Enjoying Tartu and Latvia

Saturday, Sept. 15, 2007--Tartu (Continued)

I ate a sandwich like the ones I had read about here--juicy with sour cream and other ingredients. It was called a burger kebabiga and had roasted chicken and pork in it along with tomatoes, onions, the sour cream, and a red salsa. It was on a big bun. Ummm!!

I gave myself two treats. I bought some dental floss although it costs 6 times as much here as it does in the U.S. I just could not stand going without flossing. I also bought a box of chocolate truffles. They are nice and creamy. Unfortunately, they are a bit too sweet. Too bad.

I am trying to get by without buying many things that cannot be taken onto my flight back to Copenhagen next week. I am using soap to shave rather than buying shaving cream. I am also using the soap as a shampoo rather than buying a bottle. I bought the smallest tube of toothpaste, since it is under the 50 ml limit. Unfortunately, it tastes HORRIBLE--a bit like bubble gum. I have to drink water to get the taste out of my mouth after brushing.

Tartu has a nice market building. It is clean and bright. And there are nice food products for sale in it. It is too bad that markets here do not have restaurants in them the way markets in many countries do. I would enjoy going to the market to eat a cheap local meal.

Sunday, Sept. 16, 2007--Tartu

I awoke to one of my recurring dreams this morning--one where I was supervising a student teacher and had forgotten about him. It was late in the semester, and I had only visited him once. When I went to see him this time, he was not doing well. He had not even tried teaching full time on his own. I hate dreams like that.

It is a nice, sunny day. The wind is blowing though, and it is cold. Earlier in the day, there were some off and on showers, but they ended and the sun has shown most of the day.

I had a bad experience when I left the room this morning. I walked toward the song park (where they have national singing competitions) which is near my room. On the pathway, I found a man crumpled up. He was dressed well and I could hear his music player going. So he probably had been out jogging or walking. I did not try to talk to him, since I cannot speak Estonian. Instead, I rushed to a nearby building where I saw a woman outside. I started to tell her about him, and she responded that the police had already been called. I walked away and watched for the police. Finally, they came in an ambulance, but I had already walked several blocks and they were traveling at normal speed without a siren. I hope that man survived. He probably had either a heart attack or a stroke.

I had 300 krooni left to spend today which is my last day in Estonia. That is a little less than $30. I went to Humana, a used clothing store I had seen, and looked at shirts. I bought two 100% cotton shirts (one still with its original paper tags) for only $5.25 each. That will get me by until I return to Denmark where I have other clothes that I keep stored there. Later in the day, I also bought a pair of socks at a sporting goods store.

I went to the Estonian National Museum. It is so nice. Everything on exhibit was of high quality. And they had long, detailed explanations in English related to everything. I felt I really learned a lot by going through there.

The museum is at the back of the hill in the center of town. It was already past lunchtime when I left, and I wanted to return to the Student Cafe at the university. So I walked through the area of the university on the hillside to get there. It is so nice. It has REAL university atmosphere. It ought to, since the campus is 375 years old!

I ate lasagna and salad and drank apple juice at the cafe. It was good, but the lasagna was a bit salty, I think. I remained thirsty the rest of the day.

I spent most of the rest of my money on pastries, boxes of juices, and other snacks. Then I went toward my room as rain began again. It stopped, though, as I was passing the botanical gardens, so I went into there. They were delightful. There were more flowering plants there than I think I have ever seen at a similar garden before. I wandered through their entire block square grounds enjoying the colors and the smells. Then I headed out toward home and it started raining again.

I am reading two novels at the same time. That is not normal for me. I usually like to concentrate on only one at a time. But The Pilgrimš Progress is too detailed and takes a lot of thinking. It is written in series of events, so it is easy to stop after any one of them. Dubliners is a collection of short stories, so it is easy to read them one at a time, too. So I go from the heavy to the light reading, back and forth and back again.

Monday, Sept. 17, 2007--Tartu, Estonia, to Valmeira, Cēsis, and Segulda, Latvia

When I left early this morning, it was raining. By the time I arrived in Valmeira, it had stopped and the sun was coming out. The day ended up being one of the best I have had here--sunny and rather warm.

I had two worries this morning: Would I have any problem at the border? Would my bank card work in the ATM when I got to Valmeira and needed Latvian money? The first was a worry because there is only one crossing where international tourists are processed, and I was not sure if the bus would pass there. I got even more worried when we pulled into the middle of the border town. But we only stopped to let passengers off and then pulled out and went northward to the country crossing where I could go through with everyone else. In Valmiera, the card worked fine. I had been told it would, but one never knows if a mistake will happen when they change things (and they changed my card so that called-in uses could not occur).

My problem that eventually came was unexpected. When I got to Cēsis, they had no listings of private rooms. My choices were to stay in a dormitory at a hostel for $16-20 per night or to stay in the cheapest hotel at $50 per night. There was nothing between those. I decided to leave the city and go on to Segunda where I had already planned to spend the next night anyway.

First, I walked through Cēsis. It is an OLD town. And it seems even more old than it might because it has not been improved much. It still looks, I would guess, much like it did when Latvia was part of the USSR. I do not know what Latvia has done with their EU funding, but they have not done what Estonia did with theirs. In Estonia, they have restored everything, put in new streets and sidewalks, etc. One street in Cēsis had been paved with flat bricks, but a big trench had been dug down the middle of the entire street at some point and then filled in with rubble. The other streets were old cobblestone streets that had more dirt than they did cobblestones. The buildings were gray for the most part. Even the window displays looked a lot like the old communist window displays used to look.

There are other differences I have seen in Estonia and Latvia. The highways in Latvia are rough and not newly paved as in Estonia. The people in Estonia are more stylish looking than here in Latvia where people still tend to look like Soviet peasants to a great extent. The teenagers here in Latvia seem to be more menacing looking to me than the ones in Estonia did. In other words, Estonia is the more progressive country.

Now in terms of prices, both countries are ADVANCED. Like most countries joining the EU, they have had prices go up dramatically. My guidebook was printed 4 years ago which means it was written about 5 years ago. Hotel prices are 5 times today the price that my guidebook quotes. Other prices are higher, too. Could salaries have gone up so much also?

I was lucky to get a private room in a home with an elderly lady here in Segulda. I have spent the afternoon wandering after a disappointing luncheon. I was told a dish was chicken and could not tell much because of the dark mushroomy-like sauce over it. When I bought it, I found it was chicken livers. These Latvians, according to my guidebook, love their offals and their organs. Anyway, I ate it although I would have preferred something else. Then I went on my way to enjoy the town and the area. This is the headquarters for Gauja National Park. The town is rather open and spread out. The park includes a river in a deep valley. It is autumn here, so the trees are starting to turn color. Some are already a bright red, yellow, or orange, so it is beautiful when there is an oversight that lets me see for a long distance. There are castles here, too. This was the dividing line between lands that were given to knights and retained by the church. Each built their own castle. I sat inside the ruins of one today as I looked across the river and woods to another that has been restored.

I will stay here tomorrow and explore the park. Then I will head to Riga on Wednesday.