Mascara. Sledding. Facefull of snow.

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Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Henceforth this blog shall be dedicated to my GOOD MORNING hair. Because it's just too awesome to keep to myself.

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Signing off.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is it. I leave tomorrow.

And how do I feel on the eve of my departure? Honestly, I feel strangely... conflicted. Not like I expected at all.

I have been through a lot during these past four months. I have learned a ton and I feel like I've grown up a lot. My academic goals have come into focus. I feel like I've discovered completely new facets of myself over here. Although I made only a few friends here, they are wonderful and I will miss them terribly. And believe it or not, there have already been occasions when I'm able to remember an Estonian word or expression but not the English equivalent. ... A small part of me has become quite attached to this frigid, soggy little country.

However, my consolation is that I will be back this summer. In 6 months it will be St. John's Day, Jaanipäev, the biggest holiday in Estonia after Christmas. I'll be here by then, and hopefully I'll get to stick around until after my birthday at the end of July.

But at the moment, I'm packed and ready to go. I've been packed and ready to go since Monday. All week long, my relatives have been stopping by to give me boxes of chocolate and bottles of liqueur to take home, and by this afternoon both of my suitcases were threatening to overstep the 23kg weight limit. Tomorrow morning at 5am I'll heave them downstairs, say my final farewells to the apartment, and let my relative groggily drive me to the airport. After that, I travel for 15 hours and arrive at PDX around midday tomorrow.

So. This is it. I hope you enjoyed reading about my Estonian shenanigans. I may start up a real-life blog someday to chronicle my boring Corvallis life, but don't count on it.

Be well. Happy holidays. May all your adventures be awesome.

Leaving Tartu

It's been an eventful week. In Estonian, I would use the phrase "sündmusrikas."



Wednesday night I hosted a White Elephant goodbye party for myself at a cute restaurant/pub in Tartu for my folk dance friends. I was really pleased with how it turned out, mostly just because people showed up. Afterwards we all went clubbing, and at 2am I realized that I needed french fries *right now* and for the first time in my life I had the exciting experience of walking through the Mcdonald's drivethru.



Thursday morning I woke up surprisingly early, packed up 90% of what remained in my room and handed it off to Piret and Margus, who were in town for a funeral.



I then spent the rest of the day wandering around Tartu, doing things and going places I hadn't seen yet. I walked around Jaani Kirik, the Botanical Gardens, Toomemägi, the leaning art museum. My flatmates and I made dinner together for the first and last time. Afterwards we went out for cake and took photos of Christmas lights.




Friday I packed up the last of my room and moved out. My Turkish roommates Tijen and Tugba sent me off at the bus station as snow started to fall.

Margus and Piret picked me up from the Tallinn bus station and we went straight to their summer home in Noa Rootsi. I spent a relaxing weekend drinking mulled wine and playing board games, and Sunday I went to Marje's in Haapsalu.






Monday I came back to Tallinn and visited with Heljo and Nikolai and their children and grandchildren. We watched a video of my solo performance at the 1996 Esto and the subsequent interview. I am always slightly mortified whenever I watch it.

Tuesday I had borsch and mashed potatoes at Heige and Uno's house. I then spent the evening chatting with Riho. Riho is a musical genius and is an ex-patriot Estonian like myself . He was born and grew up in Toronto, and is now studying composition at a highly respected Estonian music school. We gossiped and listened to Simon and Garfunkel until around 1am.

Wednesday I visited with Reet for a few hours and then hurried back downtown to meet up with Maret. Maret is a personell manager at Viru Hotell downtown, and had invited me to come to the company Christmas party at the Estonian open-air museum at Rocca al Mare. ... Of *course* I had to accept an offer like that. Wednesday evneing was rather cold, a few degrees below freezing, and humidity was around 97%. The ground was covered in a dusting of snow and frozen rain. We arrived at Rocca al Mare at around 4pm and helped finish setting up. The little pub on the museum grounds had been reserved for our Christmas party and was decorated simply and tastefully. The evening started with a candle-lit choir concert in the Sutlepa Chapel and afterwards we all hurried back to the pub and ate, danced and drank for hours. We all had a jolly old time. Once we were finally kicked out of the museum at 10pm we took the bus back into town and carried on at a dance club I probably won't ever go back to.

