baltic!

There are three inches of snow on the ground and people are talking about the coldest winter in decades and cancelling bookings because of the treacherous traffic conditions.
I disagree with most people in Ardfern though, thinking that snow is absolutely lovely and how do you mean you can't drive when it's snowing..? :P
I once heard a story from an Estonian truck driver about a heavy snowfall in France; all the cars were piling up in every available car park to the point where other drivers, tired from their own international trips and deeply discouraged by the snow, couldn't fit in.. so the police pitched up and quite quickly selected out all the Scandinavian and Baltic drivers and told them to hit the road; claiming that they're used to tough conditions!



Scottish people have a funny expression to describe cold weather - they would come in from the front door of the pub on a "cold" winter night, delivering a series of shivers, rubbing hands against each other, jamming up the fireplace and saying "uuhh, it's baltic!"
Now Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) do experience occasional freezing weeks during their winters (a few days of minus thirties celsius every winter), but compared to Scottish weather, so are the other seasons more extreme; more hot in the summer, more cold in the winter; oh perhaps not more rainy in the autumn, but anyway using the word "siberian" or "laplandic" would make much more sense... :P

One of our frequent pub-visitors, Robin (who has something to say about everything) suggested that the word "baltic" is not so much to describe the weather conditions in Baltic states as to say something about their personalities.. John, a superbly intelligent local who has an amazing ability to remain insightful and interesting even after fifteen pints of Guinness, thought that since Scottish people love their drink so much, it would be difficult for them to pronounce "Siberian" or "Laplandic" or even "Arctic" throughout most of the day, so they settle with using a slightly less accurate alternative..



Anyway our few weeks of baltic-like weather have just been lovely, looking forward to a white Christmas..

crazyamazingnaked

During my stay in Ardfern, I've developed quite a liking for swimming in Scottish lochs. Or swimming in lochs, seas, rivers, anything, really...
It all started with our little local loch Ardlarach which we occasionally visited with my crazy co-worker Sarah (who had never swum outdoors before). It had a road trimmed with blackberries leading to it, a life ring, an overhanging tree to jump off from, additional surprises in a form of floating dead sheep etc., perfect! By the end of August though, as the temperatures started to drop and the road to the loch seemed to grow longer and longer each day, no-one really felt like coming with me anymore except occasional guys from the pub who thought going swimming with me would be an excellent next step towards picking me up.. :P haha.

Anyway, as it happened, on the third or fourth day of September I talked about my love for swimming with my (ex boy-)friend Martin, mentioning that I had swum in that loch every day of that month so far. So we made a bet and I started taking pictures of my daily trips down to the loch.
Pretty soon, as the weather and the water went colder and colder, even the most adventurous people I met thought the price of dipping themselves into cold water to be too much to pay for the company of a crazy pretty eastern-european girl.. :P In other words, I was to walk down to the loch and back all alone every single day... I found a way to combine my trips with eating loads of blackberries and listening to motivational audio books..









Quite quickly I became known in Ardfern as „the crazy girl who goes swimming in that freezing loch every day“, to be honest I might have helped the rumour a bit by telling everyone about it myself :P
And I was quite proud of myself - I took trips down to the loch early in the morning as well as late in the evening just after my shift, borrowed a bike from a friend once when I only had 30 minutes left before work; jumped off a sailing boat in heavy rain, ended up getting home completely wet on another rainy day, took a kitchen probe down once to find the water temperature to be around 12 degrees celsius (experiments under running cold tap water showed that it is warmer to take a cold bath in the Galley)...

great fun!

Loch Ardlarach, September


Morar, October


Loch Ness, December

„And where is home for you?“ asks another customer in the restaurant. I really need to find a clever, interesting, witty answer to that...
„Tell you what, I'll by you a drink if you get it right in three guesses! (pose and smile)“ seemed to work pretty well on all three of the handsome guy customers I tried the approach on in the bar. „I'm from Estonia, they say Estonia has the most beautiful women in the world, that's why I left!“ didn't seem to work that well though, so I kinda felt a need to apologise for my conceitedness straight after that :P

My usual answer still turns out boring, something like „I'm from Estonia“ - (awkward silence) - „oh!“ or alternatively, if I'm lucky enough -„Oh, we've been to Estonia in 2003“. Luckily I've found that most of our visitors have actually heard of or even visited my country, so the small talk can move on to discussing the Estonian language or the old town of Tallinn or the differences in weather conditions and such.
Still, being constantly recognised as a foreigner bugs me a bit, especially as I have an image that most British people don't exactly have the healthiest opinion about all the Eastern-Europeans immigrating and taking over their jobs :P It worked out a bit better when I was still blonde (hair colour) so people would suggest I was from Sweden, Finland, Denmark or on some occasions from the Netherlands, sometimes as close as the Baltic region as a whole; never Poland, Russia, Czech Republic etc that I get now that I've gone back to my natural (kinda) hair colour :P
I suppose people just need something to smalltalk about, and my recognisably Eastern-European accent must be the most evident thing there! I don't really think that most of the people here hold a grudge against me, at least not for being Estonian...:P Oh well...

I've no idea where that unimportant whine about nationalities came from ; I must say that I am immeasurably proud to be Estonian (why else would I go on about being one :P) and also extremely glad to live and work in Scotland!

glad to get that off my mind though...

what's the speed limit in Ardfern?

The decision to move to Scotland, all alone, to do a job I'd never had anything to do with before was really quite an easy one to take. It just took a bit of self talk convincing myself that my little comfort zone in Birmingham amongst all those lovely English ladies with sugarcraft classes and afternoon tea breaks, amongst my Estonian companions I used to go out with, amongs my growing pile of useless belongings that I had bought/collected during my stay in England doesn't really give too many all time high experiences to remember when I'm looking back at life in my golden days...

