One Day in the Life of an International Student at the University of Tartu

Upon our arrival in Tartu the frost lay two fingers thick on the windowsill. Actually, it was sunny and around eighty Fahrenheit, but no matter how many times I explained to friends and family back in Seattle how, despite the fact that Tartu is roughly parallel with Juneau, Alaska, the weather is quite a bit milder here due to Baltic currents and that, although it does indeed say on the internet that it gets to negative forty degrees here sometimes, that’s negative forty Celsius and there’s a big difference[sic], no one could quite get it through their heads that Estonia is not Siberia and I was in fact not moving to the Gulag. I trust that many international students from far enough away experienced similar skepticism on the part of their friends and family when they informed them of their plan to move away to this remote and sometimes unheard-of corner of Europe.

Perhaps it is simply in the nature of most Americans, to assume that everywhere else in the world is somehow worse off. Considering the current state of economic and social affairs in the US I trust the reader finds this attitude as ironic as I find it. Even those hyper-liberal friends of mine from the pacific northwest, critical of US foreign policy and consumerism as they are, by the time of my departure could not help but wish me a fond fare-well with a tone that suggests you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. Mind you these are the same individuals who are prone to go off at a moments notice on a rant about the Illuminati, election fraud, and all other manner of paranoid distrust of their home country. I ask them: if Kennedy was assassinated, the dollar is soon to be discarded as national currency, and 9/11 was an inside job, could it really be such a bad idea to leave the US? Despite my dismay at their skepticism I too had begun to doubt the wisdom of my venture.

Aside from the all-too-practical elements contributing to my paranoia, such as the logistics of attaining residency, cost of living, weather conditions, etcetera, the very absence of information about the place online created a vacuum into which my imagination projected all sorts of dire visions.What if there are no good bars? What if the only food is beets and potatoes? What if Israel and Iran go to war, Iran China and Russia form an alliance, and Estonia is reoccupied in the process? What if the University of Tartu turns out to be some sort of online scam to recruit American citizens into forced labor? Or a more likely concern, what if no one there reads Foucault? Regardless of the irrationality of these thoughts, nothing could calm my troubled mind besides seeing Tartu myself and confirming the untruth of these speculations personally. The following day-in-the-life is an account of the twenty-four hour period during which my exaggerated paranoia shifted and eventually turned into its own opposite, false expectation giving way to a far richer reality than I could’ve hoped for.

Tallinn impressed me with all its touristy old town appeal and weird abundance of beautiful women, but I had already come to expect those amenities. I observed the huge empty spaces and rural farm quality from the bus on the two-hour ride between there and Tartu. When we pulled into Tartu it was raining. Moss clung to lot after lot of apparently abandoned buildings. The first excursion I took led me north on Raatuse. There I found more abandoned buildings and deserted streets. An elderly women in a purple scarf and worn shawl fed grain or corn to emaciated chickens. The building reminded me of Raskolnikov’s apartment in Crime and Punishment. What I had tried to disregard as paranoia seemed to take shape in reality…The series of coincidences and my eventual discovery of the real Tartu, the events that led up to the dissolution of all my misplaced paranoia, occurred only after finding out the following morning that my first full day in Tartu fell on a special occasion.

After my morning coffee and surfing the New York Times online I noticed the majority of businesses were closed. It was already ten am. It was a Friday morning and I could conceive of no reason why all these stores were not open yet. I skirted all of Raekoja plats before coming upon Pierre, the lone open café that offers the best espresso I have yet to find in Estonia. There I overheard a conversation in English, from across the ornately carved Victorian furniture beneath embroidered curtains. “The holiday always sneaks up on me so fast,” the woman said to her companion.
“It is hard to imagine it has been nineteen years” he replied. Having finished the last of my macchiato I flipped two more pages from Roberto Calasso’s The Forty-Nine Steps, then made my way to the counter. “What’s the occasion?” I asked the cashier.
“Excuse me?”
“Is today some sort of holiday?” I clarified.
“Today is the anniversary of the regaining of Estonian independence,” he politely informed me.

The overcast had parted and the cobblestone plats was bathed in sunlight. Unsatisfied with the findings of the previous day’s excursion I began my second walk about the town, this time in exploration of the south side of the river. On Narva Street I passed some massive dorm buildings nearing the Konsum market, then crossed the Emajogi by the Lai Vene bridge onto the south side.

From the front entrance the botanical garden appeared to be nothing special, but upon further exploration I found that it continued quite a ways past my expectations. I followed its bending paths and exited the garden by a large steel gate at Kroonuaia Street, taking a left. At Jakobi I hung a right past Krooks, a metal bar with outdoor seating and wifi that has since become my favorite watering hole. From there I went up to Veski Street and took a left. I entered a far more picturesque sector of Tartu than the side I explored the day before. Here lawns were well maintained, old couples walked their tiny dogs, and it seemed the majority of buildings were occupied. Superficial factors such as these have never in the past determined my estimation of a city, but with the degree to which my doubts had run away with me it was relief to see the majority of the city was not in total squalor. With each additional kilometer it became more apparent this city is far from squalid.

