Tallinn’s Christmas market ranked among 20 best in Europe
Today I want to share a link to an article in the Times Online about the 20 best Christmas markets in Europe. They’re not ranked per se, but the very first one listed is the Christmas market held on Tallinn’s Town Hall Square, and the picture included at the beginning of the article is absolutely breathtaking. It’s one of those pictures that makes me think, even after more than two years, “Wow– I can’t believe I live here.” This is my city. I get to walk along Medieval cobblestone streets week after week, passing by historical buildings, but most of the time I don’t think about because I’m preoccupied with my work assignments for the day or what ingredients I need for dinner that night. But every once in a while I do look, and I notice the beauty this city has to offer, all of which could have been destroyed during the Soviet occupation but wasn’t. I’m grateful for the chance to live here, a chance that my parents’ generation never had, and every day see evidence of the history that took place, and also that which didn’t. I may complain sometimes, but at the end of the day, I really do love this city.
I love my kitchen, but…
it has a bit of a problem. Let me explain. Today I roasted a chicken.
Looks pretty good, doesn’t it? And it was. I love roasting a chicken because in our household of two, it provides enough meat for at least two or three meals. Also, roasting a chicken should be pretty easy. You just prep it, stick it in the oven, and leave it alone for an hour or so.
But for us it’s not so easy, because we are still experiencing problems with our oven. When we moved in, the oven had essentially no temperature control, which I discovered when it ruined a batch of my cookies. If we turned it on, it would just get hotter and hotter, not stopping when it got to the correct temperature. We could use it to make pizza or roast veggies– things that require high heat anyway– but anything else was out of the question. I was so bummed. I even went back to our old apartment a few times just so I could bake.
A repairman came in July to fix the oven. That whole event was pretty bizarre– our landlord was supposed to be there but arrived late, we could barely talk to the repairman because he spoke mostly Russian, and then when he couldn’t talk to us he called some guy (his boss?) who insisted that J was the one who called him, even though we’d never spoken to him before (our landlord had). Luckily our landlord showed up and sorted everything out, and our oven was allegedly fixed.
After that it worked… sort of. It was more or less able to maintain its temperature, no longer heating and heating and heating as much as it wanted. But lately it’s been iffy again. If we set it to 180, there’s a chance it will get up to 220. Any time we bake anything we have to constantly monitor the oven, adjusting the temp and sometimes opening the door if it’s overheating. I’m usually content if it stays within 10 degrees of the appropriate temp, but sometimes even that’s hard to achieve. Practically every time I make something, I worry it’ll be ruined by the fluctuating temperature. It is supremely annoying and it just shouldn’t be that way. The next time we see our landlord, we’re going to emphasize that the oven is still not functioning properly, and then I really, really hope we get this issue resolved once and for all.
All dressed up for Halloween
As promised, here are some pictures of mine and J’s Halloween costumes. I’ll go first, although you won’t recognize who I’m supposed to be unless you’re familiar with Nordic children’s literature.
If you do happen to know Muumi (the Moomins)and his group of friends, then hopefully you can tell that I was dressed up as Little My (Väike My in Estonian and Pikku Myy in Finnish).
And then there was J.
He decided pretty quickly that he wanted to be a zombie, and he wanted to use real blood in his costume (and of course I mean pig’s blood, NOT human). It was surprisingly difficult to find, and although he was finally able to locate some– begging a free bag from the butchers at the central market– he realized that it might not be safe to put on his face. So, relax– that stuff all over his face is NOT real blood (he used it to create the brownish stains on his shirt). Creating fake blood took some problem-solving skills, since every single fake blood recipe we found on the internet called for food coloring. Guess what they don’t carry in Rimi, our neighborhood grocery store? That’s right. So there I was in the store on Halloween, trying to think of a substitute, something else that could dye things red. I ended up grabbing the reddest thing I could think of– marinated beets.
