Road trip through Estonia in one day!

This weekend after a nice dinner at Laura(Colombia) and Immu’s (Estonia) place we took our stuff and went on a road trip to the north east side of the country. The rest of the gang was Yianna (Cyprus), Manu (Colombia), Kadri (Estonia) and Dasha (Russia).

Something that I still found interesting about Europe is the small size of most of their countries, travelling from Tartu (South) to Toila (North east) takes a little more than one hour, that means that you can have really nice weekends travelling to different places near from your home, besides there are many lakes, rivers, historic places and parks to visit.

Our first stop was on Lake Peipsi, It’s the third biggest lake in Europe and it’s shared between Russia and Estonia but most of it is in Estonia’s side. The lake, as everything in Europe :P, is sooooooooooo flat that if you want to swim you must walk inside about 200 meters and probably the water will reach your knees only, but the view is amazing you will think that you are watching the sea instead of a lake.

There is small part of the lake in which the two countries are about 500 from each other and literally you can swim to Russia from there.

After this we went to a famous fish marketplace and bought two Latikas (Smoked fish) and later we bought the rest of the Lunch (Salads, bread, ketchup, sausages, juice, etc) at a store in the middle of nowhere.

Our second stop was Toila and the biggest attraction was the cold Baltic Sea. There is a nice cascade on a cliff near the sea and a view point with some scary stairs, the place remind me the Angel’s fall but of course ten times smaller, still was a great place to take pictures.

We went a few kilometers further to a nice beach and had the first part of the lunch with our hands, we brought forks but that fish had so many bones that it was easier not to use the forks. Of course we stunk all the way back.

The Baltic Sea is also flat and cold, in summer it is possible to swim there but this time I just washed my hands there. On summer the color of the sea is kind of brown but right now it’s dark blue.

Our final stop was in Kaiu Järve (Lake Kaiu) and there Manu a Kadri were waiting for us almost two hours :s, we had a nice fire right next to a lake and had the rest of the lunch-dinner.

Tartu... my new town!

"The kissing students"

So I am finally in Tartu, Estonia, for those of you who don't know where or what is Estonia here is a link with some info about the place. Actually the first time I heard about the place I had to google it because I didn't know anything about it :P

The two wildes, Oscar and Eduard

Anyway, I am here and it is not that weird as it sounds, is a town with 100.000 people a big amount of the are of students from many places in Estonia and the world, in just one week I've met people from Russia, Bulgaria, Armenia, Germany, Colombia, Brazil , Cyprus, USA, Finland and Belgium. Right now I am living in a student dorm named Raatuse 22 and I have to say that It has been kind of weird to live in this place, in Venezuela we don't have dorms so this is also a new experience and I am trying to enjoy every moment.

Tartu University

If you start to talk with people from here and you end up talking about Venezuela, as in Poland my country is know by four topics Oil, Miss Venezuela, Soap Opera and unfortunately by our stupid president Chavez, and by the way now I know that two continents thinks that he is a jackass (Europe and America). Here I found out the only good thing about soap operas, It has made Spanish very popular, so It's very common to find language institutes teaching it. Concerning the oil, wow how cheap is the oil in Venezuela! with the amount of money you spent here I can completely fill the tank of my car the whole year in Venezuela.

The Nobel prize winner, Wilhelm Ostwald

Now back in the subject, Tartu is called the University City because of the amount of students here, mainly in the University of Tartu, so the city is filled with energy and a very international flavor. The weather here is supposed to be really cold in winter, like minus twenty five degrees so my Venezuelan summer clothes won't be useful here at least for five or six months :P They have a really weird tradition on winters, the Baltic sea gets frozen and then they open a whole in the ice and each person is supposed to run from a hot steamy sauna to the whole and then take a dive in the Baltic sea, and is not just once, they do it the whole night! Maybe I'll send you some pictures about this tradition in a few months ;)

King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden

One main thing that attracted me to Estonia is their huge economic grown, and now that I am here I am doing some research about because I would like to understand todays Estonia compared with the small and poor country twenty years ago. So far all I know is that people now have money in their pockets and that money has good value, before 1992 it was weird to see a foreign car in the road (only LADAs were seen here) and right now you can see a lot of Mercedes, Audis, Mazdas, Volvos and many good brands, besides the increasing amount of malls and solariums everywhere .

Emajõgi River

This is my first weekend in Tartu and I started it on Friday with a nice birthday party for Manu's girlfriend, nice opportunity to meet a lot of new people here in the dorm. On Saturday I decided to take a walk across the town using a route that i found on this website and after three hours of walking and taking pictures I was done, now I realize that Tartu is really nice place, the city center is a big park, every place you look is green. This place has almost one thousand years so it has a lot of history and since Estonia is called the signing nation, there are also many cultural events in the town.

My apartment ;)

Japanese party!

OK so yesterday was my last complete day in Poland and at night we had a real real real Japanese party at our place!

With a big help from our four Japanese friends Asia prepared a good party with some origami decorations and hello kitty stickers, of course this girls brought a lot of stuff from their country and this was also their last night here in Poland before going back to Tokyo, so It was the perfect day to eat everything they had.

