This year I found it incredibly tedious. Sure, the buildings were still interesting, but a bit "old hat". The shops were all full of the same trash, the restaurants were all overpriced and the people were cashing in on the throngs of tourists who were everywhere. Maybe I was just tired. Maybe I was over tourists, and being a tourist. All I know is that the place did not re-acquaint well. Have you ever bumped into someone you used to like, only to realise you can't work out what you saw in them? It was like that.
Tartu was always someplace I meant to revisit, just to see some of the museums I missed on the first time. Oddly, since coming here I haven't visited any museums apart from the ones on my class excursions. I suppose I'll have to work on it quickly, as I'm only here for a few more days. I've just been spending my afternoons riding around the river on my bicycle or shopping for CDs I can't listen to and DVDs I can't watch (my apartment doesn't have a DVD player, and my computer doesn't have a disc drive).
And books. I have bought far too many books - but I console myself with the fact that they are all cool. Well, one of them is just practical, but the others are cool. I have Estonian versions of Tarzan novels, Pippi Longstockings, Mary Poppins and The Hunger Games. Yes, they are all translations of books in English, but that's the point - I'll be able to use the English books to have a fighting chance of reading the Estonian. It worked really well for The Reader (which was in German, but I'm hoping the principle will hold).
The find of the century, though, was a beautiful hard-cover side-by-side Estonian translation of The Hunting of the Snark. Have you ever wondered how the last stanza of the Snark would sound in Estonian? Of course you have. Well, here it is:
Ta vaevu üht sõna seal ütlema hakkasBeautiful, isn't it?
kesk naeru ja täis meelehead,
kui pehmelt ja äkitselt olemast lakkas--
Snark oligi Kõmak, kas tead.
Oh, by the way, I bought a bicycle. It was a second hand thing I bought from a bike shop aways up the road from the university. My primary reason for buying the bike was that it was the cheapest one with a hand-operated break for the rear wheel (all of the others had back-pedal breaks, which I'm sure, in this hilly city, would lead to my certain death), and I'm absolutely in love with it. It's such a neat little bike, and it has no problems with handling a wide variety of roads and footpaths - and dirt tracks and even sand. I have no idea what it is, because there's nothing written on the bike except for the number 73 (I suspect it used to be a rental), and a badge I haven't been able to identify yet. I haven't given up, though. I'm a librarian. I have powers.
I said that to one of my classmates today, and he decided to challenge me by asking me what it means if his ring finger aches. A quick check on PubMed suggested referred pain from lung or breast cancer. He didn't seem convinced with either option. I told him that's what you get from asking a librarian a medical question. I went to Viljandi on the weekend. It was high on my list of things to revisit, and it was close enough to manage. Viljandi is where I suspect I want to put my maze complex when I'm rich and eccentric, so I wanted to see if it still felt like somewhere I could live for a few years.
I quite like Viljandi. Tartu seems like a place where people work, Viljandi seems like a place where people live. It has a larger proportion of people who smile when they pass you in the street. They never seem to smile at the cash registers of the supermarkets, though. Check-out chicks always seem to regard you with a look of mistrust. It's like they've been told there will be a test today, and you could very well be the person testing them.
The last time I was in Viljandi I heard you could run around the lake, so I thought I'd try walking the track on the weekend. If you are ever thinking of walking the track around Lake Viljandi, I recommend that you do take insect repellent, and you don't take your camera. You see the lake about three times in the walk. It's about 13 kilometers long, and for most of it you're just staring at trees, weeds or highway. Seriously, you spend more time in view of the highways in and our of Viljandi than you do in sight of the lake. It was exhausting, and not pretty enough to warrant that kind of effort. I was feeling a bit annoyed with Viljandi, to be frank.
But... but later that evening, just to stretch my legs, I went for a walk to a park down the end of the street where I was staying, and discovered another lake and a winding little valley that had a dam designed to be used as a swimming pool. A beautiful valley I wasn't expecting to see, with a swimming pool in the middle of it. That's Viljandi for you.
I had intended to try someplace over the other side of town this time, but in the end I went back to Hotel Endla. I stayed there the last time I was in Viljandi because it was conveniently close to the bus station and I had misread the price schedule for Estonian guesthouses. I thought I was getting a hotel that was one step down from the most expensive, but I was actually getting one that was one step up from the least expensive.
It worked out quite well, though, because the cafe was cheap, the room was comfortable, the bus station was conveniently close and the neighbourhood was a pretty place for a stroll. It was also really easy to walk to the major sights of the town. I settled on going back there this year for those reasons - and, you know what? The cafe was still cheap, the room was still reasonably comfortable, the bus station was still conveniently close and the neighbourhood seemed a bit more fixed-up than last time, so that worked out well.
I didn't have to share the hotel with a bus load of Finish Mormon missionaries this time, which was a bit of a plus. Missionaries are okay in small doses, but on mass they become quite cumbersome.
I did have to share the town with a rock festival, though. Just my luck, I missed out on the folk festival by a couple of weeks and arrived just in time to have the streets flooded with drunken hooligans. Actually, drunken hooligans are kind of normal in Estonia, but this was a concentration of drunken hooligans with lots of tattoos and the kind of gormless anger that only heavy rock can soothe...
I wouldn't have minded so much if they hadn't taken over the castle ruins for the festival. The bridge and the ruins were things I wanted to take some photos of, this trip, and they were both roped off with yellow hazard tape. Stupid "Rockramp". Why couldn't they have their acts in pubs, like proper rock?
For that matter, why can't Estonian men drink in pubs, like normal drunkards? I'm a bit over the amount of men you see rolling around the streets with open containers of alcohol at ten o'clock in the morning. Civilised people don't do this, Estonia. Just because you can buy alcohol at any given shop and at any time of the day doesn't mean you should, and it certainly doesn't mean you should start drinking it straight away. People keep telling me Estonia has more in common with Sweden and Germany than Russia, and shouldn't be thought of as a Post-Soviet country... but, you know what? If you want to stop being seen as a Post-Soviet country, you should stop drinking like one.
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