My umbrella is broken. It got caught on some door and one of the ribs broke, unrepairably.

Actually it broke already well over a year ago. I was going to buy a new one in Estonia last summer. There is an umbrella shop in Tartu that sells umbrellas that are colourful and pretty and fun to look at. Like this one. In Sweden the shops mostly sell black umbrellas, other single-color umbrellas, and umbrellas with tacky pictures such as palm trees or parrots or dollar bills.

Before I had bought a new one, Ingrid hinted that she might buy me one as a birthday present – since my birthday very conveniently comes a few weeks after our Estonia trip. She must have forgotten it or changed her mind, though, because I got other gifts instead.

So then I was going to buy an umbrella in Estonia this summer instead. Somehow our trip ended and I never found the time to go to that shop, so I came home without an umbrella again.

The funny thing is that during these sixteen months or so, the lack of a properly working umbrella hasn’t bothered me very much. I’ve used this broken one a handful of times. Sometimes I’ve worn my waterproof jacket and trousers instead. Sometimes I’ve simply gone without and hoped that the misting rain wouldn’t get any worse.

From my childhood I still remember my grandmother’s umbrella, mostly because I wasn’t allowed to use it because of the risk that I might break it. It was beige and lilac in colour, I believe, or maybe brown and purple. Like many things, umbrellas were “defitsiit” goods in Soviet Estonia: they were not produced in sufficient quantity and were not available in shops. You needed the right connections to get hold of one. Grandma’s umbrella was probably a gift from her emigrant friends in Germany rather than some cheap ugly Soviet thing.

The circles have turned and now I am abroad and making plans to buy an umbrella in Estonia. Although I probably won’t put it off for another year and will order something from the UK where, unlike Sweden, they do know how to make pretty umbrellas.

And just like that, our time in Estonia is over and it’s time to go home.

Ingrid and Adrian are both telling me that they wish we could stay longer, and so do our friends here. As for me, I’m quite happy to go home now. I’m looking forward to being with Eric again. I’m looking forward to being in my own home, rather than living in a suitcase. A proper kitchen, and a bedroom with blackout blinds, and a room of my own where I can be on my own. Being with friends is fun, but constantly being with other people is also quite exhausting.

During summer, the Tallinn-Stockholm ferry usually has some kind of entertainment for kids. Their conference centre gets no use this time of the year so they fill it with other activities. This year they have a bunch of “big wooden games”. There were games I’d seen before, and games that were totally new to me. There were all kinds: games of skill, of memory, of speed, of logic, and so on. We had a lot of fun here.

Sangaste castle has a newly opened exhibition about the last count of Sangaste, early in the last century, and the technologies of his era. Both things that have survived to this day such as the wireless radio and the telephone, but also more odd ones such as massage machines and grain sorting machines.

Alongside with the tech of those days there was a gallery of pictures of what the people of those days imagined future tech to be like. Some of it has come true, even though it doesn’t exactly look the way they imagined it back then: hearing the day’s news in your home instead of buying newspapers; robots cleaning the floor; machines imparting information to schoolchildren. Mail delivered by flying postmen might become reality one day. Underwater races seem unlikely.

There is a hiking trail at Kauksi. We walked the trail and we ate blueberries and had fun. But none of it could compare to the beach.

Empty and flat. Endless.

Even though the weather was cold, the children played for hours. There were shallows where the water barely covered the sand, and a lagoon with warmer water, both of which offered great conditions for digging – and for photography.

We only left because of the threatening thunderclouds that appeared in the early afternoon. A speedy hike back to the cars saved us just in the nick of time; the rain came pouring down while we were driving back.

After a morning of shopping (primarily funky patterned Estonian socks, and Estonian candy) we treated ourselves to a restaurant lunch today.

I now have a new favourite restaurant in Tartu: Forrest. Modern, healthy pub food with plenty of vegetarian options, and a wide variety of interesting fruity, non-alcoholic beverages.

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.