A peculiar Finnish friend I got to know during his last few days in Tartu told me that leaving Estonia for a couple weeks or so makes the place great. Shortly afterward, a goofy stranger from England captured me for conversation on the street. I was bored and annoyed until he mentioned that when he came to Estonia 20 years ago, after a life of failures, life got real for him. He didn't stop failing, but life has been real since then, and he calls Estonia his home now, not England.
This morning, 5 days after leaving Estonia after a long 10 months, I was surprised to find that I missed Tartu for the first time. I came to the Netherlands to spend 2 weeks with family, including my american parents, uncle, and aunts, dutch grandma, and her big, amazing family here. It’s the second time we’ve come for one of these reunions - last time was 6 years ago in ’07. They are wonderful, kind, generous people and I'm grateful for this opportunity to visit them. I’ve been sharing a room with my parents in a rustic hotel in Joure - a small, quiet village in Friesland where much of the family still lives.
My mom, dad, and uncle amidst the beauty of Joure.
It started at 3 am, when it was very dark. In Tartu, it would begin to get light around 2 am. I sat awake in the hotel room, waiting for the sun to come out and all the crazy birds to start screaming, but there was no daylight in sight, and Dutch birds were either sane or sleeping. I decided to go for a walk - a totally normal thing back in the student town of Tartu, especially in the summer time.
After unsuccessful attempts to reassure my disgruntled parents, I grabbed my headphones and headed out a side door. The trip started out on a bad foot - a great song had just begun when my ipod died, before I even got out of the parking lot. Then the street got very dark, still, and silent. There was not the slightest stirring. The houses sat tightly together, with explosive flora and narrow, winding, perfectly clean streets. It gave me the feeling that I would be a considerable disturbance if someone spotted me, so I went back to the hotel after a quick loop around the block.
There I discovered that I was locked out of our quaint, respectful building, and needed to make a phone call to the “night porter” in order to get back inside. Naturally, I didn’t have my phone. Unsure of what to do, I creepily paced around the hotel a few times trying to get the courage to throw stones at my parents’ 2nd story window. Three times I passed a fully lit room on the ground level, and the 3rd time, an alarm went off. I ran back to the front doors and spotted a sleepy young staffmember inside trying to figure things out. Confused old people were beginning to wake up and stroll down the hallways. He let me in and I told him that I think the alarm might have been my fault, because I was creepin’ around and possibly scaring some folks. He looked very confused and asked me to show him where I think I might have set off the alarm. I pointed outside and mentioned the lit room and he looked even more confused. He finally said alright - I will look for a fire first, then I will turn it off if there is none.
Turns out it was the smoke alarm and caused by something else entirely, in another part of the building.
I had a good laugh, though my parents sure didn’t. Then I felt my first ever pangs for the physical and social space of Tartu, where there seems to be a special kind of freedom - a lonely freedom from the attention of others. I sat awake awhile longer wishing that the damn sun would come up and the wild ruckus of strange bird calls would piss me off as usual. Tartu is often described by others as a dream. I think I know why, in some sense - I can only share it with my family and friends (and self, upon leaving) through the lonely process of reflection and description. It is also a space that is very much one's own - many people write about "my tartu" because it is such a variable experience for foreigners. Estonians also pay very little attention to individual identity, which has ground me into a comfortable nobody. Also, I never quite know for sure what the hell is going on, and am never quite understood - or am differently understood - by others, so once I'd sort of accepted this fact, I became a bit more autonomous and did a lot of things alone, both with and without people. Yet, because I can't take this space with me when I leave, I wind up being a lonely somebody in the spaces of home - somebody with previously recognized traits/qualities, and somebody whose behavior affects others and is tied to others much more. So the habits I've acquired in Tartu no longer make sense in that context. Lacking a sense of (socially recognized) self has been both painful and liberating, as I'm sure one would imagine.
Tartu and peculiar Finnish friend
