Day 6: First interview, departure, walks

Today, Mairi leaves us for a few days because she has a couple of things to do in Tallinn; she'll be back on Monday.

We're doing the first interview later in the day: With Maria, the neighbor of Ambulartoorium. She answers our questions regarding her life and way of living, her family, her guests, and of course about fish, onion, and Old-Believers. As we already suspected, most of the young people we meet and see on the streets right now don't actually live here - they only spend their summer holidays at the lake, visit their families, and will leave again later in the month before on September 1st the new school year will start. Therefore, the visual impression we get right now doesn't really reflect the reality of these villages: In fact, it's mostly older people living here, some younger ones, but most of the younger ones actually live in the cities and come back only during summer and sometimes weekends.

Maria herself spent most of her life in this village. Not a very frequent church-goer, she is nevertheless familiar with the rituals and rules of her religion, and shares a few insights. We film her and chat with her in her garden, facing a wooden cottage full of onions. Impressive for us, yet Maria tells us that what looks like a huge amount of onions to us is in fact just a fraction of what they used to grow during Soviet times, when there was no border to Russia, and they could sell their produce on the market in Leningrad (nowadays St. Petersburg).

Liza, the young girl whom we meet almost daily on the street, has a puppy with her today which she happily shows us. And we end another sunny day at the lakeside at our beautiful picknick place: Marc grills the best hot dogs any of us has ever had, from some lamb sausages we bought earlier on. Warm wind, cold beer, great food, and all this right at the shore of the lake. The lake which, by the way, just doesn't feel like a lake: It sounds like the sea, with its loud waves that form a hypnotizing background sound, and you simply can't see the other shore. We feel like sitting at the seaside.