Not far down Vaseki I hung a right and entered an increasingly green and treed area. The entire city is sprinkled with small parks, so I assumed this one would discontinue after a short while. Instead it seemed only to gain in splendor the further I walked. It dipped down and led me into a series of connected groomed ravines with trails running throughout and vistas with seating at each peak. One such trail led me past tennis courts toward a massive brick ruin of tall arches and stairs with many compartments. Originally a church constructed in the thirteenth century, it later became the university library, was eventually too small to house all the books, fell into disrepair during the northern war, and was renovated in the twentieth century and turned into a history museum. Forgive me for any factual inaccuracies. I passed Toome Hill, beneath which is situated what I gathered to be a pagan sacrificial stone. The side of the hill facing the stone is dug out and replaced by a rock wall. I am unsure what lay behind those walls… Beyond there I passed a wide variety of statues of great intellectuals of the University of Tartu and finally came to a flat area in the trees perched roughly above the Raekoja plats, where I began my excursion. Contrary to my impression of yesterday, from my new vantage point I felt more like I was in a Henry James depiction of bourgeois London than a Dostoevsky depiction of St. Petersburg. At the Rotunda in the middle of the green I took a seat and ordered the Ale. Coq grapefruit long drink, which for my readers abroad is a canned Alt Greyhound you can buy in any store for a buck-fifty. I sat back.

My unrealistic expectations about the city itself were effectively dashed after that day. Sitting beneath the canopy of leaves at the Rotunda, with each sip of my gin long drink I became more satisfied with my decision to move here. And yet doubt remained in the back of my mind, no longer about living conditions and the beauty of the city, but about academics. The Evergreen State College where I earned my bachelor of arts was by no means a first-rate institution, but there the interdisciplinary structure and liberal attitude allowed for enough leeway that any enterprising student could pursue and at length acquire whatever he or she was looking for. When it came to semiotics there was an admitted dearth of specialists at Evergreen, but there were enough professors and students involved in peripheral areas such as philology, translation, and literary theory, that I had always seemed to find satisfactory conversation. My main concern was that at the University of Tartu the real specialists would probably engage their studies in Estonian, and that the international students might not be serious enough about the topic to be willing to engage me at the level I desire. To be perfectly honest, all I really feared was that no one in Tartu would have read Foucault’s The Order of Things, the center of gravity in my current research. Having finished my long drink, I made my way down from the Rotunda, past all the undergrads gathered on the hill drinking, through Raekoja plats toward Raatuse 22 in preparation to finally meet M., my correspondent from abroad. She is a second year semiotics student and answered many of my questions about the program over email. We were to go out for a drink and she was to introduce me to some fellow semiotics students.

M. met me on the first floor of Raatuse 22 at seven-thirty. From there we walked toward the bridge and then into the plats. At the kissing students fountain she introduced me to S., a blonde long-haired Estonian with glasses. S. greeted us cordially and led us to Illegaard, perhaps my second favorite watering whole currently. I thanked her for all the assistance and encouragement she had provided from abroad. We went around the table introducing ourselves, I explained I’m from Seattle and that I found the university in an online search for semiotics programs in Europe, and so on. My curiosity overtook me finally and I had to ask, “So, what’s your focus area?”
“Oh, nothing in particular,” M. replied with a snarky smile.
“Aren’t you working on your dissertation?”
“Oh, yeah, but it’s not going too well,” she explained with little concern. My heart sank. At length she elaborated, “It involves the study of emotions in relation to Peirce’s sign system, but I’m beginning to realize I don’t know anything about Peirce.”
“That sounds interesting,” I continued.
“Eh, not really.”

Over time I have discovered M.’s level of dedication to be much higher than she was willing to demonstrate on the spot, but at this moment it seemed my fears about academics here might be well-founded. She got up to order a pizza and a coffee and I turned my attention to S.

“So what do you do around here in your spare time, S?” He gave the remaining beer at the bottom of the bottle a cursory swish as if to say, “this”, and finished his drink, but then went on.
“I used to play in a rock band but have recently transferred most of my energy toward school. The whole rock star thing was starting to get in the way.” He went on to explain that he is a drummer, that he sometimes still plays but doesn’t have a full kit. Again at a certain point I could not help but bring the topic of conversation back around to semiotics. “What did you write for your master’s dissertation? Who did you focus on?” I asked. S. first named a thinker I am totally unfamiliar with, then he said,
“…my main interest right now is Foucault.” Barely able to restrain my nerdy enthusiasm, I prodded for more details. “Which books in particular?”
S. elaborated, “I believe The Order of Things to easily be his most brilliant work.” After we finished our beers and coffees and pizza we continued on to two more bars and fairly late into the evening. I was still jet-lagged and had not eaten enough. Discussion oscillated between where the best place to buy beer in Tartu was and the inevitability of representation to disintegrate into simulacra without proper internal regulating mechanisms. My feelings oscillated too, between being on the verge of passing out and total euphoric bewilderment. In fact the two states may have fed each other. The bottom line was that I was dumbfounded. After all my time at Evergreen and all the talk of Foucault not a single person there had ever examined The Order of Things closely enough to have a real discussion about it, and yet the first Estonian I meet here personally is already challenging my contention about the increasing arbitrariness of the relation between sign and meaning between the renaissance and modern episteme…

I was left with two possible paths of interpretation after this evening. Either, one: The University of Tartu is a far better institution/Estonians are far more dedicated to rigorous discussion, than what I was previously accustomed to, or two: some strange gossamer network of fate has placed me here, delivered me from a state of intellectual and emotional destitution I thought for a while might be terminal, and that the accumulation of synchronicities I have experienced so far is merely an indication of the influence of this network on my life. At the moment I lean toward a synthesis of these two interpretations, am willing to relinquish the need for absolute definitions and try to relish the uncertainty that comes from the inability to reconcile the opposition of expectation and reality; an inability that I trust will continue to characterize my stay here for a long time to come.