Tahtvere Hostel Tartu

... Croatia)<br>Monday, 15 June: take a bus to Zagreb (Croatia)<br>Tuesday, 16 June: day-trip from Zagreb to Novo Mesto (Slovenia), return at night<br>Wednesday, 17 June: take a bus back to Zadar, fly Zadar - Dublin<br>Thursday, 18 June - Thursday, 25 June: take buses around southern Ireland<br>Friday, 26 June: fly Dublin - D.C.<br><br>And from D.C., I go to Charlottesville with Gail, Mom, and Dad for a night, and then we all go to Buffalo ...

... was over, I met up with some other students and we headed to the Püssirohukelder (Gunpowder Cellar) to celebrate amongst the Estonians. Niels (Netherlands) brought a friend from home with him who had come to Tartu along with Niels' parents for a week, but his parents didn't feel like going out for a night :) I called it an early night, but most of Tartu stayed out for most of the night - my flatmates Birol (Turkey) and Alexandros (Greece/Germany) came back to our place at about ...

... and it was incredible - their English was amazing and I never had trouble understanding them. To my knowledge, they also understood me most of the time, and I didn't feel like I had to speak particularly clearly or anything in order to make myself understood. The best part, though, is that I feel like I got along really well with all of them. It wasn't completely like "Here's an American, poke him and see what he does," especially later in the evening. It was kind of just a group ...

... We'll travel all day Thursday, spend Friday and Saturday checking out the city, and come back all day Sunday. Now we're just trying to find a good hostel to stay at, and then we'll be set. I'm pretty darn excited now, it's going to be hard to motivate myself to get through class knowing I'm headed to the fatherland in a few days. I'll try and put some more pictures up soon, but it depends on the amount of free time I have.

... He'll pick me up the next day to take me to the prison when I go visit Valdur. He tells us about his big fall off in business. Estonia is really going through a tough time economically as much of the rest of the world. We asked UCG brethren Andrus Ripps and Katrin Kaasik to have dinner with us. They both arrived at 6 pm and we went to the Chinese Tsink Tsink Plekk Pang restaurant in the center of town. We had a ...

... The ad copy was written by Johnnie Lambert. The manager of the radio station Paavo Pihlak is on vacation. Along with his wife Mare they devote themselves to the radio station which was established in1994 three years after the Soviets left. They manage the programming, he is the station engineer. The four of us went out to the radio station about five miles away by taxi. Tiu, the new secretary graciously showed us around. I wish that Paavo ...

... Tallinn with 1300 prisoners. From the first "welcome" center you are taken outside into another building. There you wait some more as they go through your passport. Then through turnstile doors, security check, body check. Then to the visit rooms. I sit behnd glass waiting for Valdur to come. I recognize him immediately and hold our hands up to the glass as a greeting. Then we talk through a telephone. It's a good visit. He is incarcerated for 20 years for armed robbery ...

... car. Luckily, the guy asked why we were not going to stay and when we told hiim it was the price he said it would be fine to stay there for free ;) the place was completely empty and we think the guy was resigned to the fact that his hostel was a long way from anywhere and unlikely to get customers at this time of the year. The hostel was pretty amazing in its own way. Formerly it was a soviet era pre school and it was now in a rather delapidated condition with stark rooms and ...

... really goes by peasant anymore. Some tidbits from my visit: in the days after Christmas, the peasants would play games on the threshing floor lined with straw and the amount of straw left hanging from the ceiling when they were finished was considered an indicator of the success of next year's harvest. Also, on arriving at her new home, a bride's mother-in-law would lay down a blanket for her to walk over on the way to the house, as a sign of accepting her into ...

... them There are many people who volunteer with ways that they can contribute to the propagation of the Gospel and they need to be thanked extra for all the work that they do. Johnny went to the Aura Club which is a sauna and water park and I just went walking for an hour and half, stopped back by the copy place and picked up the 200 articles to be inserted with the GN. It was good-sized box and I managed ...