Merike of Estonia

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October 19

After leaving my newfound friends in Orneta.I didn't have a real plan for the rest of the day but I knew I needed to start toward my next couchsurfing adventure, three countries and about 400 mile away, in Estonia. I had a leisurely drive on the back roads on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Like most of the trip, the roads were very narrow, often with huge oak trees right along the road, making it dangerous and difficult to widen the roads. Apparently some ruler a long time ago had commissioned the planting of these trees for shade and they are on many of the Polish roads. Occasionally there would be a yellow sign with a black dot in the middle and some numbers on the bottom. I never gave them much thought until Danka had explained that this meant 'black point' and the numbers were the amount of people killed and injured at these dangerous parts of the road. In nearly every town I went through the busiest spot on a Sunday afternoon was the cemetery. Throughout the trip I had noticed that the cemeteries were full of fresh flowers, more colorful than any US cemetery I had seen, even on Memorial Day. Now I think that most of these flowers are placed on Sunday. In fact many cemeteries had "Kwiati" or flower stores and occasionally there was a short line at these.

I thought I would never be hungry again but that didn't last so I stopped at a supermarket in the city of Suwatki, the last city before the unknown of Lithuania. In this store there were already a couple of aisles dedicated to Christmas candy and decorations. Now there is something that reminded me of home. After stocking up a little in the store, I ended up buying a baked chicken from a little booth in the parking lot.

One thing I had noticed throughout the country were lots of big signs on the highways saying "pallets". Huh, I thought, I wonder what that means in Polish, I'll have to look that up in my dictionary. Well you guessed it, 'pallets' means the same thing in Polish as it does in English. I never found out why there were all these big advertisements for pallet stores with very few ads for other stuff like food and lodging.

My next adventure was my first border crossing, going to Lithuania. Only it wasn't an adventure at all. In fact, the border was wide open, there were no guards or cops or anything, just a zig zag in the road and a lot of signs I couldn't read. One interesting thing I saw was a bunch of tiny shacks alongside the road, usually with an older lady in it. They were tiny exchange booths to change money from Polish to Lithuanian money and vice-versa. By this time it was nearly dark so I went about five miles off the highway to a small college town to find a place to stay. I found a brand new looking motel that had a very nice room and even had a computer with internet access that I could use in the lobby, which was a nice treat. Right next door was a bowling alley that was full of people and neon lights and looked like an interesting place to check out but I went straight to my room. Later I regretted not going to check it out but I was just so tired that I just wasn't interested at the time.

October 20

My motel room included a free breakfast. After a long shower I wandered down to the lobby. There were about 10 tables but only one that had silverware and a flower in the middle. It turned out that I was the only guest in the entire motel that night. But the breakfast was great. I did notice that the time on the clock was an hour later than I thought. It turned out that I had crossed into a different time zone, it probably was on one of those signs at the border that I couldn't read the day before. This was no big deal except I had a commitment to meet Merike, my next couchsurfer at 5:00 and I still had quite a ways to go.

On the way back to the highway I saw an old lady with a bundle of flowers and a small package that she must have picked up at the market. She was hitch hiking (which is much more common there than it is in the US) so I stopped to pick her up. She new zero words of English or Polish but she got in and we were on our way. I did my best to tell her I would be happy to take her where ever she needed to go and she nodded, making me proud of how good I was at communicating without even knowing the language. But soon I found that I was mistaken. As we got near an intersection she started to jabber and grab at the door knob, all at about 40mph. Apparently she seemed to think I was going to take her somewhere she didn't want to go! So I stopped of course and let her out, then I was on my way to Estonia.

I made great time through the rest of Lithuania. Marek, in Poland, had warned me about the speed traps in Lithuania and he was right. Unlike Poland (I think I saw one speed trap in the whole country), there were many of them. Going into Latvia was like the day before, no guards or cops at the border crossing. I wish that I had studied about the differences in cultures between these countries a little more but I never found a great difference between Latvia and Lithuania.

