Estonian Day No. 146.

Today, it's my sisters' birthday - although Eva and Sylvi are no twins! ♥ :D

And now another part of the Chronicles of Estonia:

Dec 10th - after 11am

We're leaving for Tartu.

Epic walk to the bus station.

  

After we had been on the bus for about 90sec, Janika called me to give me a list of the things she had forgotten at my place. Creepy little redhead... ♥

Isabell, Leonie and me bought some food and then took our bus to Tallinn. We wanted to meet there with Kanta, Kahm, Fern, Pauline and Pauline at Elisa's place. (You remember Elisa? I missed the first snow in Sojamaa while I was standing at the Baltic see with her, being rained on hardly, when all the others had gone to Helsinki.) Well, since the girls had told us that Elisa was not too happy about us coming that late, we decided to take one bus earlier - it would be only 30mins difference, but still. 

Having arrived in Tallinn, we were facing two options: either taking bus no. 17a to the kesklinn, or taking tram no. 4 which would stop about 200m from Elisa's flat (I was the only one of us who knew the way to the flat). We decided for tram no. 2. When you have to choose between A and B, it's rarely clever to pick W. It was the same in our case. It was cold and windy, so maybe that was what made us take the first tram to come, and we simply tried to look for a place, that seemed to be familiar. We ended up at the baltijaam, the main train station of Tallinn, which was pretty much at the other end of the city. Funny (or rather sad) thing about the baltijaam is, that even Gera's train station is a lot more looking like a European capital's main station. It was pretty disgusting there. Luckily Isabell claimed to know the way to Vabaduse Väljak, from where I would be able to find Elisa's flat. 

It took us almost an hour to find Vabaduse Väljak. We were wondering about why the others had so strictly refused to take us from the bussijaam again and again. Actually we had planned only 30mins to get from the station to Elisa, but after all it had taken us an hour - so it was not really any use that we had come half an hour earlier to Tallinn, except that we were not much too late. 80% of the girls were waiting in front of Elisa's house - and when we arrived, they sang and played on ukulele "Happy Birthday To You" for me. That was sooo cute! Then they explained that they were standing in the cold and the rain because Elisa hadn't arrived yet - WTF?! So we could as well have taken the later bus. But whatever.

When Elisa arrived, Kahm (with whom Isabell and me would be staying the night) still wasn't with us. She came a lot later, but that was okay. We were meeting because we wanted to practice "Time Of Your Life" by Greenday, because we would be singing that for the YFU Jõulukontsert. Well - you could hear that we had never practiced it together before. It took us quite a while to find the problem why exactly it simply didn't sound, and when Elisa and me realized what it was, we couldn't change it anyway, so we decided that we would be imperfect and just try to make the best out of it. Pauli said "well, nobody will hear it anyway, except Monique and Eduardo". "And me", I added. 

I love being perfect, so when I know that I am not, it's hard but still kinda okay, I can take that. But when other educated musicians know that I am not, although I should be and could be, it's too much. But whatever. We would be imperfect, and I couldn't change it without making everybody feel miserable. 

During all the time, we were communicating with Juliana (German girl in Estonia) and Clara E. (German girl in Finland), because we actually wanted to meet the exchange students from Finland. After all, it was my birthday and I didn't want to spend it all with senselessly practicing instead of meeting my friends. But that was exactly what happened. 

When Luisa talked to me on the phone and congratulated me warmly, I almost cried. Seriously: I was closer to tears than I had been in a long time. I had been able to keep them back all day, and all the day before, but hardly in that moment. But again, I managed. So we agreed on meeting the next day, Vabaduse Väljak at 11am.

We finished practicing around 7pm and Isabell and me went with Kahm to the city centre. Again: after all, it was still my birthday. We had a closer look at the Tallinna Jõuluturg, but it was already closing, so we decided to buy some non-alcoholic sparkling wine (yay!) and go home to cook and sadly celebrate there. Kahm's family turned out to be one of the most amazing YFU families I have met here in Estonia. Or rather all over the world, since I know only Estonian host families... We had a lot of fun together and after a delicious Thai dinner, we built up our beds in the living room and watched "Slumdog Millionaire". (Why exactly do all families in Estonia have a huge flat-screen TV set?!!) It was nice and we finally slept around 2am.

 "OMG, we all look really awful in this picture!" - "Well, photos show how you feel, don't they?"

  

 

 

                 A big ship made all of amber - check out the price!

 

Estonian Day No. 142.

And the photo story is going on... ;)

Dec 8th
After the PE lesson

Dec 9th

My birthday party - we made it a theme party: "Sini-must-valge" was the title, which are the colours of the Estonian flag. So everybody had to come dressed in blue-black-white, and we made pretty much blue-black-white food. 

Still preparing...

Well, the best part was that we finally had SNOW, real snow!!! There was actually a pretty heavy storm outside in the afternoon. I should've become even stronger, but luckily that didn't happen. It was almost gone by the time the main part of the guests arrived. Leonie and Isabell had been there earlier already to help me with all the preparations (and even six hours seemed to be too little time in the end...), and the others arrived around 9pm. 

Then we had sauna. I usually go there alone (mainly because there is noone to go with), but this time we managed to put seven girls together in there - and our sauna is really small - and it was soooo much fun! Especially when we were running around in the snow-covered garden, barefoot and with our bikinis on only. We even wanted to go swimming in the pond, but our feet were frozen before Janika got to break the thick ice. That was the most amazing sauna experience I ever had.

  When the guys were in the sauna...

Dec 10th - my actual Sweet Seventeen

The day started with me waking up because I heard people in the kitchen - at 9am. (Argh!!!) I went downstairs and found my parents and my younger brother, who had left our house for the night.

Oh, there's a dialogue I gotta tell you about. It took place in some morning, while I was sitting in the car with Ilona, on the way to Tartu:

"By the way, you can have the house."

"Which house?"

"Our house."

"Whaa...?"

"For your birthday."

"But...?"

"Yeah, Ahti, Andreas and me will stay over at some friend's place."

"But...?"

"Yeah, of course, we'll get your guests from the busstation in Lähte and bring them home, Ahti will make the sauna, but then we'll be gone."

In that moment, I was still speechless. Later, when I had found my voice again, I kinda thanked her a thousand times for everything.

Well, they had come back in the morning, congratulated me, and gave me flowers and my super cool present - two tickets for the Ahhah!-Science centre - and then started making pancakes. I had actually wanted to make pancakes, but Ilona said that I'd better go and wake the others, she'd be caring for everything. And she made pancakes with whipped cream and my favourite fruit-stuff-whatever. We had never had pancakes with whipped cream before! That was pretty much the best breakfast ever.

Afterward, me and some of my guests had a short walk outside, because we had snow and sun at the same time! Reeeaaally cool.