EVS in Estonia

Last week, we helped organizing an picture exhibition on the first floor above the museum. It was a photography contest and the pictures had been taken by some students in architecture. The general theme of the exhibit was the local heritage in the reserve of Rebala.

For this purpose, we cut some little white pannels where we glued the pictures and we hung them on the ceiling with some wooden bands (that we painted in black before) and some iron wire. We also cut some little pieces of cardboard to write the name of the picture on it.

The final look of it is quite good, especially with the lights and the special atmosphere of the room.

At the end of the week, we helped to prepare the “vernissage” (opening) of the exhibition, all the students were there and we could attend the prize-giving.

Last friday, our little dancing group met again, after having been busy all summer with festivals all over the country, the musicians and dancers from our village are back again and renewed the traditional meeting every first friday of the month. It was a pleasure to see some faces we hadn’t seen for a while, though it was not always easy to remember the steps.

I played some tin-whistle to accompany the bagpipe, and we danced along all evening. Our good friend Helen, a local english teacher, gave us a CD from a group from Quebec which we had met this summer in Viljandi festival. It was very nice of her and she had sewed a little linen bag for it.
we can’t wait until next month !

With the coming of winter and Amélie’s birthday last week, we thought it would be the perfect time to get what we had been looking at since we arrived here : some warm woolen estonian sweaters. We took advantage of our day off to go shopping in Tallinn and found these nice ones, with grey and white traditional designs.
Now, we will be ready for the cold weather (lets hope) and can show off our new estonian style in Jõelähtme !

At the very end of our friends stay here in Estonia, we decided to rent a car and go for a 4 day road trip to the southern and eastern part of Estonia. It was the best way for them and for us to discover places that we hadn’t seen yet and also to go to other places we wanted to show them. In such a short time, we saw so much of Estonia, mostly staying out of big cities, camping, staying in Margus’ farmhouse (one of our trainers) we really had an intense estonian experience.
Our itinirary was basically going to Lahemaa national park, then continuing East until we hit the russian border (where we still could see a statue of Lenin), then headed South, along the Peipsi lake and then down some more to Tartu, Võru, Mnt Munamägi (Estonia’s highest point 347m), Rõuge, a nice southern village, and finally Otepää, a place we had wanted to go to for some time where we did some good tree climbing before going back home… We stopped along the way quite a bit, to see more or less interesting sites not to far off the road. It was a good way to see the change in landscapes, habitat, vegetation.
The summer is almost coming to an end and I feel we got the best of these few days.

After having had both our families over, here came our friends ! We had them here for 2 weeks and did lots of great activities with them and had lots of fun. They could also meet with the other volunteers (even with Pascal, a french volunteer from hungary we had met in our pre-departure training) and we spent good evenings all together. Not always easy for them to understand the english speaking with different accents from all over the world, but it was part of the discovery awaiting them. It felt nice to have some young people our age to have fun with and they stayed long enough to see quite a bit of Estonia, though their favorite activity was sleeping. We still found time to go swim at Jagala falls, go to a spa in Tallinn, discover the city through a different point of view, with the “funky bike tour”, and finally go on a 4 day road trip, but that’ll be another article…