. It took some manoeuvring to hand over the camera from one canoe to another without risking dropping it!

Apparently Rally Estonia, part of the World Rally Championship, is happening in Tartu right now, and Ingrid wanted to see it. Adrian and I weren’t interested, so we went dog walking with a friend instead. Although we did watch some of the rally on TV, and it wasn’t entirely boring, but the half hour we saw was enough for me.

On the ferry to Tallinn. After two missed summers due to covid, we’re on our way to Estonia again! Eric stays at home for some peace and quiet, and to take care of Nysse.

I’ve been a voracious reader for as long as I can remember. We had a great variety of books at home. I read children’s books at first of course, but moved on to adult literature around my tweens. Classics, detective stories, travel stories, adventure stories, and so on. (Everything except contemporary English-language literature, which was hard to get hold of until the early nineties.)

At my grandmother’s cottage where we spent our summers, there wasn’t much to read. Partly due to a lack of space, I imagine. The cottage consisted of a single large room, with the kitchen open into that same room. 35 m² maybe? – and that housed as many as five of us at times. Or maybe the expectation was that we’d all be outdoors most of the time.

We took the train to town, to Tallinn, at regular intervals for laundry, baths, groceries and whatever else the adults did. My grandma’s apartment there was not much larger, but it did have a bookcase… which, however, contained almost no books that I recognized or that looked interesting. There was really a surprisingly small overlap between her library and my parents!

There were two or three (quite literally) children’s books from my father’s childhood in the 1950s. One was a picture book about how trucks were produced in the 1950s. One was about how spacecraft worked. I read both.

I read and browsed books about cooking and gardening, including giant gardening encyclopedias in German, which had gratifying amounts of illustrations. I’ve always liked well-written, illustrated “how-to” books.

I opened dull-looking books at random and stumbled upon a collection Tolstoy’s stories for children (in that same 14-volume series from the 1950s) and read most of those.

There was one small oasis in that reading desert – two books that I truly enjoyed and kept returning to. I think we may even have taken them with us to that tiny cottage. Both were memoirs. One was Kirurgi süda by Fyodor Uglov, a pioneering Russian doctor and surgeon. (“Heart of a surgeon”, full of fascinating medical case histories, not available in English as far as I can see.) The other was Eesriie avaneb (“The curtain opens”) by Mari Möldre, an Estonian actress.

My grandma passed away in 2003. Now I have her copies of these books in my bookshelf, and they always remind me of her.

Olen lapsest saati ablas lugeja olnud. Meie kodus oli lai valik raamatuid. Alustasin loomulikult lasteraamatutega, aga varases teismeeas läksin täiskasvanute kirjandusele üle. Klassika, krimkad, reisikirjeldused, seikluslood, jne. (Kõike pealse kaasaegse inglisekeelse kirjanduse, mida polnud saada enne 1990-ndaid aastaid.)

Minu vanaema suvilas, kus me oma suved veetsime, polnud eriti midagi lugeda. Osaliselt vist ruumipuuduse tõttu, oletan ma. Suvilas oli üksainuke suur tuba, ja köök avanes samasse tuppa. 35 m² võib-olla? – ja seal elasime kuni viiekesi. Või oli arvestatud sellega, et kõik veedavad suurema osa ajast õues.

Sõitsime aeg-ajalt rongiga Tallinna pesu pesema, vannis käima, sisseoste tegema ja mida muud täiskasvanud veel tegid. Mu vanaema linnakorter polnud suvilast palju suurem, aga seal oli raamatukapp… mis küll ei sisaldanud peaaegu ühtegi raamatut mida ma oleks ära tundnud, või mis huvitav näiks. Tema raamaturiiuli sisu ja meie pere oma vahel oli üllatavalt vähe ühist!

Seal oli kaks või kolm lasteraamatut minu isa lapsepõlvest 1950-ndatel aastatel. Üks oli pildiraamat sellest, kuidas 1950-ndatel veoautosid toodeti. Üks oli sellest, kuidas kosmoseraketid töötavad. Lugesin mõlemat.

Lugesin ja lappasin raamatuid kokandusest ja aiandusest, muuhulgas hiiglasuuri saksakeelseid aianduse entsüklopeediad, milles palju illustratsioone oli. Hästi kirjutatud, paljude piltidega käsiraamatud on mulle alati meeldinud.

Avasin suvalisi igava välimusega raamatuid ja leidsin sedaviisi Tolstoi lood lastele (osa tollest samast 14-köitelises sarjast) ja lugesin suurema osa läbi.

Selles raamatukõrbes oli üks väike oaas – kaks raamatut, mida ma ikka ja jälle tõelise rõõmuga lugesin. Vist võtsime nad isegi kaasa sinna pisikesse suvilasse. Mõlemad olid mälestused. Üks oli kuulsa vene arsti ja kirurgi Fjodor Uglovi „Kirurgi süda“, täis põnevaid haigusjuhtumite kirjeldusi. Teine oli näitlejanna Mari Möldre „Eesriie avaneb“.

Mu vanaema suri 2003. aastal. Nüüd on need tema raamatud minu riiulis, ja nad meenutavad mulle alati teda.

When I was a child, Tartu had two cinemas – Ekraan (“Screen”) and Komsomol. Ekraan was close to where we lived, a few bus stops away, so that was the only one we ever went to.

Ekraan was and is a low, boxy white brick building. Now it has all the conveniences of a modern cinema. But back then it had a single large auditorium, with maybe thirty rows of seats and hardly any rise in the floor. The seats were unpadded, made of thick plywood, dark brown, slightly curved. The cinema sold no drinks and definitely no popcorn, and had no toilet. You always made sure you went to the toilet before leaving home.

Tickets were made of paper. I found this photo of an old ticket from Ekraan at an auction site in Estonia. The row and seat numbers are hand-written. A grumpy middle-aged lady sat in a booth in the entry hall and sold them. When you had chosen a seat, the lady crossed that seat off the seating map, wrote the row and seat numbers on a blank ticket, and tore it off the ticket block.

When the movie was about to start, the grumpy lady moved from the booth to the auditorium entrance and checked your ticket and tore off the stub.

I’ve been thinking for a while about starting to write down some memories of my childhood here.

Some random memories keep circling in my head, resurfacing again and again. Writing things down tends to get them out of my head.

I generally have a pretty lousy long-term memory. Other people – friends, family – ask me if I remember this or that event or detail, and usually I don’t. Sometimes I have a factual memory that the trip they talk about did happen, but have no personal recollections of it. Sometimes I don’t even have a clue of what they’re talking about.

An old classmate recently linked to his blog posts with memories from school. He remembers teachers’ names and can link events to particular school years. I mostly have no memories of all the things he writes about. But I can remember the “feeling” of the new, young maths teacher we got some time in middle school, and the feeling of the dank basement canteen.

I remember random tidbits, loose fragments, what a particular place or moment or activity felt like. Out of nowhere I can sometimes recall the experience and feeling of cycling down a particular street in London, or what it felt like to be standing on a crowded bus in Tartu.

I wish I had more photos from my childhood; photos tend to jog my memory best. I wish people had smartphones back then and took endless photos of ordinary school days.

Maybe writing down the things I do remember will also jog other memories.

There is a possibility that this mini-project will fade away soon after my vacation ends and I will have to start focusing on work again. We’ll see.