After barely two days at home, we’re off again, this time to Estonia. I had initially planned for more rest between the two trips, but due to hotel availability one of them had to be rescheduled, so there we are. If we want to squeeze three trips into a single summer vacation, there isn’t an awful lot of time left over for other things.

Tomorrow we’ll be attending the song festival, so instead of heading straight to Tartu as we usually do, we stay in Tallinn for the weekend. Today we strolled around Tallinn’s old town, which we haven’t done in many years. The town was was full of visitors for the song festival, and plenty of foreign tourists as well. Just like Prague, and Valldemossa. I wonder if central Stockholm is the same.



Tallinn is all about medieval cobbled streets, and churches and towers and walls. We sampled some of each, and even toured defensive tunnels under the walls.

Having been under the earth, we climbed up into Oleviste church tower, which – back in the 16th century – used to be the tallest building in Europe. Or maybe the whole world, I can’t remember for certain.



Lunch at Tallinn’s market hall was a nice surprise. The range of eateries was much wider and more varied than I had dared to hope, and so were the choices of vegetarian food.

On the ferry from Tallinn back to Stockholm, there was entertainment for the kids, including a lady who made balloon animals for the kids.

It’s not like this was the first time they saw one of those balloon dogs… but for some reason, this time Adrian really fell in love with those balloons and wanted to make his own. We bought balloons and a pump, and he went wild. Ingrid also made some, but Adrian was completely obsessed. He stayed up past sundown, twisting more and more balloons into all kinds of creations. Several dogs, but also many, many swords (which was the easiest model to make) and lots of free-form doodles and squiggles.

We’re heading home again.

We usually stop for a picnic lunch when we’re about two thirds of the way from Tartu to Tallinn. There is a real shortage of nice stopping places along that road. The roadside cafés we’ve tried have all been dingy and unpleasant. Sometimes I’ve simply turned into a random small road off the highway and then stopped as soon as we get some distance away from the highway. Beats having a picnic in a parking lot, but not by much…

The one nice place I’ve found is the churchyard of Anna church. There’s a small meadow in front of the church and a larger one behind the churchyard. They’re grassy and shady, and we have the pretty church and the wooded little graveyard to look at.

There is an old school cool water pump in the meadow behind the churchyard. Not made for Adrian-sized users.

We spent today in the countryside together with my father and stepmother.

Today was “Open farms day”. We first visited one farm that didn’t have much to show off apart from a corn field. The next farm was more of a fishery than a farm… They sold local fish in various forms, smoked and chilled and cooked into lunch. They had also invited the local fire and rescue service to entertain the kids (and adults too). We saw and petted water rescue dogs and police cars and a fire truck, and saw a demonstration of rescuing a drowning drunk.

After a very fish-oriented lunch we went bathing in Võrtsjärv. It has a very shallow beach so it’s hard to do any swimming but it suits Adrian well.

We went for a cruise along the river Emajõgi that cuts through Tartu.

Tartu is not like Stockholm with pretty old buildings along the waterside. In central Tartu, the river is flanked by parks with large old trees. Further out there are scruffy old wharfs and then some equally scruffy industrial areas. Cruising past there feels like seeing the backside of Tartu. Even further out there are meadows and hanging willows.

Our cruise passed several cool works of graffiti. Tartu’s politicians obviously don’t share Stockholm city council’s view that all graffiti is vandalism. After the cruise we went for an improvised graffiti walk upriver from the boat harbour to see more.

Continuing on the nostalgic theme, here’s a vintage jug from Tarbeklaas, the Estonian producer of glass jugs. The etched/cut image came in a few variations, but the general look was the same.

I think most Estonian households had one like this, back in the days, and many still survive. It’s heavy and pretty robust. The rental apartment where we stayed last year had the same one.

We drove to the Road Museum, not so much to visit the museum but to see an outdoor theatre performance of Mowgli next to the museum.

Just as we arrived, the skies opened and a torrent of rain poured down. It was raining so hard that I could barely see the road and we crawled the last few hundred metres at below 30 km/hour. It sounded like hail when it hit the car. Then we sat there for some twenty minutes and waited for the rainstorm to pass. Had we stepped out of the car into the rain, we would have been wading through gushing rivers of water deeper than our feet.

Anyway, the rain passed and we got out. By this time it was too late and still too wet for the outdoor museum. We only visited a tiny part of it: a vintage “shop in a bus”. These mobile grocery shops – sometimes in buses, sometimes in the back of trucks – drive around in rural Estonia. I believe they are less common these days. They are definitely more modern these days.

This bus was part shop, part museum. It sold modern snacks and ice cream, but part of it was furnished like a Soviet Estonian grocery shop, complete with wooden bread shelves and an “OUT OF BREAD” sign. Just the way it used to be.

Somewhere someone had also gotten hold of some original vintage food packaging, so in the snacks section there were boxes of bread sticks, looking and feeling just like they did in the 1980s. These were not modern cartons with a vintage print but true original cartons, made of rough beige cardboard where you can see the individual fibers, with a coarse surface and no coating, and of such lousy quality that it starts falling apart as soon as you handle it. This truly brought back memories.