I got home at around 12:30am.

And then I realized that I hadn't even started packing for my trip to Stockholm yet. I'm spending Thursday-Sunday visiting my uncle in Sweden and have been putting off the tedious chore of actually *packing* for this trip since arriving in Tallinn. ... Bad idea. I ended up having to dig through the piles and piles of clothes that I had simply thrown into black garbage bags last week when I moved out of my dorm room at Tartu. I nearly drowned in my own possessions trying to find my long underwear, but luckily I succeeded and threw them in with the rest of my slightly mis-matched clothes. I sank into bed around 3:15am, dreading the 8am alarm I had set.

But you know how it goes. I inherited the over-preparedness (read: paranoid) gene from mom. So here I am, in the Tallinn airport, two and a half hours early for my flight, surrounded by European businessmen and pots of unimpressive coffee.

Eight more days until I come home... it's starting to sink in that I'm leaving very, very soon. I'm beginning to feel odd, conflicting emotions about the whole thing. But more than anything, above all, I want to be home.

Thanksgiving 2008

Most years I have a hard time deciding if I love Thanksgiving food or Christmas food more. Maybe I ought to make a list.

Turkey vs. Estonian blood sausage -- Sausage wins.
Mashed potatoes vs. Sauerkraut -- Tie.
Stuffing vs. Sült -- Stuffing wins. By a long shot.
Pumpkin pie vs. Mom's raisin bread fresh out of the oven -- ooohh... tie.
Broccoli goop vs. ...Broccoli goop -- Win. We have this every holiday and it's amazing.

Okay I can't choose. Thankfully, I live in America, where I can celebrate both and I don't have to choose. Poor Estonians. They don't have Thanksgiving. ...That is, most years they don't have Thanksgiving.
Enter Maarika, the Culinarily Enlightened One.

Since Thanksgiving is such a big deal in my family, I knew I was going to feel lonely and depressed witout them. So I decided way back in October that I was going to put on the best Thanksgiving Estonia has ever seen. The first week of November I started organizing menus and talking to my relatives in Tallinn. I e-mailed Mom for recipes. I freaked out a lot. Mom reassured me that my relatives have never had a Thanksgiving before, so if I messed up they wouldn't have anything better to compare it to. Mom found and sent me the gaudiest, corniest Thanksgiving decorations she could find, along with happy Pilgrim cards and cans of pumpkin puree. ... This was the first major holiday meal I was going to be responsible for. This was going to be epic.

On real Thanksgiving, I didn't do much. Went to folk dance practice, ate some gingerbread cookies, listened to ABBA on repeat. On Friday, though, I took the bus up to Tallinn and my Thanksgiving madness began.

Grocery bill: 757.54 EEK (not including the birds)

Number of cooks: 4
Total number of mimosas: 12


Number of pumpkin pies: 2

Total kilos of turkey: 14

Corniness threat level: Orange.

Number of consumers: 12


Number of American flags used: Never enough.


Everything tasted, looked and smelled perfect. My Thanksgiving dinner was such a success that I'm tempted to try it again someday....

But one last thing.


Happy first of December! I'm home in 18 days!

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.

Latvia

Last weekend I went to Latvia with Linda and nearly froze to death.

Totally frozen.

It was minus 2 Celsius the whole weekend and I think my body went into hibernation mode. Any time I wasn't sightseeing or freezing to death I was either eating or napping.

We took the bus south from Tartu to Võru early Friday morning and waited in a candy-shop-slash-cafe for a couple hours waiting for our connecting bus to take us to the Estonian-Latvian border. Linda's father was to pick us up from there and take us to Linda's home in the town of Ape. Linda is a pseudo-Estonian like myself; her mother is fully Latvian, her father is fully Estonian, and she grew up in Latvia but speaks Estonian fluently.

A Kalev candy store in Võru.