Of course you don’t have an AIESEC party if you don’t have people from all over the world, and this one wasn’t the exception with some guests from Tunisia, USA, Japan, Rumania and of course from Venezuela and Poland :P

I like that so much! You can feel the diversity and how small and big is the world in this kinds of parties, you can hear some conversations related to traditions, food, music from each country and many subjects including of course the World War II, Hiroshima some AIESEC stuff and more.

Now back to the party, we had a lot of food! First they gave us a special soup with a nice flavor, with some fish on the bottom and some sea weeds.

Then came the main dish of the night, Sushi! These girls made almost thirty rolls with crab, tuna and another fish that right now I can’t remember.

They also had some help from our polish friend, actually she also speaks Japanese so she took advantage from the situation to practice one of her many languages (she also knows Spanish, English and of course Polish). The only problem with her preparing the sushi is that she putted some (a lot) wasabi in a couple (10 +/-) of rolls and now you can see my face while trying one of those :P

The soup was helpful after trying the wasabi roll :S

After the main dish we had a workshop about “How to prepare Sushi”, the girls gave us the ingredients cucumbers, carrots, eggs, crab, tuna, unidentified fish, sea weed and of course special rice. It is so easy to prepare them! If you have the ingredients you can have fun having a sushi Sunday or the day you prefer to cook weird dishes, the main problem is the rice because you have to put some vinegar on it and I missed the rest of the explanation so you will have to google it ;)

Besides sushi the girls also brought some liquid candy :P

Preparing the sushi involves four main steps: Prepare the rice and cut the ingredients (preferable in stick shape), Put some rice in the sea weed, Put all over the rice all the ingredients you like! And the last one, close the roll carefully and cut it.

So that's it guys, have some fun while having a sushi night!

Private Luis... Venzuelan Style ;)

Let's start with this, if you are in Europe hair cuts are expensive! Or in Venezuela they are cheap, that depends on your point of view.

So again lets compare this with some facts, in Venezuela you are going to pay for a hair cut in a really cheap place Bs5.000 ( PLN 6,5) and Bs 20.000 (PLN 26,2) in a expensive place.

This time I went to Arkadia to get a hair cut, of course that is a big mall and they are going to charge me a lot there, but I just wanted to do some research, so the prices here in Poland are PLN 25 (19.088,00Bs) for a cheap hair cut and PLN 50 (38.164,00Bs) for an expensive one! After spending a lot of money eating the Panga I was pretty sure that I was not going to pay that much for a hair cut.

If you know me you can see that even a blind person can do my haircut because it really easy, so I decided to buy my own hair cutting machine and do it myself! Or better yet I told Mary and some friends (Peter and Asia) to help me out with this.

It doesn't look that hard when you see a professional doing it, this time I trusted my head to Mary and although she was a rookie I still have my head complete and besides a good haircut ;)

Of course now I look like private Luis, but actually I like it that way...

Fuck the Panga!!

Yeah that's it, fuck the Panga! When you have a lunch already done in your fridge, eat it! In my case, today I went out to do some shoppings at the biggest mall in Warsaw called Arkadia.


So it was suppose to be a regular day shopping a pine to seed it in Warsaw, a hair cutting machine and a present for a friend, but of course if you spent the day in the mall you must have lunch there, the thing is that when you are living abroad and you don't know the language except for basic words like good morning, thanks, door, see you later, you are going to have some trouble buying food in places different that Burger King or Pizza Hut. This time I went to Wiking.


So if you don't know the language and you are in hurry because you are really hungry please read everything very well before asking for something! In my case I just saw a healthy fish and without reading very well the menu I just saw 10zl for the freaking fish and that sounded reasonable, so after adding some salad, rice and a drink I got a really expensive lunch today for 42PLN!!! So If you are in Venezuela and you don't have any idea, let me tell you that my lunch in Burger king would have cost 15 PLN :S


My advice is, read everything at least twice! And it doesn't matter if you are hungry ok, otherwise you will get something like this, but at least I can say that the Panga was really good actually I almost ate dish :P

3rd International Chopin Festival

Ok so I'm a really lucky guy! I went to buy two tickets for Thursday night function of the 3rd International Chopin Festival, of course the tickets were sold out for the whole event, and right there buying the tickets comes one girl right from heaven to give back two tickets, she heard me talking to the guy from the philharmonic and then speaking in Spanish she told me that i can buy those two tickets, of course I bought them right there!

Then at the function i could notice that this time the event was not very popular for young people, there were a lot of old persons there and I think Mary and I were the only young couple in the event, that was kind of funny because all the persons there were looking at us kind of amazed :P

The philharmonic is a wonderful place, you can feel the history there and while you are sitting in that place you can imagine all the event that have taken place there.

The first part of the event, we had Stanislav Bunin at the piano playing Chopin's Piano Concerto in e minor and at the second part Tchaikovsky's Symphony no. 6 in b minor, both absolutely amazing.

It's really nice to remember the events in the Teatro Teresa Carreño and I'm grateful that I had the chance to go there and watch Gustavo Dudamel, one of the best orchestra conductors in the world, a couple of times last year. Now that I'm on this side of the world my gold is to watch one of his presentations, this time is going to be harder because most of his shows are already sold out three months before. But lets see what happens, anything is possible in this life ;)