Day Two partially over…  Wanted to keep the momentum up while I still can.  Woke up this morning around eight after getting a good nights sleep.  I think I’m pretty much comfortably in the time zone, but I hear it’s harder going the other way?  We’ll see.

I went for a jog around this cool park this morning (another habit I’m trying to force myself to have), and, as planned, got lost on the way back.  This was planned cause I knew I’d only want to run a couple miles, but the time I spent trying to reorient myself nearly doubled the original run.  Way to plan!

Came back to the hostel and studied for three hours, then I went a wanderin’.  I waited awhile for a tram to take me to the museum, during which wait I had my first conversation.  It went something like this:

Estonian Woman: blahblahblahblahblah kolm blahblahblahblah

Me: shrug

Pretty cool!  I finally got on the tram, where I again couldn’t figure out how to pay, so I didn’t.  I went to some cool park and wandered, then found the museum.  The big art museum is beautiful, and the collection was pretty cool.  There was a contemporary exhibit that was uniformly awesome, especially one installation.  I filmed it, so that’s something.   I walked home rather than do the train, I figured it wouldn’t be that far.  It wasn’t.  Now I’m home, having dinner, after which I’m going to try to do another two hours.  (Five hours really doesn’t seem like much, but day after day?  I’m not sure.  We’ll tweak the plan as we go along.)  so..  yeah.

The highlights of the museum were a room full of weird busts, some of which talked, and this water fountain thing (see pictures) that spelled out words in water droplets, taken from some sort of internet news feed.  It’s like rain from a word cloud.

Observations:

• The local beer tastes like the first time you ever tasted beer.  Whether that’s a good thing…
• There were a ton of portraits of Stalin in their Soviet-era exhibit.  Being an American, I have a hard time looking at them and not assuming they have some satirical subtext, but we all know how artists are all pinkos.
• The tram also smells.
• There really are a lot of Russians here.  There’s no sh- or ch- or dj- sounds in Estonian, so those are the giveaway.
• Credit cards here are different.  While mine does work here, the cashiers never know what to do with it.  European cards are just inserted into a customer-facing reader and held there.  The magnetic stripe kinds like we have have to be done on the register by the cashier.  Anyhow, nobody every told me this.
• The weather, by the way, is phenomenal.  Low 70s, crystal clear.  I hope this holds.
• Terrible music everywhere.  So I guess it’s more or less like the States.