Her town is small. I mean tiny. I think the population is around 2000 or something. Linda's house is nice, though, and we had a sauna after dinner on Friday. It was wonderful.

Saturday morning the ground was white with frost as we drove to the closest normal-sized city of Aluksne, about 30 minutes away. Linda showed me the song stage and the lake with the mysterious moving island and the castle, but I was so cold that my favorite part of the afternoon was eating alphabet french fries in a small cafe.

Song stage.

Castle.

Later that day we drove back over the border to Estonia to visit her aunt and uncle on their farm. There was an Estonian "kiik," or swing, and we played on that until our fingers were numb.

Linda on the swing.

Sunday we walked around Ape a bit and then celebrated Estonian father's day with Linda's family before heading back to Tartu.

What a happy family, eh?

___

I've kind-of settled into a routine over here. During the week I sit in cafes working on grad school essays and applications, studying for the GRE, and trying to decide what coures to take when I return to OSU for the winter and spring terms, and during the weekends I travel and play. For instance, this weekend I'm off to Tallinn to meet up with an old friend and go to a choir concert.

I have exactly five weeks left until I come home and all of a sudden it seems like I have hardly any time left at all.

Winter.

Winter has arrived. The mornings are covered in frost and stores are starting to sell Christmas.

...All I can think of is how much I miss Oregon.

Prof. Toivo Leiger

It’s strange to be in a math department so small that the professors talk about you. All the professors here know me; apparently they’ve all heard that I’m a “hard worker” and a “promising student.” They seem genuinely disappointed that I’m leaving.

Today I met with the head of the mathematics institute, Professor Toivo Leiger. He’s a tall man with a weathered face and a very practical disposition. He doesn’t mince words and comes off as stern – in short, he is typically Estonian. When his secretary e-mailed me and told me that he wished to speak with me, I was a little scared to sit down one-on-one with someone who seemed so unbending. To my surprise, though, when I arrived and explained my situation to him I discovered that he’s actually very reasonable. He said that he understood, and was sorry that things ended up this way. Whereas my thesis advisor Peeter Oja tried his best to convince me to stay, Professor Leiger calmly admitted that the mathematics department here was indeed focused more on theory than application; moreover, I wasn’t the first student to be disappointed by this fact. He nodded his head. He thought quietly. The sunlight shone through the dusty window as I calmly waited for him to speak.

He asked me what my plans were from here on out. I said that I was going home to take the GREs and then take some classes over winter and spring terms before hopefully being accepted to another grad program in the fall. He smiled – though it was less of a smile and more of a relaxation of his facial muscles – and said “Ma usun küll, et olete vastu võetud. Nad näevad, et olete hea tüdruk.” ["I believe that they will accept you. They'll see that you're a good girl."]

I got a tattoo yesterday.

It's a barn swallow, the national bird of Estonia.


I am so pleased. It's exactly what I wanted.

And yes, mom knows. She's not exactly thrilled, but she's not angry either. She thinks it's pretty. It's simple and elegant and carries a lot of meaning for me... I'm very happy with it.

Nõo Folk Dance Camp

Last weekend I went to the small town of Nõo for folk dance camp. Over the course of three days we had 4 dance practices and racked up a total of about 13-14 hours of dancing. By Sunday afternoon I was completely exhausted, sore all over, and really, really stinky. I would have killed for a nice long soak in a hot tub but I was too tired to actually go anywhere.

Friday morning I made a million pancakes and made a pancake torte, since all the first-year dancers were required to bring a cake of some kind and I don't have an oven. I was picked up in the evening by an older dancer with a car and we arrived at the Nõo high school at around 6:30pm. After our dance practice, while everyone else was either showering or getting ready to leave, I put on my kitschy-cat accessories and ran around demanding that everyone say "Trick or treat!" and then offering them fun size candy bars. What a first impression. That night I ended up getting to sleep around 4am after having passed a couple of bottles of Vana Tallinn around with the 18- and 19-yr-olds in my folk dance troupe. We all ended up sleeping in the gym.