Blood-making station
The “recipe” J ended up using borrowed components from a few different ones we’d read on the net. He started with dark syrup and beet juice, but it was too pink, so I suggested cocoa powder to help get a browner tone. A little bit of cornstarch was thrown in as thickener, and voila– gross, sticky, convincing, and totally edible (albeit funny-tasting) fake blood.
Julie & Julia
We finally made it to see “Julie & Julia” last week. Of course I had been reading about it for months and was so excited to see it; J knew nothing about the film and therefore had no expectations whatsoever. I did, however, show him a few brief clips of the real Julia Child on YouTube so that he’d know what the real woman was like.
I liked it, but overall I have to agree with what I’ve read in countless reviews– the Julia parts were much stronger than the Julie parts. Julia was accompanied by a lovely, romantic French backdrop, and was herself very compelling– a woman with a strong personality trying to find herself. The Julie parts sort of made me feel… uncomfortable. It was clear that she didn’t like her job or her friends, and I wasn’t sure whether she even liked herself. And I didn’t like her apparent motivation for starting a blog– she seemed to be jealous of the attention her friend’s blog was getting, and she wanted some attention too. She didn’t seem to do it because she thought it would be fun or somehow fulfilling for her, regardless of whether people read it or not. (I haven’t read her blog or her book, so there probably were other motivating factors. I’m just going off what I got from the film). I found the character of her husband much more likable that Julie herself, and in the scene where they argue and she yells at him, “Stop looking on the bright side all the time!” I thought seriously, who says that? Maybe it’s because I myself tend to be an optimist, but I thought she was being quite unfair. And bratty. Also, I thought the movie could have used a more realistic representation of the amount of weight she and her husband must have put on after eating that way for a year 
.
But Julia was fun. I need to learn to be more like her in the kitchen. Maybe not to use quite so much butter, but to follow her advice to NEVER apologize for your cooking. I like that. One Julia scene that particularly struck me (that has nothing to do with food) was right after her sister arrived and the three of them were sitting in the cafe together. Julia and her sister were talking loudly, laughing at nothing in particular, being decidedly un-French but not caring at all, and Julia’s husband sat across the table, regarding them fondly, not a party to their sisterly jokes but still engaged in the conversation, rather than trying to quiet them down. Julia’s husband Paul was portrayed as a good guy throughout the whole film, but that moment in particular made me think, “What a good man.” It reminded me of how lucky I am to have a man who is the same way– he allows me and my sister to be sisters, no matter how loud and ridiculous we might be. I felt it was a scene that clearly yet subtly portrayed the relationships between the characters, and it left me feeling warm and fuzzy about the characters in the Julia half of the film– too bad the same can’t be said for the Julie contingent.
This is what it’s like being me
So. I did two incredibly spazzy things tonight, both of them involving food. First of all I was organizing my closet, clearing out the summer clothes (sob) to make room for the sweaters. I found a box of chocolates I had forgotten about, and some of the individually wrapped squares were left. I ate one– the wrapper said “Vigor” and it was dark chocolate and with coffee. It was good. Only after I had eaten it did I check out the description on the box, which read “Vigor: 1 bar = 3 cups of coffee.” Umm. Oops. I generally avoid coffee after 5 pm because caffeine can sometimes keep me awake, so the equivalent of 3 cups at 8 pm could mean this is going to be a long night. Damn.
The second thing occurred when I was grabbing stuff from the fridge to make my lunch for tomorrow. As I grabbed something from the top shelf, I managed to knock over a half-filled container of tomato sauce left over from making pizzas yesterday, which bounced down to the floor, leaving disturbing splatters in its wake. Fantastic. And believe me, this stuff happens to me all the time– sometimes I think I have spatial perception problems because I accidentally knock against things so often. Luckily J had a sense of humor about it and even asked to stage a photo with me holding his giant Finnish army knife.
Scary, eh?
But anyway, that’s a little taste of the story of my life: oblivious and clumsy since 1983.
