Hotel Ihaste Tartu

... the least interesting of the beer in any country so far. Not much flavor, including its dark beer. It turns out that the Baltic Youth Philharmonic is in town, presumably practicing for a tour that begins in a week. They are virtually the only other ones at the café. The kids are speaking some Baltic language, drinking milkshakes with vodka, while the adults are speaking English. There are actually quite a few older ...

... secondhand store or something because I really won't need them at home. Well, I don't have any trips planned for the immediate future, although we were discussing renting a car this weekend to check out the Estonian wine country and some other small towns in central Estonia. I'm still planning the Lithuania/Poland trip, trying to figure out if couchsurfing is a possibility or not. So this is really all I have to say until something more exciting happens :)

... I need to go, and at most it would take about 30 minutes. One of the best things about living here is that I can walk to all these places at any time, day or night, without really worrying about danger. I mean, not that Huntington is the crime capital of the world, but people there have recently developed that weird tendency to get shot or stabbed outside of bars - you'd think they'd learn, really. On the other hand, Tartu's biggest and most frequent crime problem results from the ...

... so he works with these constraints. But, he says that the work is going well. Before I knew it, the visit was over. Will see him again on June visit to Estonia. He commented about how much he appreciated all the letters that have come to him since we posted him on my Prison Page at www.kubik.org/prison. He particularly commented his contacts with Paul Dzing, another family in Arizona and Tasmania ...

... the next two months as part of a Seattle University/LifeNets collaborative project. She is doing research about our educational and other projects. We like to check in our her regularly. She has started a blog at http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog/da visc./1/tpod.html/ You can easily get to it from the Home Page of my Web site at www.kubik.org. That's how our evening ended. Thanks for following along in our blog.

... We were then led to another building, screened again with our passport, then searched. Finally we were led to the visiting rooms where we could visit talking by telephone through a glass window. As soon as I saw Valdur-this is my third visit to him-I gave him a high five through the glass. The visit went great....but only one of us can talk at a time through the telephone and this makes a visit a bit awkward except for the ...

... It was a great meal with great socializing and people getting to know one another. I was happy to see the intermixing between the Latvians and Estonians. Their languages are so different that they have to resort to Russian. I guess one thing the ugly old Soviet system did was to provide a communication vehicle in an enforced common language. Most older people know Russian well. Younger people, however, are not learning ...

After a fairly good night of sleep we had our first full day in Tartu. Now, I wanted to give a little background why we are here in Estonia since many people have a hard time figuring out why someone with a wife and two small children would trek all the way to a little known Baltic country. Our church has two Festival seasons, one in the Spring and Fall. We are now keeping the Fall Holy ...

... that you have the place all to yourself to absorb and enjoy. Perhaps the lack of specific sights keeps it out of the guidebooks, but it's a lovely area to walk through at a relaxed pace. My lunch today was one of the biggest highlights though, interestingly enough. Unlike Tallinn, Tartu has yet to expand its dining costs to Western European levels, so you can still find restaurants that are fairly reasonable by Eastern European ...

... color with the interior photos converted to black and white. Again we have to haul the six boxes outside, find a taxi and take everything back to the apartment and haul everything inside the apartment. The six boxes are the first six lessons and a start for our fulfilling orders. Now, we can advertise on the radio station with the big Russian language reach. It's really exciting to us to be ...