We left for Tallinn on Sunday and arrived in just enough time to get settled into the hotel and go to dinner. We ate at a place called Olde Hansa, which is a medieval themed restaurant where all the waiters are characters in full costume and the dinner is lit by candle light and you get your hands washed with a pitcher of water. The food was excellent, and apparently very authentic. It consisted of all sorts of foods that I adore but do not get the opportunity to eat all the time. We had smoked-sauerkraut, lentils, ginger and turnips, juniper and herb baked cheese, and those are only a few of the side dishes. The actual feast was amazing and such a fun experience at our long table of 26. There was also this great thing since it was served family style that if you ran out of something (including the meat dishes and dessert) you could just let one of the servers know and he would run and grab you more. They also had honey beer and cinnamon beer, but at almost 5 euro a piece I decided to pass, but I had some sips and they were devine. Other people went out to explore the city but my ankle was killing me so I took a cab with my professor back to the hotel. My friend bought me a rose at the Estonian flower market because she could see that I was bummed out to not get to explore. It was a perfect act of kindness to end the night.
The next two days we went and saw some schools and had a bit of free time in Tallinn. Going out to the schools we got to see a lot outside of "Old Town" and it was startling because it looked quite a bit like I would imagine an ex-soviet country to look, with sort of run down apartment buildings and a little bit of a depressing vibe, but in Old Town it was bursting with culture and tourism. I wish we had been able to have a little bit of a review of Soviet countries. It is hard to remember anything besides "it was bad" from sophomore year in high school, when the USSR seemed lifetimes away. Estonia is the first country I have been to that is younger than I am. I mean, Tallinn is old, but all the schools we saw were still in the process of figuring out what to do. Since my class is "Children with Special Needs" we also had to deal with the shock that under the Soviet regime most children with disabilities did not live long enough to go to school or were institutionalized. There was more snow in Tallinn than I have ever seen before in my life, and granted that I have only really seen wimpy Danish snow, considering that it is MARCH and there were still MOUNTAINS I was impressed.
I hope I get a chance to go back to Tallinn some time. I really did enjoy it, and I cannot wait to see how that little country flourishes on its own. Also fun fact, Tallinn literally means "City of the Danes".
We took a ferry/cruise over to Stockholm, and that was my favorite night by far. Not only was the ship fully equipped with bars, night clubs, a ball pit, karaoke, and a buffet that went on for miles, but it was Mardi Gras. We ate the traditional Estonian Shrove Tuesday buns, which were kinda gross consisting of unsweetened rolls with fermented cherries and cream inside, but it was still and experience. We had read about how a ferry making the same exact voyage we were on in 1994 sunk and killed over 850 people, so that was fun and scary. The ship is also an icebreaker, which literally means that the sea around us is frozen and it feels like an earthquake when our ship's special design crushes ice around us. We all spent hours staring into the ocean. It is one of those things that you see that you will probably never see again and strikes you with a silent awe. Almost like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, or the feeling I got when I first saw snow. Just huge abysses of the darkest black with no lights in sight but the glow of the ship illuminating sheets of ice that stretched meters and meters across and floated and knocked into each other. I could have watched it forever. It is also something that did not photograph well at all, but I tried.
If I forget about the frustrations with how the trip was ran, Stockholm was also fabulous. It is maybe one of the only cities I have been to that I could see myself in besides Copenhagen. I am such a little Scandinavian girl. Everything was beautiful, including the weather. I know I will go back at some point.
We had a day of field visits on our last day that started at a spectacular Reggio Emilia school, and I have said it once and will probably say it every time I am asked for the rest of my life, I LOVE REGGIO EMILIA. Seriously, if you have a child and public school just isn't cutting it, please please please send them to a Reggio Emilia preschool/kindergarten. The children served us refreshments and then performed a belly dance and then a hip hop routine, complete with full costumes. They also made us welcome signs. The last academic visit we made was by a social entrepreneur, and although she was a little intense, she was 26 and had started 3 businesses that made her money and helped the world, one of them specifically helping children. She was a bit of a wake up call to why I am really in Denmark. It is great to take this year to get experience and figure out who I am, but I am really hear to help me later in my career. The experiences here need to be taken to the next level when I get home so I can apply the Danish philosophy to how I view children I will work with in the future. My new thing is to ask myself "Julia, right now are you being more or less competent than a Danish child?". It is funny because it is true.
The last thing we did before we got on the plane to come back home to København was go to Junibacken, which is the children's play amusement park type thing based on Swedish children's literature, mostly Pippi Longstocking (which all of Scandinavia is obsessed with). I am taking my children to Scandinavia when they are young, maybe around 7 or 8. I want to take them to Legoland, and the Tinderbox, and Junibacken. It is so hard to learn about my ideal child rearing countries and then have to go back to the states. Junibacken had a ride that was 11 minutes that was what I always wanted Storybookland at Disneyland to be. We rode in boxes that were on tracks, but tracks from the top so you flew, but they moved, so more intense than Peter Pan, but not as endearing, although pretty darn cute. It told you little synopsis of the different stories and ended with a longer one where essentially the little boy got paralyzed by the evil dragon and he and his brother committed suicide together, but it was a very peaceful almost happy ending. The same type that the real Little Mermaid had, where she died for love and was taken up to heaven by angels.
Okay, I took some Nyquil before starting this entry because I am a little sick and I am practically delerious right now. I need to go to bed, this is also the stress week from hell, so please wish me luck and hope I do not post, because any posts this week will be in procrastination of paper-writing and studying that should have priority. Today is the 205th day I have been away from home, I get to see my family for the first time in the time in 9 days when I am going down to meet them in Munich. I am still stressed, but also excited!
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