OMG, you guys! Yesterday was epic. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Man!  Sorry it’s been awhile since I rapped at ya..

Anyone remember that columnist from the Onion?  That dude was cool.

So class is good.  Three hours in the morning, lunch break, then more class, or lectures, or tours or whatnot.

I’ve watched two Estonian movies this week.  Vilmne Reliikvia, which is a weird Soviet propaganda movie set in the olden tymes in Estonia.  Sword fights and stufff.  Any fan of The Princess Bride would love this movie.  Then we watched today a movie called Klass, which is about bullied kids getting their weird revenge.  It was a little gruesome, but I guess that’s kind of the point.

We visited the old observatory, which is nice because I didn’t see it the last time I was in Tartu.  Back in the day it was kind of a big deal in astronomy circles..  so that was cool.  The best part was that the tower with the telescope could spin around so you could aim the telescope wherever you wanted, and it still works today.  You can see a picture of it below.

And..  yeah!  Finally, I saw this piece of graffiti:

Hastert. I swear.

I swear swear swear that it’s Dennis Hastert, which would be awesome, but everyone else thinks it’s an Estonian politician.

I guess you can decide which one makes more sense. But I’m sticking with the story that the random piece of graffiti on a wall in Tartu is a picture of a downstate Illinois US Representative.
In other news, I’m going to bed. I’ve got an awesome run mapped out for tomorrow that should have some pretty good views of teh city, maybe I will try to run with my camera. Seriously though, I’ve probably taken enough pictures of blue skies and old buildings, but somehow it never gets old.

I don't how to say "palatial" in Estonian, but I should learn.

I’m totally back in Tartu. For real.  I may have mentioned this in the past, but I’ve got a rather strong preference for Tartu over Tallin (though neither of them are Haapsalu..? ) so I’m pretty happy to be back.  Unfortunately, my hostel is tiny, there’s no wifi in the room, the window shade is absolutely covered with crushed, dead bugs, there’s no desk or dresser, and it’s a twenty minute walk from school, maybe ten from the center of town.  Yike.

Because we’d all like to focus on the positive, I’ll do my best.

The shower is not totally disgusting.

It’s too early to compare classes, though we spend a lot more time in the class, which I think will be good for me.  Well, it can’t be bad.  Really, my big problem is my small vocabulary,  so…  well, that’s something.  We’ll see how it goes.

Word.  I’ve been doing a pretty solid job of not actually writing anything about Estonian, which is probably a little bit odd, but I haven’t really had anything yet to say about it.  One thing I will mention is that I’ve decided they need to take another look at alphabetical order, which is as follows:

A, B, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, Š, Z, Ž, T, U, V, Õ, Ä, Ö, Ü

The problem is that all the vowels with diacritics are at the end of the alphabet.  This is something I could deal with (though I’d prefer they each just get stuck after their boring counterparts), but the problem is that they come in as Õ, Ä, Ö, Ü.  I cannot think of a good reason for Õ and Ö not being next to each other.  (Maybe I just did: Close back unrounded, open front unrounded, close-mid front rounded, close front rounded.  There’s some semblance of logic there if you stare at a vowel chart for a minute, and make roundedness the first decision but seriously, who thinks of vowel charts?  The rest of the alphabet has the unrounded vowels (a, e, i) before the rounded ones (o, u), and moves from more open to more closed…  but like I said, who thinks of vowel charts?)

I also don’t see why you’d bother with diacritics for vowels when there’s still a Y available, especially when Finnish uses the Y, but I guess that puts them in line with other European languages.  Still,  it’s certainly an improvement over the way it works in English with our blahblahblah, and sometimes Y (and W?) but what’s not an improvement over English?  I actually do kinda like how Š, Z, Ž follow S, though these don’t really pop up that much in Estonian.  It’d be great the Latin alphabet were in some sort of oral cavity-based order, but now I’m going crazy.

(In the spirit of totally going crazy, here’s my proposed new alphabetical order:

 A, B, P,  Ä,  D, T,  E, G, K, H, I, F, V,  Õ,  S, Š, Z, Ž, O, M, Ö,  N, U, L, R, Ü, J

Similar looking vowels are togetherish but spread evenly-ish between the consonants, roundedness/unroundedness is reflected, voiced/voiceless letters are paired up, stops come first, the approximant is near at the end like ‘Merican Y, F is next to V and the other non-Estonian letters are near S.  Ha, okay, so maybe this was a ridiculous waste of time.  So it goes.)

I’m going to do homework now, then figure out where i’m going to get dinner.

So I’m leaving Tallin today to spend two weeks in Tartu, where I’ll hopefully finally master the language!

Friday was our last day of classes.  We took a test, which I did okay on, but it confirmed that I still have a pretty sketchy idea about how four of the cases work.  I’ve got a good handle on the first three (nominative, genitive, and partitive), and the last four are pretty straight-forward (terminative, essive, abessive, comitative).  The problem is the rest of them, really.  I’m basically saying something like “I understand even numbers to 10 pretty well, but odd numbers, decimals, and everything over 11 is a mystery” and then acting like I’ve accomplished something.

Still though, there’s been progress.  My current worry is that I won’t be prepared for the class in Tartu, but I wasn’t really prepared for this class, and it went well enough.  We’ll see!

In other news, it rained a ton yesterday, and it’s really pretty out today, and I’m wearing a black -shirt.  The Superchunk Misfits cover has been playing on repeat in my room, Nestea brand lemon-green tea is totally disgusting, and I’m having second thoughts about that math analogy.  Until next time.

I just posted this photo with semi-cryptic caption:

The oddly familiar door

Why do we care?

This is why we care.

Link.

Camera Finder

First things first: I would like to thank the above girl, whoever she is, for not stealing my phone.  Last Thursday, I went to a restaurant for  dinner.  We were sitting on a bench waiting for a table to open up, and I was goofing around, looking at my camera and playing with my  phone, as I do.  When a table opened up, I left my camera on the bench.  About a half hour later, I realized it was missing.  I went over to the bench, which was occupied by a group of kids, and I asked them about the camera.  Helpfully, they had given it to a waitress at the restaurant, who I found and who subsequently brought me my phone.  Hooray.  It wasn’t until later that I realized that the original camera finders had taken a couple pictures of themselves, which I’ve posted, above and below.  Whoever you guys are, thanks for being honest and funny.  I appreciate both of those things.  (Funny: if you enlarge the photo, you can actually see me in the background.  I’m sitting with a guy with sunglasses on his head; I’m wearing a plaid shirt.  I’m at about 1:00 if you stick the clock hands in the girl’s forehead.)

In other news, I went to my first Estonian rock show.  The venue was comfortingly like your average venue at home, complete with cheap beer, uncomfortable temperatures, and a 45-minute late starting time.  The bands we’re pretty good.  Ans Andur, Elephants From Neptune, Kosmoseratsanikud, and Lobster Handshake.  LH was a Finnish band that kinda sucked, despite having a shirtless long-haired dude.  The K band was good, too, though the last band wasn’t terribly great.  Unfortunately, Ans Andur, the band I was actually there to see, wasn’t that impressive.  They seemed to be focusing on new songs, so a lot of the crowd wasn’t that into it.  I can’t really blame bands for wanting to do that, but it was still a little disappointing.

Some other pictures are from the beach, and thus don’t require much in the way of explanation.  I also happened across an awards ceremony for some amateur track and field competition. Russia did quite well. That’s it for now.