Last weekend I visited a place where they greet each other with a happy “ciao”. You guessed it; Estonia.
My dear colleague Evely has gone back to Tartu university to finish her master’s degree, so I, Shinya and Jenni took this as an opportunity to go and visit our neighbouring country. When you get to stay somewhere for free, eat for free and have private tour guides you would be very stupid not to. Here are some pictures:
Shinya at the breakfast table. This is what met us when we came downstairs on Saturday morning – just like living in a hotel! We were staying at Mart’s parent’s house that was located about 5-10 min walk from the city center.
Town hall and Tilting house of Tartu.
A popular student prank is to pour washing powder into the Town hall fountain.
The bridge that every new student has to walk across, and when I say across I mean on top of the archway! Evely has done it… don’t tell the police 
After seeing the “city by night” on Friday, Saturday was spent out on the countryside. We took the car to go and pick up Evely’s boyfriend Mart and at the same time do some sightseeing. 
Our first stop was at the shore of Peipsijärvi, an enormous lake (which I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t even know existed before I saw it with my own eyes). Half of the lake belongs to Russia, which made Shinya look for military posts and seeing spies in every bird that flew over us. We did however see some “Russians” when we went for lunch in a local restaurant.
At the restaurant we had grilled fish with tea. Hot water was poured from a samovar and the waitress stressed that we should have a piece of toffee like sugar in our mouths while drinking – who knew you could find such exotic foods just by crossing the Finnish border!?
After lunch Evely wanted to buy some snacks. When we were driving we’d noticed a lot of signs along the road saying that people were selling smoked fish. I had pictured it to be something like the Finnish muikku that is a small herring like thing that you can eat whole. But no, when I came out of the restaurant I was shocked seeing Evely holding a giant fish in her arms. This was then our afternoon snack. And it was good!! Mart is the guy standing beside her with is thumb in the air 
Another exotic experience was crossing a river with a raft-like ferryboat. It ran on pure man-power and the driver actually forced Mart to give him a hand.
Our journey continued to a power plant where they had a nature path. Here we got to see some beautiful sand cliffs and we also had some time to pick mushrooms!
