28.8: Shopping

Overnight I received a load of information about a 10-day conservation holiday I am participating in next week with the Eestimaa Looduse Fond (Estonian Fund for Nature). We are first going to a little place in the west of Estonia called Pivarootsi where we will be clearing scrub from disused grazing land to enable migratory birds and certain rare plant species to return. We’re then going to Vormsi Island, which is one of the smaller islands off Estonia’s coast. Resultantly, I decided I needed to get some more appropriate work clothes. As I’ll most likely throw these things away once I’m done with them (or re-donate them if they’re not destroyed), I wanted to find some cheap, ideally second-hand stuff. Fortunately some Tartu locals and friends, Katre and Piia, were able to point me in the direction of some op-shops and other suitable places to go. Clothes shopping isn’t my favourite activity so I made sure to intersperse it with some coffee breaks. I found some good long sleeve shirts and waterproof pants at a second hand shop called Humana, then found a hat at another place on Kuperjanovi. None of these places had shoes of my size so I checked out some of the bigger supermarkets around town with no luck. In the end I decided to trek to the edge of town to a very large shopping centre which had a Rimi Hypermarket, basically a Big W kind of place, along with a plethora of other stores and an indoor ice skating rink. Here I was able to find a cheap pair of sneakers which fit the bill nicely. I was very pleased with myself when, at 5pm, I managed to catch a free bus back to the kesklinn, saving me a rather long walk.

The day started with a brief military parade on the plats

A typical Tartu suburb (very different from Narva!!) 

Indoor ice skating rink at shopping centre

In the evening I met up with Gustavo at a nearby restaurant called Meat Market. We had some cocktails, Gustavo watching very closely to try and pick up some tricks, and a delicious platter of different smoked meats, fish and dips. We spent the evening chatting about various things, with Gustavo showing me some pretty amazing ultrasound photos of the baby he and his wife are expecting, one of which he had set as the background image on his phone. Eventually we exchanged some gifts and went our separate ways. Just as we were doing this in the Raekoja plats, I got a tap on the shoulder from Martiene, one of the students from the second part of the language course. She is originally from The Netherlands and is doing her masters in human geography at the University of Tartu. She was taking part in a pub-crawl organised for international students so I joined in as a ring-in. There were two pubs left, both of which were extremely noisy and didn’t lend well to conversation. Nevertheless it was nice to catch up with Martiene and meet a handful of other international students and Tartu locals.