I still needed to get to Lullemae, a very tiny village (two or three buildings) in Estonia by 5:00pm. I was supposed to meet my couchsurfing friend, Merike there, by the side of the road, and then we were going to drive an hour and a half or so to her Spanish class in the city of Tartu. There were some slowdowns for road construction and one wrong turn but everything was going fine until I came to the towns of Valka and Valga. These looked like one town really but they straddle the border between Latvia and Estonia so they are really two towns. I was probably only twenty miles from my destination and I had over an hour to get there but I could not find the road to Lullemae. I asked four different people how to get there. The first two people were so kind but the language barrier was just too big of an obstacle. The third girl spoke English well but didn't know how to get to where I wanted to go. The fourth gentleman was walking his dog along the road and he was so patient and eventually he got me going the right direction. This was one of the very few times on the entire trip that the language barrier was a problem at all. So by this time I was on a small dirt road going much faster than I should have been. This village was so small that I almost went by it. But there was Merike standing by her car waiting for me at about 5:10. After a quick chat we went to her house, dropped off her car and off we go to Tartu. Now it may seem odd to meet people this way but just like my new friends in Poland, Merike and I hit it off immediately and we talked non-stop for the whole hour and a half trip and we never ran out of things to talk about the whole time I was visiting.

I dropped her off at her class and had a couple of hours to explore the city. I drove a mile or so to a park along a river and parked by a bridge with blue lights (it had been dark for most of the trip). I walked around some and decided to walk up one side of the river for awhile and then back along the other side. It was a great little hike until there was a fork in the river or something and I got a little lost. Then, when I retraced my steps, all I could see was a bridge with red lights. The by now familiar nervous feeling I get when I am lost or late returned because I was supposed to meet Merike at her class and I had no way to get ahold of her if I was late or got arrested or anything like that. I couldn't really ask for directions because I didn't know where I wanted to go, just to a park by a bridge by a river. While I was weighing my options a wonderful thing happened. The lights on the bridge in the distance changed from red to blue. It turned out they changed colors every two or three minutes and that was the bridge I was looking for. I got to where I was supposed to go in plenty of time and I never mentioned my scare to her since I had already told her of my hassles earlier in the day.

We then drove around for awhile and Merike pointed out many interesting things. Although she spoke English very well, she had a strong accent and it was quite different from the Polish accent so it took awhile to adapt to it. At one point she was pointing to the "white peak" and she told how Estonia had many of these. I strained and strained and could not see any peaks, white or otherwise, since it was dark out. I told her I could not see it and she kept pointing and saying the "white peak". Finally I figured out that she was saying "wild pig" and there was a statue in the park we were driving by.

Our next stop was the supermarket. Estonia is much smaller than Poland, it is as far north as part of Alaska, it borders on Russia and is further north than Moscow. So I must have had preconceived notions because I was floored when we got to the store, it was much brighter, cleaner and well stocked than any other store I saw on the entire trip. We bought some stuff and we were off for the hour and a half trip back to her house.

About ten miles from her home we were on a dirt road (I probably went 200 miles or so on dirt roads in Estonia) I noticed the car weaving a little bit and sure enough, the same tire went flat that was flat in Poland. So here we were in the middle of nowhere at about 11:00, and it is very dark and cold. We got out the spare but we could not find the jack anywhere. Merike said not to worry as there was a house about a quarter mile away. I said I really didn't want to bug these folks but she said that she knew them, that she knew almost all the people for miles around. Sure enough she was back in a few minutes with an older guy and a jack he had gotten out of his VW. I don't think he was thrilled but he was very kind and helpful and soon we were on our way.

When we got to Merike's house her eleven year old daughter, Liina was still up. She was one of the sweetest, bubbliest children I had seen in a long time (my own children excluded, of course). This house was an old farmhouse, now in Karula National Park. There was a kitchen with a sink (the only running water in the house), Liina's bedroom, and a living room which doubled as Merike and her husband, Silver's bedroom. I got a room upstairs that had been their son's room before he moved away. The toilet was an outhouse that was attached to the house but not heated. Anyway Liina was excited to show me her pink bedroom and her electric keyboard. I played a few bars of Glen Miller's "In the Mood" and she played them right back. I never learned if she already knew the song or picked it up that fast, just from watching me.

A couple of glasses of wine that we had picked up at the store and off to bed, a very long but fascinating day.

October 21

It is hard to describe how fun it was for me to have all these experiences. Before I could even let the events from one day soak in, another day of all new and different experiences was happening. This day was no exception. I had to get up early because I was going to work with Merike. I needed a shave and somehow I had lost my razor and shaving cream and I didn't want to use the only sink in the house. So here I was upstairs shaving with only a replacement blade without a handle that I had and a little spit. It wasn't as tough as I had feared but it wasn't my best shave ever, either. Then downstairs to a big breakfast. There were maybe eight things laid out because "We didn't know what you would like.". We were sitting at a small table and by the end of the meal everything was pushed down to my side, they were so generous.

