I had my first full-time teaching session last week in Tartu. It meant two classes of SDA church history and one class of my beloved homiletics. We have a saying in Estonia - sometimes you feel like a fish in the water, meaning that there are times you do what you were meant/made to do and it's the most natural thing for you. Well, I was the fish in the water last week. I don't think I'm ever quite as alive as I am when I teach (or, maybe, preaching competes with it).

And people are so nice to me. I don't only mean my students who are a great bunch of people. But others as well. I still get some 'who's that kid?' looks from older lecturers and on Wednesday evening when I sat in the cafeteria and waited for my homiletics class to begin an elderly gentleman (I've no idea who he was) asked me which classes I was taking in the seminary, but even that is ok. I feel like a real stereotype buster when that happens haha! The seminary has a new principle, inaugurated just a month ago - I already knew her a bit before the teaching began but now that I've been there for two times I think we're becoming good friends. Well, maybe that's too much said but we sure have a lot of mutual respect and understanding. Her husband is the pastor of the biggest baptist church in Tartu and also a lecturer in that seminary and I happened to have lunch with him in the seminary's caf on Thursday and he's really sweet too, getting slightly fatherly and telling me I need to continue my education and all that. Ah, good people!

And when I was done with teaching on Thursday and was sitting in a cafe in central Tartu, having dinner and waiting for a friend to join me, I saw a bunch of students coming in and sitting at the table next to me. They all spoke English to each other and I could tell English was not their first language. So there really was only one option - they were the international students from Tartu Uni. And I got all sentimental watching them from the corner where I was sitting, thinking that there was a good chance these kids had just come from their Estonian class. And God knows, if my life hadn't turned upside down five years ago and if I had stayed in Tartu Uni and continued teaching in the uni's language centre, I might have been the lecturer whose class these students had just come from. But now, instead of teaching someone the formation of 14 cases in Estonian language I teach the formation of Adventist doctrines...

The weirdness of life.

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Oh, right. Happy V-day! Look what I got today. It is no small thing to get a V-day card from a nine year old friend!