It’s been a week since I last wrote. Some more little bits and pieces.
The DPDR/dissociation has become even bit worse; somehow still keeping it
together. Watching The Princess Bride with Annie last night helped.
Miscellany:
Presented to the Police and Border Guard Board office to renew my ID card. Sat
down in front of the worker once my number was called and asked, “kas te
räägite inglise keelt?” (do you speak English?). With almost a tinge of pride,
she replied, “ei!” (no!). It took everything in me not to burst out
laughing.
There’s an oddity in that I can pronounce Estonian very well, despite not
really knowing much of it (i.e. reading out text, like from a menu or Google
Translate or whatever, I sound semi-native, but actually producing that text
myself I’m nowhere near yet). This makes for fun situations.
We have a new home :) An r/eesti comment mentioned someone once found an
apartment in Tallinn on day 5 and was moved in by day 7. That was encouraging,
if a little unrealistic-seeming. But nope: we inspected ours on day 4 (!), and
moved in on day 8. Now we can ship our boxes from Australia.
Food’s so nice here.
Sure it’s 2° outside, that’s no problem, but then you walk into any building
and it’s 22° and you’re shedding layers as fast as you can. Other people just
seem not to?! I don’t get it.
The worst part for me is that, even with all our apartment floor-heating
turned “off” (or as off as you can, which is to say, the set point is set
lower than the actual point), we’re on the top of the building, so it’s over
20° regardless. This is troublesome at night, and the street noise might be
a bit much to open the windows, but using the aircon when it’s below zero
outside feels a bit …
Also, sharing a bedroom for the first time in so many years is a strange
experience, like I’m cosplaying being a different kind of adult.
Public transport’s so nice here — it’s already happened that we’ve taken
train+bus+tram all in the one day just out of convenience.
Not that I’ve worked out how to get the free transit for locally-registered
residents working on my Ühiskaart yet.
Is it only on TLT-operated busses? Is that it?? The information’s all very
vague.
DISREGARD THAT I S—eem to have gotten it on a further attempt with the
card reader.
We’ve been in the country a little over two days now. It’s been one of the most
serene times of my life, and even the flights from Australia seemed to pass in
an instant.
This is in some part due to intense derealisation, but as uncanny as life has
seemed for months now, I can’t say I hate it — I’ve been able to do so many
things without crushing anxiety killing it, whether due to COVID or whatever
else. (Not that the skin on my face is recovered yet from the 30 hours of
wearing an elastomeric respirator.)
Some fun moments and things I don’t want to forget:
We had 6 hours to kill between getting out of Tallinn airport and our
temporary accommodation becoming available to us. We walked around the Old
Town after storing our bags, still wearing the clothes from our flights. I had
on a plain blue dress and black knee-high compression socks, and didn’t
realise quite how I looked until we spotted two men, bottles in hand and
visibly drunk, who spotted us in turn and called out to me, “Гермааааания!
Айайайайяаа!”, and all four of us were laughing.
Beer and cider at 3pm in an upstairs nook of a café with no-one in it but us
(still waiting for our accommodation to become available). The owner came up
and gave us some cake that was left-over from a birthday party.
Walking to the Rimi express on my own first thing in the morning to get cereal
and milk oat drink. I feel so calm here.
Bike riding to Rocca al Mare :) We took panniers and had probably the nicest
and most “successful” shopping experience of my life. (warm clothes for the
new climate!)
NEXT TIME HIRING A MOUNTAIN BIKE, PLEASE, “CITY BIKES” ARE A GRIFT
Vapiano vegan chicken pastaaaaaaaaa, next time I will take much more bread
Going from straight-up pre-emptive “Inglise keel?” at the beginning of
exchanges with service staff to full Estonian in the course of a day, and just
hoping I was guessing the questions right when I didn’t know the operative
words. (usually assuming it’s “do you have a membership with us?”, since “ei
ole” seems to get me through …)
We were having a sit in the square after exploring the new town today,
people-watching, when we noticed a group of younger Russian girls having fun,
chasing pigeons, etc. After a while, I began to notice the most adventurous
one tracing out a circuitous path from their spot under the town hall over to
us, inverted phone in hand, ready to record an exchange.
Without much ado, she finally came over and sat down right next to me, holding
her phone up and asking something in somewhat-shy-and-therefore-mumbled
Russian. I just said “Что?”, and even more embarrassed she repeated her
question. I got the gist of it and first said “Я не знаю русский.. English?”
She haltingly replied, “m-maybe?”, and so I finally answered her question and
said “Half-half”, using a gesture to reinforce the meaning.
The question was if I was a boy or a girl, which is a pretty common one when
I’ve been overseas. She then apologised and said she didn’t mean to be rude,
and that she thought it was a totally fine thing to be different and not at
all a problem here, and I made sure she knew I didn’t mind the question at
all! It was pretty daring of her to just come over and ask; I think she and
her friends must’ve been observing us two as much as we had been watching
them. It was a really nice exchange across cultures and generations.
(I only realised once home that I was wearing a Trans Justice
Project T-shirt underneath my coat! Missed
opportunity.)
Tomorrow we take a train trip out to Narva so I can renew my ID card, explore
there for a day, and then get back in time for an evening inspection of what
might be our future home. Fingers crossed :)
I’ve been deleting hundreds of accounts and cleaning up many more while
preparing for the move, and I found I have an npm account with one (1)
package, last published May 2012 (!): allium,
a parser for the “Gherkin” syntax
used to define Cucumber BDD tests, back when that was all the rage.
The README captured by npm refers to the literate source code as once published
on GitHub Pages. That was long ago, but I figured it might be fun to look at
again. And it is! Have look: https://f.hrzn.ee/allium/
Here’s a little tool I’ve made to help my partner and I while learning Estonian.
Very much nothing special, but I’ll hopefully find more resources to add to it
over time!
(Previously on this topic: Estonian Morphology Guide
(mirror).
I no longer collect analytics on my site, but when I did it was consistently one
of the most-visited parts of it, presumably because the link broke at some
point. I’ve just found its new canonical home, though, so I’ve updated the
link!)