Сдача не надо. Tagasiraha ei vajalik. Keep the change.

Täna oli üks esimestest päevatest et ma tunnin nii kui olen kodus siin. (Today was one of the first days that I really felt like I was at home here.)

Well, home is a different sort of feeling. This was.. comfortable, pleased with things. A good haircut will do that for you. If my haircut had turned out extremely shitty, I might have been writing this from the bottle of a bottle in a ditch sapping wireless off of a homeless shack (I assume they are set up) and all of this would just be a string of characters punched from my tears falling on the keyboard. Appreciate a good haircut. Especially when it works out while speaking Russian.

Really, though.. it took a while for the feeling to develop and for me to understand what the specific flow was behind it. Over the last month, comfort and dis- of the previous have come and gone, often multiple times within the course of a few hours. Makes one a bit staggered. It takes some time for small ins and outs of thoughts and trivial occurences to have less of an impact on your overall conception of place and your life. So, I have come to attempt to ignore most of this rocking back and forth with the waves of an uprooted life. Not ignore so much, just.. deal with, and.. justify. So it takes larger happenings to really make me motion sick after a period. The little occurences keep their impact, however.. and it was one of these miniscule and usually trivial processes that gave me a fuzzy.

It is smalltalk (lobisemine).

Really, and this is one of the more difficult things to stumble into in Eastern Europe on top of that. For effective smalltalk, one needs a grip on the language at the level of a toddler (although I was really downtrodden when this 18 month old totally schooled my ass today in Estonian.. she's got it coming, just wait..). This also requires about the same level of time, dedication and immersion in the language. I was able to make remarks today three times. Ridiculous. Given, it lasted no more than a simple exchange of a sentence or two, but it is the ability to be understood and to demonstrate that you understand and can even make light of something that starts to root you into a population. The feeling is alleviating, incredibly uplifting. It also gives a new stimulus to remember words, to increase proficiency at the language from basic encouraging non-formal exchanges. Apart from these usual sentences of "Please, give me xxx" or "Excuse me sir, it isn't to my liking when you stab me" being devoid of much personality and basically mechanically reproduced utterings from a textbook, the formality of basic command and respond is tiring. I barely make every other sentence completely serious in English; this inability to joust with words has been an unrealized source of discouragement for me, apparently. Much more to go, and endlessly more up and down to come. Kuigi now, there is a renewed spark.. an increased chance of expression and things sorting out in more intricate ways. Järgmine (next), solid friends with whom this can occur.. I suggest along with this (and before this) that those dear to me in the States get your Estonian down and get over here sharpish. There is only one microbrewery in Estonia, and it is shit. I see opportunity, and free beer. These thoughts will move forth in time. Responses?

Aside of such rambling, I am shaking loose this curse of a journalist position as hard as I can, am starting a few shifts at a private cafe next week where I will speak ainult eesti keeles, applied for a Critical Language scholarship Venemaal suveks (in Russia for the summer), and have moved to the next and final stage for approval of a Fulbright scholarship here Eestis. That sentence could be another 12 paragraphs, however there is a bottle of A le Coq in my külmik. The scale weighs unevenly in this case.

Edasi..