The background photo was taken at the Open Air Museum in Tallinn, which was one of the highlights of my trip to Estonia last year.
I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who is thinking of travelling through Eastern Europe at any point.
Mind you, I had some difficulty explaining the concept of an open air museum to a friend of mine recently.
You see, it's a museum of buildings and farms - as in, the actual buildings and gardens are the "objects" in the museum. It's brilliant - they grabbed old buildings from all over the country, took them apart, moved them to the museum and put them back together again.
It took a few goes to explain to my friend that I was talking about real buildings sitting in a park. It's such a brilliant concept, but one that we're not so familiar with here in Australia.
The Open Air Musuem has something of an extra significance for me, as well. I was standing next to one of the buildings, reading the sign, when my personal language goals cemented into place. You see, all of the signs in the OAM are in Estonian, English, German and Russian. I was looking at this sign, trying to make out the few words I knew of the three non-English languages, when I realised I didn't want to just play with these languages - I wanted to be able to read them, dammit. I want to be able to go back to the museum in a few years time capable of reading the entire sign - all four languages. Maybe, by the time I'm there again, I'll be able to do it.
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