Adrian and I are on a short break in London.

I went with Ingrid six years ago (to see saw Hamilton and various sights). Now it’s Adrian’s turn.

The weather forecast promises rain for all of our four days here, although the prognosis has been improving the closer we get. Just a few days ago, the forecast for Friday and Saturday was torrential downpour; now it’s down to just fairly rainy. It was raining as we got to our hotel, but the afternoon was supposed to be one of a few dry-ish periods, so we headed out to see the town. To get the proper London experience, we took a double-decker bus from East London through the City to Trafalgar Square.

Saw Big Ben and Westminster Abbey; walked past Whitehall and a guard change, then onwards through St James Park. Debated whether the large white birds we saw in the distance were really pelicans, which seemed unlikely. Adrian argued that they were swans, but the shape was all wrong. It was getting dim and the birds weren’t posing very well, but Google confirmed that there are indeed pelicans in St James Park.

Buckingham palace, then along Piccadilly to Chinatown.

Tons of tourists everywhere. It’s autumn break in more places than Stockholm, I guess, although a lot of the tourists were not of an age to be there for a school break. I wonder if there is any space for locals left at all in central London. It definitely wasn’t like this when I lived here. I am contributing to the problem myself, and this does rather confirm my general preference for holidaying in less popular spots, outside of big cities.

We stopped by Fortnum & Mason on our way, and it is now more of a tourist attraction than a department store. Hysterically garish, rather crowded. Worth it, though – I now have an authentic English Christmas pudding for this Christmas!

This trip was for Adrian’s sake maybe even more than mine (although I do love London) and one of his wishes was to eat typical British food. We had Pret sandwiches for lunch, and ate dinner at an Indian restaurant in East London. (That one was too dim for photos.)

No afternoon tea, but we did treat ourselves to very decadent donuts at Donutelier

It’s the end of October and still warm enough to sit outside, even for me.

Near miss #1: Adrian and I are going to London for a few days during autumn break, which is this week, and I was this close to missing the fact that you now need a permit to enter the UK. I know they’re out of the EU but for years that didn’t actually mean anything for travel, and somehow I’d missed that this had changed.

The confirmation email from airline even mentioned it, but the new permit thing is called an ETA – a most unfortunate naming choice, I have to say. As I skimmed the email, I saw the term in passing, naturally interpreted it as “Estimated Time of Arrival” in the context of a flight booking, and didn’t pay any more attention to it.

Today I finally noticed it for real and had a minor bout of panic because it can apparently take days to get an ETA (“Electronic Travel Authorization”, why couldn’t they just call it a visa) and we don’t have that many days. Spent a good chunk of the afternoon going through an online application process only to realize, when my payment didn’t go through, that I had landed on a scam website and had to start all over on the real site.

The process required photos and face scans and scans of the passport and whatnot. I got the applications in just before Adrian had to leave for his week at Eric’s, and thankfully got an approval back within 10 minutes, so our trip was saved.

Near miss #2: Due to the ETA panic I nearly forgot the fact that I had a concert ticket for this evening, and almost missed a concert with Grigori Sokolov. Missing it wouldn’t have been quite as sad as missing a London trip, but still, I’m glad I remembered it in the last minute. Beethoven and Brahms. Just the thing I needed to get my adrenaline levels back to normal again.

Buying Estonian candy is a necessary part of a trip to Estonia.

Likewise, eating Estonian cake. This was a sea buckthorn cake with cream cheese and chocolate.

We spent the day at Kapsta with my father and his wife.

Made our traditional home-made sushi lunch.

Enjoyed lunch out in the gazebo tent since the weather remains horribly hot.

Went for a walk in the early evening when the temperature had cooled a bit. Still 25 degrees but at least it’s not 29 any more.

My father’s back is in a bad enough shape that he’s probably not going to be taking any more walks in his life.

There are no pea fields this year. Beans and wheat instead.

A hot and rainy day. Had the weather been better, we might have gone to the adventure park in Otepää, like we do must summers. Now we chose indoor climbing instead – or bouldering, to be more precise. “We” here being the next generation (Ingrid, Adrian, and my Estonian friends’ kids) and me. The rest of the older generation were all either working, or not the climbing kind of people. Occasionally I feel a bit weird, being the only mum in a group that’s otherwise mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings and one brave nine-year-old. But I’m young at heart, eh?

The first room had the traditional kind of bouldering wall with colour-coded routes going crossways and sideways. Then we found the other room, which had a series of twenty-odd competition routes. The first couple were easy, the next few were doable, and beyond that they got more and more bizarre. It’s hard to even picture someone climbing some of them.

In the evening we went paddleboarding. Or “SUP riding”, which in Estonian sounds identical to “soup riding”.

There were heavy showers earlier in the day and heavy clouds even now; even some warnings of thunder. Thunder would have forced us to cancel; heavy rain would have been unpleasant. In the end we were lucky to get neither.

We had a safety and technique lecture on the shore, and then we were allowed on the boards and the water. Initially we were all wobbly and stayed on our knees, while swarming in the little bay we started in.

We left the bay and started paddling our way up the Emajõgi river. When we had worked up a little bit of speed, it didn’t take long for us to find our balance and stand up, like the name suggests you’re supposed to. It took longer for the knees and legs to stop shaking slightly from all the balancing that was going on.

The stand-up paddling was OK, but most of us concluded after a while that the standing-up part was rather unnecessary. You get much more leverage and control when you’re closer to the water. Canoes just make sense. Some of us went back to kneeling; many sat cross-legged.

I was all set to be camera-less during this activity, but the life jackets turned out to have a zippered chest pocket which fit my phone, and I had a little waterproof bag that also fit my phone, so I could take photos after all. I struggle to get the exposure right on the phone – in many non-standard lighting situations the photos come out way too dark and I need to adjust them a lot afterwards. But I’m glad I have these.

We got together with all of our Estonian friends for a grill night at a public picnic spot. I completely forgot about my camera and didn’t even take out the camera bag from my big bag. So, no photos of us eating all the good stuff, nor of the beach volleyball or badminton games, or anything.

All I have is two phone photos of the grill, which looked rather sad and worn. The bench on the far side of the picnic table had collapsed, and the grill itself was rusty and graffiti-ed. But once we got going, we forgot all about that.

Visited Ahhaa science centre with a bunch of friends of various ages. Their interactive exhibits captured everyone’s attention for hours.

The current temporary exhibition was AI-themed. We got to try out AI attempting to deduce our emotions, recognize images, drive a toy car, etc. Very well done.

The exhibition also included a kind of a poll about visitors’ views on AI. Would you trust an AI diagnosis? Fly an AI-piloted flight? Would you be more inclined to forgive a human or an AI for a mistake they made?

I’ve got mixed feelings about this. It’s easy to be distracted by LLMs and other generative AI, and forget about all the other kinds of AI out there, doing more workmanlike tasks. I rather like AI analysing X-ray images and sifting through tons of data to find anomalies.

The statement I was most positive about was “I can imagine AI teaching me”. And I absolutely can. An AI-curated, individually adjusted learning path, instead of listening to pre-prepared hour-long videos where I find myself skipping half – yes please. Then I thought about AI teaching children, especially at a younger age, and my immediate reaction was a visceral “no”.

In the evening we gathered and played “Bang”, which has for many years been our go-to game for large groups. I might be growing just a little bit tired of it, but we only play it for a few evenings each summer, and it’s become a firm tradition by now.

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.