Riga & the blizzard.

Hello all. Sorry for being MIA for a while. I accidentally went to Riga last week.


Monday night I'm sitting around the kitchen table with Linda and her Latvian friends and all of a sudden one of them is like "Let's go to Riga" and I'm like "Okay."
So we went.
And it rocked.
Look at more photos here.

We got back to Tartu on Wednesday night. Thursday I unpacked and re-packed, because Friday I went to visit our good friends, the Killing family. They're some of the nicest folks you've ever met. So nice, in fact, that I couldn't refuse when they told me it was time for country line-dancing.

Ech. Let's all try to forget that ever happened, okay?

On Sunday night, Estonia was hit by a blizzard. Winds were blowing horizontally and snow was coming so thick that at times visibility dropped to a couple meters. ... and we were driving in this weather. It was surreal. Cars and snowplows were falling into ditches. The snow on the highway was so thick that the car was in danger of getting its underbelly stuck in the snow between the tire-tracks.

This photo is taken from my window once I got safely home. Those lumps in the parking lot are cars, yes.

Linda had her 19th birthday on Monday. We went and saw the movie Mamma Mia! and I rediscovered the genius of ABBA. Then we bought the smallest cake we could find and stuck 19 candles into it and watched it nearly burn to a crisp. We ate an enormous dinner at the best Italian restaurant in town, came back to my place for a glass of wine, and then before Linda caught the last bus back home she says "Let's go jump in the snow."

Brilliant.
___

Estonian Food: Kama, Keefir

Kama is a "traditional Finnish and Estonian finely milled flour mixture, containing roasted barley, rye, oat and pea flour." Estonians throw a couple of spoonfuls of this stuff in to a mug of keefir, "a fermented milk drink that originated in the Caucasus region," and mix it up with some sugar. It's very werid. But I really like it. And I'm bringing some home for all of you to try.