But we were late for work. Merike worked for the National Park and this happened to be the one day a year that her and her colleagues got together and went to visit other parks and sites. So first we picked up one of her coworkers and his son (I am afraid I have forgotten all of of her coworker's names). We then took the son to kindergarten maybe five miles from his house. He was the cutest thing, bundled up with hats, mittens, oversized jacket and backpack. Then it was off to pick up a another coworker at another park office. Since we were late, Merike drove very fast on these little, windy, wet, dirt roads, probably up to 80 mph or maybe a little more. Then when we came to a paved highway we would slow way down to about 55mph. I asked about this and she said she had to go slow on the highways because there might be cops with radar. By now we had two carloads of people. We stopped at a store to stock up for a picnic lunch and we drove for awhile to a meeting.

After the meeting about seven of us took a hike that was very interesting. Way out in a field we came to this really old looking watch tower. You could see for miles from there. My imagination was really going strong, thinking of all the people who had used this over the years. I was disappointed to learn that instead of being built centuries ago, it was built in 1994 or something like that and was just made to look old. Another long drive took us to another park, then to a place where they reenacted the ancient ways of building things in Estonia. Another very interesting guy worked here. His name was Robert and he was an expatriot from the US. He graduated from college in Indiana. After that he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Estonia. He like it so much that he chose to live there. I asked him and he didn't stay in Estonia because of a girl and he said no. He is married now but they met after he had become a permanent resident there. We went to one more park and then back to the house, we went probably 150 miles or more. The guy we picked up early in the morning did not speak much English but he had good stories and Merike would translate for me. My favorite was about his dad and his uncle. His uncle was forced into service by the Germans when they went through on the way to fight Russia in WWII and his dad, who was younger, was forced into service with the Russians when they were fighting the retreating Germans.

Merike's husband, Silver, is a fireman. I felt a little bad for him because he did not speak English so he was excluded from most of the conversations in his own house. He was off that day but was working that night. In fact he was kind enough to take my rental car down and bought another tire for it and put the spare back in the trunk while I was at work with his wife. So I was looking forward to going to the fire station where I could take an interest in his work, too. Three men were working that night and it was very interesting to look at their equipment including a giant pump that was powered by a VW bug air-cooled motor that was given to them by Finland. The only problem there was that one of the other firemen had spent a year at school in Wisconsin so we spent most of the time listening to his English which he was proud of and seldom got to use in Estonia. It was great for me but once again Silver was kind of pushed into the background and I regretted that.

A late dinner was next, at a pub kind of place near the fire station. Restaurants were also rare in Estonia but I think they were more plentiful than in rural Poland. Merike was very appreciative, she said they ate out only about two times a year. Then back to their house. After I did my now world famous card trick for Liina, she wanted to play more cards. The only game we both knew was Fish. Liina didn't know as much English as her mother but she knew some because they teach it in school. So when playing she knew how to ask for the two through ten cards because she knew the numbers. But she had to ask her mom how to say jacks, queens, kings and aces. But aces came out as "asses". The first time she said that her mom told her in Estonian what "asses" meant in English. She giggled and continued to say it wrong, in fact I think she asked for "asses" more than any other card.

Merike was very funny and had many great stories. Here are two of my favorites. Right away when I got there I noticed two or three big plates of cranberries that were in the kitchen. Eventually I asked about them. Merike told me a long story about an Estonian tradition that their family followed every year. She talked of going out in the woods with Liina, picking the cranberries and drying them. Then they would put them in the refrigerator for the winter and finally in the spring they would throw them away when they went bad. The other story was about their children. Merike and Silver have two children who have moved away. After I got to know Merike, I asked her if eleven year old Liina was an accident. "Oh no," she said emphatically she was not. "But the first two definitely were!"

October 22

The next morning while we were eating breakfast there was a knock at the door. An older lady, their closest neighbor, came by because her cows had gotten out. She didn't have a phone so she asked Merike to call the neighbors and have them keep an eye out for them. Merike said she hadn't seen them. After she left Merike took me to an out building, the sauna building which also had a shower, a tradition in Estonia. While walking across the front lawn we came across a big cow pie. Merike said "Oh, I guess ze cows vere here after all."

Later, I followed Merike to work to use the internet access there. They had access at home but is wasn't working which was apparently a common occurrence. When we got to her office there was a guy in a white van there. He had a weekly route and was selling a variety of groceries including two or three kinds of whole fish that were on ice in the back of his van.

After another emotional goodbye, I was headed to Riga Latvia for one more couchsurfing adventure.

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