grasswire

There will be more Tartu photo updates sometime next week. In the mean time, have as much fun as we have it here.

We had a really exhausting but really fun day at summer school today. The highlight of the programme was the poster workshop where each of us had to make a poster, representing his/her dissertation topic, methods and anticipated results and than had to present it in five sentences. Was fun but not nearly as much as hanging with the gang afterwards.

- Flat.
- Cold(er).
- Nordic.

But all of these brief impressions bear positive connotations. You get a first glimpse of flatness from the airplane but it really hit me on the bus from Tallinn to Tartu. After about an hour of driving through the light brown of the fields and unmowed pastures I dozed off and when I awoke some 50km later, the scenery didn’t change a bit. There were the same pastel-like light browns lined with green treetops and striking whiteness of the birch tree bark. Cold was the prevailing impression of Tallinn and of the freshness of the air that my colleagues assigned t the people as well. And certain Nordic overtone has a lot to do not so much with Baltic Sea but with wooden houses and washout colour of the stone walls and facades.

 As far as Tartu is concerned, it is cute, small and manageable, but the strongest impression is still “deserted”. From time to time, it does look like a ghost town or like it has been quickly evacuated (Sundays are apparently quiet and the same goes for national holidays) which gives the empty streets a bit surreal look of a movie set. There will be photo-updates on Flickr in the coming days.

All packed and ready to spend the next two weeks in Tartu, Estonia. Have very mixed feelings about this summer school. On the one hand, I am looking forward to meeting new people and hopefully learning something, but most of all I feel sad and uneasy about leaving the girls back home. I sure am going to miss them. By the time I get back, Tamara will be a big girl…

As I mentioned in one of the previous posts, Things as they are are my ongoing photo project of a slightly undervalued everyday aesthetics, and you are bound to get an image or two each month. Today’s photo is (obviously) parsley – we rarely get to use the whole bunch so some of it will inevitably fade away.

I spent the last two days without my glasses - I was a bit clumsy and than gravity did the rest. It was a strange feeling, walking around and seeing the world slightly out of focus. And even more interesting to take photos - I just framed and press the button. It was only after I took a photo, that I was able to see the image clearly on camera’s screen.

But I was nevertheless able to notice this tiny material evidence of the turbulent history of Piran. BTW, I found several groups on Flickr that collect sequential numbers. What weirdos :))

We spent a very nice week with our friend Chie and since it was not her first time in Slovenia, we didn’t have to run from one tourist sight to another but could spend the days more in a more relaxed manner, enjoying our many coffees, teas, cooking, eating and having fun with Tamara.
But we did browse the Ljubljana flea market and visited Piran yesterday. Must admit it was unusual to be on the seaside on a working day and during high season - but to just stay there for a few hours (plus not to jump into the inviting water). And I should not forget the many sweets, ranging from Trojane doughnuts to kremšnite that I brought from Novo mesto where I was a guest speaker at documentary photography festival Fotopub. It felt a bit strange, just few years ago I was considering attending the workshops and now, I was invited to give a talk :))

And click to see the mysterious wooden object “in action”.

OK, I admit I was a lazy poster this week but we are just having so much fun with our Japanese friend…

And to make it up to you, here is a little iillustration I fiddled with last week.

I admit this may seem like a side step from the Things as they are project but I decided I’d recycle the images into another project, a series of cards I will name the Alphabet of everyday life. So in the end I’ll have a non-aesthetisation of everyday life plus an aesthetisation of this non-aesthetisation :))

It probably won’t be as sophisticated as this Periodic table of elements I recently came across but I’ll give it my best shot.

We get a first proper international visit in our apartment tomorrow – our Japanese friend will stay with us for over a week and we have been looking forward to this for the last three weeks. And to put a cherry on the top, she sent us a surprise packet full of wonderful Japanese stuff. Unfortunately, the ceramic plate got crushed in the mail, but it was a chance for me to compensate my not studying archeology (which I wished for quite some time). So I bought a new tube of glue and… Well, some of the cracks are still visible but that’s part of its charm - the plate is now in one piece and proudly displayed.

And now a little Monday puzzle for you: the most intriguing item in the packet was this very nice wooden object. Any ideas what it is used for? (I’ll post the answer by the end of the week)

Check out this key ring from a shoe store on Trubarjeva :))

You can also check out today’s series of pics of Tamara on my Flickr page, the slightly unconventional framing is due to the fact that the photos were shot without looking through viewfinder. And Gašper, check out this one.