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 ;)