So as it happened, I set my profile up on a webpage which a friend had reccomended me a day earlier, and on the next day I received a confusing phone call claiming that I „fit the bill“ and could I possibly start on the 31-st of July. Seriously, after all the broken English I presented during that phone call (which I think came mainly from the fact that I hadn't really made too many phone calls in English before), I was only left wondering how could the person on the other side still possibly think about formalising his job offer by sending me a confirmation email with the job details. But he did. I put great effort into having an immaculate official e-mail conversation with the owner to counterbalance the two other broken English conversations I had with him... People say I was hired only because I'm an attractive female but I like to think that I quite quickly justified my being here and became quite a valued, trusted worker (except the few occasions I have showed up to work still feeling drunk, side-effects of working/living in a pub I guess..)






Ardfern must be the most interesting village of them all. It struck me as a place where everyone has great insights into almost anything. People here seem just lovely and fun and fearless and positively crazy.
Of course there might be the psychological aspect derived from the fact that English is not my first language (therefore anyone who can form full, sophisticated-sounding sentences in English would sound extremely intelligent!), and that I am doing my first bar job ever and that I have never really lived in any west-Scottish village before...



People here love their pubs and their drink. Again, of course, as I'm working in the pub, my sample group consists mainly of people who regularly come into the pub and therefore drink..
During the first month I spent living in Ardfern, I surely doubled the amount of alcohol I had drunk throughout all my previous life. Yes, I was (and am again, sort of) a quite moderate drinker, so the drinking culture here struck me as nothing else but... wild :P

The Valley of Porn

(Bob Hunter)

Glass in hand I look at the barmaid
Alone on the bridge of this ship of fools
She commands and demands respect
From this crew of the lost and lonely men
I am content for I am at home far from home
amongst these mindful wanderers

Each of them has a story to tell, of lives lost
And not redeemed for that is to come
For some
The others will leave but a small wake as they pass

There is happiness here too
with these men and women whose lives
Have had the contrast turned up full
So the dimly blinding barlight limits the horizon
To small easily encompassed spaces

Talk is low and wandered, searching
Full knowing that now vital things
Will be forgotten by morning
As dawn fogs the mind

---

It was on a quiet Monday evening, I was left working alone behind the bar; midnight was approaching and the only two lonely locals in the pub had just changed their pints of Guinness to a big pot of tea – just because they couldn't take any more Guinness, and just to keep me company, and to keep the pub open, I guess. Anyway, it was on that moment when I first felt that I had been accepted as a valid Ardfernian, that I was perhaps a bit more than a person behind the bar who pours everyone's drinks.
I turned the music and the lights down a bit, and in this romantish set of dim lights, quiet music and cups of tea, Bob, a local yacht skipper who lives on a rather fancy boat in the marina and who had walked in to ask for some milk two hours earlier, recited one of his poems. It was written about the Galley of Lorne (or the Valley of Porn as the locals call it) and in my opinion describes the place quite accurately (I do have the permission to publish it in my blog btw)...

Working in a pub has never been my dream job really; mainly because of the fact that it involves communicating with people and, erm... more people. In fact anyone who really knows me has said that I should be locked behind some closed lab doors doing beneficial experiments for the rest of the mankind or something; and I think I actually would excel in such things, but where's the fun in that, ha!?
I remember on my first few days working in the Galley I was thoroughly scared of every person I had to meet, even if it was taking just a few drinks down to their table on a tray (what do I say? what if they ask anything? what if...?) To make matters worse, one of our chefs decided to escape the premises on the second day I was here, so there was a massive delay for every single table in the restaurant.. Consequently, in addition to being scared I had to walk around with a very apologetic face and swallow all the criticism with a huge smile on my face. They said there would be training but I was really, really thrown in at the deep end.
I am overreacting a bit, really. I have the most wonderful set of co-workers ever who did nothing but encourage me and show me around and explain about how to do things. Even our boss, whose main activity is to walk around with a grumpy face, gave me some reassurance that I'll be just fine.

Why am I here? Well they say our boss has a tendency to employ good-looking girls, and considering I had no previous experience in either bar or restaurant work but I did have a good picture of myself on the Workabout website, I think that might be the case :P Personally, I liked the idea of working in a Scottish country pub as something every shy Estonian girl wouldn't do. I've been here for two and a half months now and have been loving it. At least I'm not afraid of the locals anymore :P And on a good day, if I don't think about it, I am also completely able to hold up a professional, interesting conversation with anyone in the restaurant; with customers mentioning me to the owners as they check out. Most of the rest of the time I'm just concerned about how I perform...

I hope by now most of you have realised that my way of describing things is through a weird sarcasm towards myself; I am actually perceived as a normal person with no apparent mental problems, true story! (or at least as a "normal" Ardfernian, I hope :P)

to be continued, maybe..

do the thing you think you cannot do

This is me, then!

Since this is my first attempt at blogging in English, my constant need of appearing perfect will probably prevent me from showing this to anyone except my Estonian friend(s) :P

I realise that it's not commonly recognised as a good idea for a shy Estonian girl to pack up her life and start travelling the world; especially since budget travelling includes lots and lots of peoples' people attitude and activities; yeah, introversion is really not the way for winners in this field :P

Anyhow, I'm residing in Scotland at the moment, and although it seems like I have lost half of my English and social and general being interesting skills at the same moment I arrived (I have my own theories about that and a plan to improve it :P); I can't be more happier that I came, about packing my things and leaving, to know that I am actually at the starting point of living the dream that I kept alive for all these boring times of having these boring office jobs that people like me are meant to have..

Well, anyway, in short- this is a travelling blog; for anyone who would like to know more about the places I visit, and/or me!

to be updated soon... (if I can stick with the idea that is)