Tartu, Estonia (Sept 16-23, 2003)

Tartu, academic capital of Estonia, full of signs of student life. Sister-school of Uppsala, contemporary of Lund. Theres a ´sacrificial stone´ from pagan times where now, supposedly, students burn their notes after exams. I have a nice little room all to myself just 2km out of town. Meelika met me in the central square and tonight we´re going to her roommate´s birthday party. Last night I stayed at the apartment of a guy who I met at an ATM. In the store there is Maribou chocolate. And Kalev sells advent calendars for EU ascession: eat the little bit of chocolate when that country ratifies ascession.

In Tartu I felt almost established; I had my own place a few kilometers out from the city center, and when I came home late at night I'd knock on the window and the komandant would unlock the door and let me in, then I'd climb the five flights of stairs to my floor. One night the temperature dropped to 4 degrees C, and the sudden chill on my face reminded me that the seasons really are changing, that winter is coming and I'm really not prepared for that. It's funny to be on a trip and have the seasons change. (And by the time I came to Luleå and then to the Arctic, Nils and I were able to throw snowballs at each other.) It makes the journey seem longer. In Tartu I felt I was there exactly for the transition to autumn, the verdant, healthy trees turning golden almost as I watched.

It's very difficult to write about travels in retrospect. It's one of those things that you just have to do in the moment, and the writing becomes part of the travels, truer than anything that could be written later. Unfortunately there's little time to write while travelling, so I'm left with all these little snippets of text, in addition of course to a legion of memories. I also have my notebook, with various artefacts pasted in, addresses and expendiatures and little notes to myself. I love to page through them and recall the adventures.

I think most of you know my Estonia story by now. My first trip may have been cut short, but it was still enough to make some friends and discover what a fascinating place Estonia is, and so I had to return. From Riga I took the night bus into Tartu and later met up with my friend Meelika.


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Berkeley thing I miss most today (people excluded of course):

• Moe's Books

Rochester has a smattering of used book stores (some feel like true antikvariat), but I think together they sum to less than one floor of Moe's, although I admit I haven't been to Webster Used Books yet (kind of far away).

berkeley programming contest

A few weekends ago I participated in the Berkeley Programming Contest. Ryan and I had just gone out to breakfast at Mt. Hope Diner, and when we came back I saw that not only had the contest started in Berkeley, but that I'd been emailed an EECS account with which to participate. So, why not? The format of the contest is that you have five hours in which to solve as many of eight problems as you can. I took quite a lacadasical approach this time and managed to solve three of the problems before running off to a birthday party. No longer a Berkeley student, I was not eligible to win anything except the usual "local bragging rights".

Knowing the form and idioms of the programming contest is a significant part of the battle. Almost everybody these days writes their solutions in Java, but I use almost exclusively plain old C because that's the language I'm most familiar with, and it's particularly well suited to the programming contest.

Each programming contest problem asks you to write a program that takes some input describing some situation and then your program must compute something based on that input, and produce output in a particular format. Once you have what you think is a solution to a problem, you submit it by issuing the "submit" command. Elsewhere, your program is compiled, it is fed some input, and your program's output is compared to the expected output.

Tartu, Estonia (II)

Woops, looks like I have a few more pictures that I forgot to include in the previous post. I also added some stories to that previous post, so you should check it out again.

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Interested in visiting Estonia?

You can check out the Lonely Planet guide to Estonia, but a much handier (in many respects) guide is called "in your pocket," which prints city guides for cities in many central european and baltic countries. Check out the In Your Pocket guide to Tartu. It has some great text about Tartu:

"A definite rivalry exists between Tallinn, the nation's political and economic capital, and Tartu, it's intellectual capital. Estonia's second city prides itself on being more relaxed, less pretentious, and saner than its noisy adversary, and Tartu's status as the nation's university town puts it on equal footing. In fact, its Tartu University and its other colleges that give the city its characteristic energy and brainy edginess. A few days here and you might notice that restaurants and bars seem to be locked in bitter competition for the most clever name and motif, and that the café culture here is unequalled in Estonia.For the visitor, there are plenty of museums and galleries to visit, but the first destinations should probably be the cobbled streets of Old Town and the paths and bridges of Toome Hill - a good place to see the spectrum of reds and browns once autumn hits..."

Travel-library.com is an excellent site that just collects travelogues. Be sure to read the various stories from Estonia. You can also read the crazy story of my first trip to Estonia.