Ina on the road

While spring still can't decide whether to come all the way to Estonia, we are packing our bags and leave. Three days of education are awaiting us on the shore of the lake Pühajärv: it's a winter school for PhD students of immunology and virology, and while most participants are from Tartu, some arrive from as far as Northern Sweden. A bus is picking us up from the parking lot of the Vanemuine Theater, and we look around. We will spend almost an hour in this bus, and three days in the same conference room, in the same dining hall, we will share hotel rooms. A decision is quietly made, as we all take off our protective face masks. If one of us has Covid, we will all get it anyway. There is no PhD student who doesn't know the PhD comics by Jorge Cham ( www.phdcomics.com ), which depict our life so accurately. There is one comic strip in particular that matches this trip: Career stages at a seminar - the first year graduate student will take notes, thinking she will ever loo...

  The da y our world was turned upside down, I was at an airport. I had just written one of my last exams of vet school and couldn’t wait to see my friends in Estonia again. It’s Thursday, March 12, 2020, eight a.m., Hanover airport. My flight has been cancelled. What now? For a moment I consider taking the tram back home, get back to my desk and study on, like all my classmates. Apart from the exams, there is this new disease to worry about that has rapidly spread from China over half the world already. It’s because of this that half of the flights are being cancelled. But one of my friends has come to Estonia from the Netherlands, she has booked us a hut in the forest and is waiting for me. We want to hike in the middle of the Northern wilderness, maybe get to see some wildlife. I’ve been eager to finally get back to Estonia for months. So I decide to travel on, on a train to Berlin and a plane to Tallinn, where she is already impatiently waiting for me. We definitely wo...

What a trip! This is how I went from hitchhiking to a spa hotel. “You can hitchhike and still be a lady” said my friend Emma. So after all the hitchhiking in the Faroes I am couchsurfing in Copenhagen and Tallinn and then I’m off to Pärnu, Estonia’s summer capital. Staying in a Spa hotel may be high up on the list of weird things I have done. I mean, imagine that dreadhead in those rainbow-colored pants take off her backpack and check in to that hotel. So what if the receptionist called me a “girl” when she made my spa appointment with her colleague. So what if the average age dropped considerably as I entered the breakfast room at seven. And so what that I had no idea what I was doing when I got a body peeling and how to relax and when to close my eyes. This massage therapist definitely thought I wasn’t too normal. Why did I come here alone? Apparently I was supposed to bring friends. And not do a mud treatment; that is to be done in Haapsalu. Ok, thanks, I’ll go for...