Saturday morning was rough. We ate breakfast at 9am and dance practice started at 10 and it kicked my butt. Truth be told, it kicked everyone's butt. In Estonia, "folk dance practice" means 45 minutes to an hour of warm-ups, which includes everything from jogging, hopping and polkaing, to sit ups, push ups and back exercises. And only *then*, once we're already sweaty and tired, do we start working on dances.




Saturday afternoon we had another dance practice but it was cut short because a very smart woman came to talk to us about folk dance costumes. Did you know:

• Not all long black folk dance overcoats are "Mulgi" coats?
• Fake flower garlands are not allowed! Only flower garlands from real flowers!
  
• In traditional times girls didn't get their first wool skirt until they started menstruating.... until then they only wore a long white shirt.

Anyways, by this point it was 7:30pm and I was exhausted and cold and hungry and not in the best of moods. After the 2 hour lecture we ate quickly and got ready for the party that night. It was a costume party and the theme was "your very first day of school."

We had been warned beforehand that all of us first-year dancers would go through the traditional initiation on Saturday night. In Estonia this is very common. First year students are called "Rebased", or Foxes, and "Rebaste Ristimine" or "Retsimine" or Baptism of the Foxes is a time-honored tradition. Our folk dance troupe has its own elaborate initiation ritual, but none of us knew what was in store for us. We showed up at 8:30 and waited around expectantly.



Eventually we were all herded into the men's shower room upstairs and told to stay inside "or else." It was a small shower room, and there were about 30-40 of us so needless to say it was a bit crowded and towards the end we were all convinced we'd die of lack of oxygen. Finally they began calling us one by one from the room. I was the second one to go. I was blindfolded, led downstairs, turned around a couple of times, made to kneel, and then shouted at, given directions through an obstacle course, told to crawl or slide in one direction or the other. Finally I was led into the gymnasium, onto the stage, and suddenly told to lie flat on my back. I felt a pair of hands grab my ankles and another grabbed my hands. And as I got swung back and forth I heard the whole room erupt in shouts of "Water! Into the water! Throw her into the water!" ... Thankfully it ended up *not* being water, but soft and fluffy gym mats.



They grabbed me and tore off my blindfold, and dragged me over to a chair. Suddenly there were four pairs of hands on me, one of them spraying me with a horrible-smelling perfume, another messing with my hair, a third and fourth drawing on my face with lipstick. I was then moved to the next station where older folk dancers dressed as doctors and nurses began diagnosing - that is, administering - all sorts of diseases. I got the pox and a big green dot on my nose.




Then I was told to go join the other foxes in a big makeshift pen constructed of chairs and benches. While we waited for all the foxes to join us, two herders were in charge of yelling at us in the pen, and demanded that we "keep moving!" or "sing a song!" or "dance! now!" If we didn't feel like it, or refused to take part in the activities, one of the herders holding a long and evil-looking stick came over to us and began to harass us. The fighter in me wanted to challenge their superficial authority but I made a conscious decision to grit my teeth and bear it. I was having a cultural experience and being a stuck-up angry foreigner wasn't going to win me any friends.

Once everyone had gone through the obstacle course and had gotten their faces painted they had us line up and do the limbo. Under a string of dead fish. Which they lowered as everyone passed so that it touched their face or hair or clothes. We then had to army-crawl through a column where the older dancers whipped us with folk dance belts and beat us with dance slippers, and when we emerged there was a dancer at the end of the line waiting to smack us in the forehead with a shoe.




... and believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen, this is only the first half of the initiation process. The rest is yet to come.

All of us new dancers were separated from those who had already danced for a year. We were then taken back into the men's shower room and given 5 words which we had to incorporate into a dance-troupe-themed skit. ... our five words were "tambourine," "mychorriza," "fur-cramp," "ear-edge," and ... I forget the last one. It's not important. We made an astoundingly awful song using our words and had nifty little dance moves.