Seeing this “out of bread” sign reminded me of a question that I replied to in some online group, about what Soviet grocery stores were like. This is what I wrote:

Tl;dr: narrow choice, chronic shortages, dull and drab.

Narrow choice: Many foods that I now take for granted just were not available at all, especially food that would have needed to be imported, or processed food. I had never tasted bananas, oranges, yoghurt, pizza, potato chips, breakfast cereal, etc etc.

The food that was available was generally all the same. There was no real competition. There was one brand of flour. Or more like no brand, it was just “flour”. Maybe three or four kinds of cheese. One national maker of candy /sweets in all of Estonia.

The largest grocery store in Tallinn, the capital, was smaller than an average local supermarket is today. There was no need for anything larger because they wouldn’t have anything to put on their shelves.

Chronic shortages: Some goods were not produced in sufficient amounts, so they were not available. For example small “hot dog” sausages, mandarins, and peanuts. You could get them if you knew the right people (grocery store staff) or sometimes if you got really lucky.

Even food that generally was available could run out, including totally normal everyday things. It was perfectly normal to go out to buy, say, bread, butter and sour cream, and only come home with two of the three items because the shop had run out of e.g. butter.

Dull and drab: All packaging was super basic and dull. Flour was sold in brown paper bags with a blue stamp saying “Flour 1st class 1 kg” and that was about it.

So: imagine a small, drab store with sparsely stocked shelves, a meter of brown bags of flour (all identical) and another meter filled with two kinds of pasta. Nothing looks fresh or colourful or appealing in any way.

Any modern supermarket in Western Europe today looks like a fairy tale in comparison. The first time I saw a Western supermarket, I was paralysed. I could not understand how anyone could possibly choose between twenty kinds of cheese. Or how it could be possible to buy apples in the middle of winter.

The weather is still intolerably hot so, even though it’s beautiful outside, we’re looking for indoor activities. Today we visited Tartu’s new “upside down house”. Which is simply a house that is upside down. You can visit it and walk around inside and look at how weird it all feels.

It isn’t exactly 180 degrees upside down but at a slight angle, which makes it feel even more weird.

The concept sounds cool but once inside I didn’t find it particularly impressive. Many of the rooms were rather sparsely furnished and decorated. They’d done the easy part – screwing chairs and tables to the ceiling – but not the extra touches that would have strengthened the illusion and made it feel real, like maybe plants or shower curtains etc.

I don’t know if it was because of that, or because the brain is hard to trick, but I never really got the feeling that I’m in an upside-down house: it simply felt like a house with furniture in the ceiling.

The entry fee was quite steep for the brief time we spent in the house. So even though this looks cool, I didn’t find it worth the money and wouldn’t recommend it.

We barely went outdoors today, but in the afternoon we were nevertheless wilting in the heat. At one point we forced ourselves to go out to buy ice cream to cool us. There is a pleasant, quiet, shady cemetery nearby, right next to the nearest supermarket, and we stopped there to eat our ice creams. The relief was, unfortunately, temporary.

I left the kids playing Minecraft, Fortnite, Legos etc with their friends, and went off clothes shopping.

Just like with food, I’m picky about the clothes I wear. I want both my food and my clothes to be interesting, flavourful, varied. I don’t generally like Swedish fashion, and not Estonian fashion either, just like I don’t like most restaurant food. I cook dinner every night and bring lunch boxes to work not to be frugal but because I like my own cooking so much better than all the takeaway lunches nearby.

Swedish fashion currently is dull and ugly. Ugly patterns, ugly dull colours (mustard and muted dark blues and reds, 1970s are back in fashion again) and often even ugly shapes. I look at fashion photos in web shops and wonder, who the heck wants this bag of a dress that hangs like a rag and makes your body look like a formless lump?

Estonian fashion looks better but tends to be too frilly and flowery and feminine for my taste. But: I was lucky to find this little shop which mostly had French fashion and I bought a whole pile of dresses!

Together with our Estonian friends, we went for a walk along the trail in Meenikunno bog and forest. It was abominably hot and at times during the bog section I almost regretted ever getting out of the house today. I was quite glad to get into the shade of the forest. Not cool, exactly, but definitely less hot. Plus there is that cool viewing tower there.

For a while there I could enjoy both the walking and the talking. And the blueberries. Unfortunately the last third or so of the trail was full of ants. Anthills everywhere in the forest and ants everywhere on the path, so instead of a leisurely walk we marched straight on, barely talking and rarely stopping, and were relieved to reach the end.

In the afternoon we drove to Värska for lunch and swimming/bathing. I don’t think I’ve ever been there, even though it’s very well known for its mineral waters and healthy mud and whatnot. The café at the sanatorium was so-so; the beach was small and grassy and not at all crowded even on a Saturday.

The water at Kiidjärv the other day was really warm; even I went in without wincing and took a long swim. Pühajärv yesterday was much larger and much chillier. Today’s swim was in a small bay of Estonia’s largest lake, and felt almost as warm as a bathtub.