picture by Jupiter
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The glorious vacation, pt. 2
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One week of my vacation has passed and I figured I should document the things that have happened. In short (in no particular order):
- I finally started working on the bathroom at the Hellhole It seems I got quite a lot done and still I managed to watch TV, curse the rain and cook for myself. I was very prolific; and if my plans are any kind of indication then the next week is going to be even more busy since I'm going to pop into the office for awhile to get the monthly statements done, and meet with an Englishman who has a questionable offer for me (more on that next time), and - a lot more pleasantly - a meeting with a friend I haven't seen in a long time, and hopefully get some money (and people) to finish the floors at the Hellhole, and go to the hairdresser's to get my Yankovic/Uruk-Hai hair back to some kind of shape, and... Well, I'm sure there's more but I have made enough lists lately to last a lifetime so let's get back to our regularly scheduled programming. Last Saturday we drove to Narva to see a play. For me the play was secondary and seeing the town and the Russian border were primary but the play was pretty good, too. The experience of seeing the Eastern border and the way people live there is something I can't even describe. It was like going back in time. Narva looked like Tallinn after Aug 20, 1991. Most of the apartment buildings haven't been fixed up, the windows were old and dirty, a lot of the signs were in Russian, you couldn't buy anything using the Estonian language. Narva definitely reminds the bad old days. Even worse were the dilapidated factories and storage buildings left over from the Soviet times. There's no-one using them anymore and watching the huge buildings with boarded-up windows and bad graffiti really made me sad. What a waste! But there was also a lot of beauty. We climbed up to the tower of Narva fortress and looked over the river to the Russian side, we looked at the river winding and eventually disappearing into the greenery. We looked at Narva itself, with its Soviet architecture and a few older buildings left standing after the bombings at WW2. It is surprising what summer can do even with the most pathetic of views. All the green in the town made it just a little more beautiful and made me forget about the plaster falling off buildings and the asphalt that felt like a collection of individual sharp stones trough my footwear. The stupid thing about the trip was that we all forgot our cameras. Mine was with Mum who'd just been to St. Petersburg with it. Kelly's was with her parents and Eve and Steven forgot to bring theirs. I guess I have to go back someday to take pictures. Sunday was spent at Megan's who had promised to make pancakes. We ate the pancakes, drank the milkshakes with vodka in them and were ready to revert to our 14-year-old selves. That naturally meant fortune-telling. The time to stalk local celebrities had arrived and the cards helped us to divide them among ourselves. In the end Ellie and Chris were stuck with the same guy, Megan got the least desirable one and I got the one that probably lives in Pärnu. No successful stalking followed since we'd seen them perform at the Beer Summer already and figured we wouldn't want to see them any time soon. I think we're too old and lazy to be successful stalkers. And a little obsession would probably help, too. ***** On Monday I decided that if I didn't do something about the shower leak situation then it would never get better, so I went to the hardware store and bought some silicon-based stuff to patch it up. Of course, I've never used silicone before but I didn't let that bother me - I had seen my brother using it, after all. At the hardware store I learned an important lesson - women are not customers in hardware stores. They are perusing paint cans and trying to determine different kinds of paint and staring at the salesmen ONLY because they are bored with having to wait for their husbands who are the ones making important renovating decisions. It is unheard of to have a woman renovate all by herself because making ANY kind of decisions is obviously too difficult for her. That was the non-verbal message sent to me there. Granted, I wasn't going to buy any paint since I was on foot but I did want to ask some questions since I'm planning to do more work in the bathroom next week. ***** [this turned out to be too long and I have to get back to work. Will finish later.]
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