After we performed our skit, the foxes had to get up one at a time and stand in front of the older dance troupe, introduce themselves, say where they're from and how long they've danced, and then introduce their tail. ... Each of us had a tail, you see, being foxes and all. ... this process became really boring and seemed like just another opportunity for the older dancers to harrass the youner ones. And I was still exhausted. And now I was hungry and upset at being degraded. I went up and introduced myself and said that I was American, and was asked if I knew Arnold Schwarzenegger. I said that yes, he was my best friend, curtseyed facetiously, and walked away.

So we all went downstairs into the cafeteria, where our cakes and tortes and cookies had been laid out. The foxes were told to stand along the wall, away from the cakes and the tables... and the biggest slap in the face of the night was when we were told to introduce our cakes and then stand and watch as the older dancers ate them in front of us. Once they were done they allowed us to pick over what was left. Load of B.S., if you ask me.



Finally, they led us back upstairs into the gym, where they had turned out the lights and lit candles to form an altar in front of the stage. The older dancers and established memebers of the dance troupe had seated themselves on the stage and there was a podium to the right, behind which stood an older dancer wearing a long black overcoat and hat.

The foxes that had already been dancing with the troupe for a while were all called up one by one and told to kneel at the altar, in front of the older dancers. They were then asked really uncomfortable questions about their experience in the dance troupe over the past year, such as "Does it bother you that the older dancers get more attention than you do?", or "What would you consider to be a good reason for missing dance practice?", or "Have you been unhappy with anything in the dance troupe this past year?" Some foxes were noticeably uncomfortable. One of them even refused to kneel, saying that she wanted to be treated as an equal, and didn't want to be made to kneel in front of the older dancers. ... She got yelled at quite a bit for that one. Eventually the man in the hat and coat turned to the older dancers and asked them, "Tarbatu, will we take this dancer into our troupe as a fox?" And without exception they were all accepted.

Bear in mind that the above process took a good 45 minutes to an hour. I was ready to die by the end. The hazing had started around 8:30pm... and it lasted until 1:30 or 2am.

Finally the initiation ceremony was over, the candles were taken away, and generic dance music was put on. I thought "Well now that we're all a part of the dance troupe we'll do something together, now we'll dance social dances or something. This'll be fun."

But no. Nothing of the sort. The older dancers hung out amonst themselves, and the rest of us ran to the bathroom to scrub our faces. There was no social mixer. There was no final activity to bring us all together. There was just more exlusion and cliqueyness. ... I found a dark hallway at around 3:30am and went to sleep feeling degrated and upset.

If something like this had happened to me in America I would have walked out halfway through.

Dear Piret

Here is the letter I sent to the International Student Office last week.

Dear Piret,

I hope that you'll forgive me if I write to you in English. I am able to express myself better in English and unfortunately I have something very serious I need to speak to you about.

I have decided to step out of the University of Tartu mathematics master's program.

These past two months I have given a sincere effort in my courses - I have attended classes regularly, I have done all the homework assignments, and I have studied and done well on quizzes and tests. However, I have come to realize that the program is not a right match for me. I strongly feel that the Tartu University mathematics program is not able to give me the education I desire.

That is not to say that the University of Tartu mathematics program isn't a strong program. The program is rigorous and challenging, and the professors are knowledgeable and helpful. Unfortunately, I feel that the program here focuses too much on theoretical mathematics, and not enough on applied mathematics. I am interested in mathematical modeling and the application of math to the fields of biology and ecology; in short, interdisciplinary mathematics. I have come to realize that this type of research is nearly impossible at Tartu University in the scope of a two year master's program, and the various departments at Tartu University are not used to communicating in such a way as to allow for this kind of project.

I had not known any of this when I applied for the master's program at Tartu University. In fact, I had tried to contact the mathematics department ahead of time with general questions about the program and questions regarding possibilities for interdisciplinary research projects. Unfortunately I never received a response from the department and so I came here not knowing what to expect.

I strongly feel that I would be much happier in another master's program at another university.

I would like to begin the exmatriculation process as soon as possible so that we may begin settling any debts I may have incurred.

I apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused.

Sincerely,

Maarika Teose

lovely linda

Linda and me, before going out clubbing last week. She is lovely.

More photos here.