Have you ever wondered how the rough wool of sheeps gets so soft when sold at shops?

This year we celebrated Midsummer in Belgium. Guess where is Mia!

Margit spend some time at the kindergarten creating this great easter nest for Mait.

On Saturday Lea and Raimo hosted the Estonian Choir rehersal and Estonian independence day celebrations at their place. Some nice pics from the event.

Happy Independence day!

Here is ours xmas card for this year. Merry Xmas and happy new year 2010 for everybody.

Holiday Season started, and you see, everything moves around Mait here at home.

Mait had lots to do on Sunday at the estonian xmas party in Annaberg. First he had to act as a spruce and then he had to unpack his present.

For the first time Mait took part of the St. Martin's day parade (the same for me, i had never heard from that before ;)

We went to celebrate the Chilean Independence Day to Antibes, France. In the video you can clearly see that no man can dance...

What are my personal impressions you might ask...

Well, first i have to say that after hearing the european choir of estonians in Bonn, i had really high expectation for this song festival, imagine those feelings and power multiplied by 1000!! On the other side, i saw the dance celebration as just a side event to just use the popularity of the song celebration.

And it turns out that i was completely wrong: first, the dance celebration was really impressive with 7500 dancers where everybody was important and had his place in an excellent choreography at the level, or even above, of an olympic games opening, but 2 hours long. Really amazing.

But then, the first day of song celebration, everything was perfect during the march, but then the big disappointment:

First, almost 2 hours delay, which for an event focused on the family, where thousand of children were present, it is not really acceptable. Then once started, the applauses were spare and everybody seemed to be more interested in grabbing some trash-food than to 'breathe as one'.

Also, the loudspeakers were completely destroying the feeling of the event, at the end you could not tell the difference between a 10 head choir and this 25000 head choir, not at all, very disappointing!

Then having already the 25000 singers gathered, they only sang 2 or 3 songs together and then they were splitted, that was taking lot of time generating several breaks of up to 30 mins just moving singers around, which i can not really understand: if you have already the 25000 singers together, use them!! and organize another concert with 1000 singers later which is much easier to manage, and from the 5 hours programme at the end the singers were singing maximum only 3 hours! What a waste of resources!

And the cherry on the cake: despite estonians love their country and their traditions, and they should also know their weather, but after some rain everybody was leaving!! yes, leaving their 25000 singers singing in the rain for no audience, this is really disrespectful and a shame!

Thanks god there was a second day of song celebration which gave me hope. There was more audience and more interest in the show, even somehow you could really hear the singers not only through the loudspeakers, and despite that at the beginning the concert was being the same than the day before, the last 1 hour was it all worth: all singers on stage, singing popular songs that the audience was singing with, even repeating songs and improvising, really great performance and i can now really tell that Estonia was at the end breathing as one!

The second and last day was completely different to the first one, first the weather was better, second the audience was bigger, about 68000 people. Enjoy these 2 videos.

This was my first song celebration, and despite that nor me or Margit are singing, we were honored to join the 7km walk from Tallinn's city center to the song celebration site with the european choir of estonians along many friends and the rest of the 24705 singers. And, on our way, we were even greeted by ministers and former presidents.

It seems to be that the walk took longer than expected since the celebration itself started at 20:45 almost 2 hours later than planned.

And at the end the weather turned against the event, and we had to leave as well as more than (i guess) half of the whole audience just in the middle of the concert.

Every 4 years Estonia organizes a dance and song celebration. Yesterday we were at the first (of three) show of the dance celebration.

This year the event counted with 7460 folklore dancers and the main topic of the choreography was the sea.

So enjoy these 2 videos of the birth of the sea. But, sadly we were located against the sun :(

This is the biggest celebration in the year for estonians (when there is no song festival, at least), and also in other nordic countries. Despite the celebrations differ in the date, they all celebrate the longest (with respect to daylight) day in the year (which, because of the latitude, is really long, over 20 hrs). In Estonia it is celebrated the 23rd June, St. John's day. Here 2 pictures: the first enjoying BBQ with friends at Hiiumaa and the 2nd showing me drunken jumping over the fire.

Everybody is preparing the landscape for the biggest celebration of the year in Estonia...

Just having some interesting fruits.

First "papayo" some ugly relative of the, for me, familiar "papaya"? That does taste more like a sort of melon.

And huge and delicious avocados, one avocado is like 1500 grams!

I heard one lady asking to a friend in Las Palmas where we took this picture:

"¿Donde vas a coger la guagua?"

which means here something like:

"Where will you take the bus?"

but the same could be understood in Chile like:

"Where will you fuck the baby?" :s

This year came 'small' Santa to deliver presents for all.

We got a permit to cut our own xmas tree from the forest. And we got the absolute nicest :)

This is one of the strangest cheeses i have ever tried, a 'braid' cheese.

Saint Nicholas normally comes the 6th of December to fill good children's socks with sweeties. This year he waited a couple of days for me to come to Estonia :p

We arrived without any problems to Estonia. And it seems that this will be a very white christmas for us.

With this card we wish all of you merry christmas and happy new year 2009.

And the day for baking arrived, and we had a lot of fun, eating and baking :p

Today Mait took part of his first Christmas party at Annaberg manor with other Estonians. He could also enjoy being on Santa's lap.

Christmas is approaching and Christmas without gingerbreads are not real Christmas. First time in my life I prepared gingerbread dough (I have always bought the dough, but here in Germany I think one cannot find it) and on Sunday I am going to bake gingerbreads.

Just to tell that the carrying sling has been really great... it is so confortable, and so easy to use, we took the pushchair with to estonia, what we did not use it much... next time we will not take the pushchair with.

This took my attention in Aino's birthday:

Laua means Table and Viin means Vodka, so laua viin is table vodka, there was anything else to drink on the table no beer and no wine. And they drink it also alone, no orange juice (like in Chile), but i have to say it was a really good vodka, cheers!