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Published: October 17th 2008
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My roomie and I
We felt crazy because it was so cold So many different things have happened that I find it hard to summarize everything that I want to write about. First off, last weekend I went on Estonian tour and it was grand! Basically, that is the topic of the authors’ choice right now. The tour started on a Thursday (I know!) and lasted until Saturday evening.
Not only was it fantastic to see the other kids, it was so stupendous to get to be acting like a tourist and seriously not give one ounce of thought to it! All of walked around with cameras, snapping random shots of each other, the scenery, the buildings, the… well, everything we could think of!
The first stop was Tallinn. I had been there once before (not including the time that I went through there to get to Tartu when I first arrived in Estonia) with my host sister when her and her friends went shopping. This time was so much different: I got to see the sights of old town and I got to appreciate why the city is the true capitol. Not only were the buildings bodaciously awesome, when you look at them and realize how much history that they hold it
My roomie with a winged cow
At dinner. Very strange... I know. is jaw dropping. After seeing old town, we went to check out this castle that was dilapidated and quite run down. What awaited us after climbing about one hundred stairs to reach the top was a man who was dressed in this very Renaissance type looking outfit. Of course none of us knew what was going on so at least we were all on a level playing field. Turns out that we all had to wear these coloured smocks and when we tied them up to us, we got to beat the crap out of each other on this long wooden beam. We only used bags that were full of wheat yet it was quite humorous to watch people get ready to do battle with a bag full of wheat and standing on a beam that could not have been wider than three inches, if that. Once we recovered from such treacherous fighting, we got to look upon a man that had been tortured (supposedly last year a foreign exchange student got lost from the crowd and had been made an example out of).
Let me skip ahead to the next day. Walking up in the morning was not easy
at all seeing as how most of didn’t get to sleep until later. My roomie and I stayed up talking until later and when we showed up for breakfast that morning, we weren’t the only ones. If you were to describe the scene of kids practically falling asleep behind the bowl, it looked like that morning after a horrendous night of partying and everyone was hung over. Crazy talk, I know, yet we were all just so tired. This day held much more sights and only more fun too. We started out two hour trek to Tartu. We stopped and did a few trips along the way and ate a huge three course lunch that was pretty tasty. One of the trips was an old mine and we got to ride in the trains that the miners use to use, we got to see first hand how to use some machinery and then of course there was this bike thing we got to ride and it went along the tracks just to make sure that no got lost (ha!... I wouldn’t put it past us to get lost on a track though…). That night we all went to this water
park in Tartu that is so close to my house. We got to swimming, hang out in the hot tubs (that honestly were not hot at all), go to sauna (extremely popular in both Finland and Estonia, so we all felt “at home” in them), go down some water slides, play basketball in the water, go in the salt sauna, and I think that was all that the hotel spa resort consisted of (sadly we did not stay there- our hotel was WAY better!). Our hotel was named Hansa Hotell and our entire corridor was filled with rooms titled German cities- mine was named Lüneburg. It was another late night talking more and enjoying the fact that we were “in Germany”!
Finally, the last day. Taking a quick trip inside of Tartu University was a must seeing as how that was one of the main reasons why Tartu is what it is-full of college kids mostly. Many statues are in Tartu and we got to see some of them- one of them is of the man who discovered the ‘eye cell’… I hope you know what that is by the way. In the center of Tartu is town center (imagine
The dead exchange student.
Supposedly this is the head of the lost exchange student... gross. that) and there are loads of tourist shops. Of course every kid from Finland wanted to visit them so we took about forty-five minutes to get post cards and other souvenirs. The last thing that we did officially, was go to this really high end restaurant and it played old 1920 American music and had a nice dance floor yet of course we didn’t dance- we weren’t allowed. Again, we had a three course meal (much, much fancier than before) that could have satisfied Donald Trump himself… which is probably why some of us looked at it funny when we saw raw salmon ‘salad’, followed by pork chops still on the bone, and some very rich (and the best out of the whole meal because it had chocolate!) blueberry and strawberry cheesecake with chocolate sauce on it! That splendid weekend could not last forever though. So, on the bus we all had to say bye bye (well the Estonians had to say bye to the Finnish kids). It was hard because I won’t see most of them again, and if I do, it will not be until April. It was my first taste of saying goodbye, and it was… indescribable.
When I said bye back in America, it was a bye like ‘I know I will see you sooner than you think’ sort of bye. Yet this one was more depressing, shocking, heartfelt, and gleeful, pride, sort of thing that I was not use to. That weekend had more happen than I wanted to write about because it would take hours to recollect everything. Hope you enjoyed this weeks’ entry, my dedicated fans.
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Rachel
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:)
thats pretty awesome Berk!!!! :)