Travel Diary, Episode 6: Playing in the Sun

I've been having great difficulty doing my homework lately, due to the fact that the time of night I usually set aside for homework doing has been taken up with playing outside in the sun.

This whole northern European summer thing is doing my head in a little. At 7pm when, under normal circumstances, I'd be starting to make dinner, I think: "My goodness it's a lovely afternoon for a bike ride - what am I doing inside?" And, without hesitation, I've changed into my exercise gear and pointed the bike towards the river or the 'leisure park'.

Tartu has a 'leisure park'. It's a big outdoor thingy with a flat track for inline-skating (and, I assume, bikes - at least, no one has shouted at me to get off it when I ride around on my bike), a BMX track, an outdoor gym with all sorts of constraptions like chin up bars and parallel bars, a cross-country skiing what-not and an eight kilometer track for running and nordic walking (which can be shortened to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 kilometers, depending on where you turn - but sadly the turns aren't signposted, so you have no idea which shortcut you might be taking).

I found it on my second day here but didn't really get to play with it until Sunday. I wanted to go back on Monday, but my legs were busy whingeing about going for a 5km bike ride the day after a 13+km walk, so I thought I'd better listen to them and take a day off. Yesterday I rode down and hit the running trail before spending some time playing with the gym thingies. I probably would have gone back today if I hadn't promised myself at least one afternoon spent looking at museums and gardens.

Even then, at 7pm - when I was heading home - I had to remind myself that I had things to do tonight and shouldn't immediately go out and play. I probably shouldn't go to the park tomorrow, seeing as I have a lot of errands to do before I leave on Friday, but I secretly hope I'll be reckless enough to go there anyway.

I get to this point when I'm on holidays where I lapse into a bit of a funk. A sort of a "what's the point of all this anyway? Why am I wasting my life? What am I 'here' for anyway?" kind of thing that tends to plague me about two weeks into any given adventure. I think it's because I'm not exactly satisfied with my "normal" life, so part of me is always looking to see if this place or that place could be an alternative.

I was born and raised in Townsville, and I've lived there for the vast majority of my life, but I've never really wanted to grow old and die there. I want to be somewhere else for a while. And then, maybe, somewhere else again for a while after that. Then I hope to eventually find the place where I do want to grow old and die. When I think about Townsville, I think: "This place is okay for a holding pattern, but it's not really where I want to be." And yet, I suspect that I'll probably maintain my holding pattern for a few decades if I'm not careful.

So, when I'm travelling, a part of me is scoping the place out - asking "is this the place I want to be?" The answer is usually "no", which leads to a bit of self loathing. If I don't want to be where I am, and I don't want to be here either, then what the Heck do I want and why am I so gorram hard to please?

I think Tartu might be hitting a bit of a "maybe" point with me, though. Or, at least, I find that going outside to play in the sun is chasing the funk away. Part of me is saying: "Yes, fine, but what will you do here? You can't afford to be an unemployed student, and you love being a librarian but wouldn't have good enough language skills to hold a similar position here..." The rest of me is saying: "Hey! Park!"

I'm sure it's just a summer thing. I expect if I was still here when it was dark between 4pm and 10am and cold and miserable for the few hours of daylight, I'd rethink basing my optimism for a town on its outdoor persuits. They do have an indoor pool, though, and an ice-skating rink, so maybe in winter I could keep chasing away the blues with physical activities. Plus, there's a fencing club here, so I'd be able to keep that up...

Meanwhile, I brought along the chapter of my textbook that I was supposed to have been working on for the past few weeks, and I have so far failed to devote more than a couple of hours to it. I've managed to write a few blog posts, though, which just goes to prove that I am a bad student.