Autumn reflections.

This year, autumn is spoiling me. My favourite season has always been that part of autumn, where the mornings are refreshingly cool, but not cold, the days are full of sunshine but not hot, and somewhere in the branches of trees, next to the singing birds, the wind is composing its own song, just perfect background music for anything.

Toomemägi will definitely be more colorful this year, when the autumn will have come with its full palette. Last year it had chosen pure gold for the whole hill and nothing else. This time, even most of the leaves are still green and trying to keep the last bits of summer, here and there one can already notice red, orange, yellow, warmly honeybrown. The maple-tree right opposite my favourite reading bench has had two branches colored for two weeks already. Nothing more, just those two branches as a small reminder that the summer is indeed over.

And there I sit on my favourite reading bench, although this time reading has been replaced with solving of differentials and integrals. Due to "unexpected dental disaster" the Semiotics lecture got cancelled and I had unexpected free time. The weather had gone from grey and rainy to autumn fairy tale in one morning. Each page of this fairy tale takes one step closer to the winter or at least colder days, and I just cannot say "no" to perhaps the last opportunity to enjoy the silent happiness of reading up on the hill. Or preparing for the upcoming test in my so beloved (absolutely no sarcasm here!) mathematics.

That it is noon already, I know not only by the Raekoja bells - a group of tourists come up the hill, along the same path I have seen so many tourist groups coming. They always come around twelve, one o´clock latest. At the same time, my lunch-buddy arrives and we decide to go down the very same path, passing the tourists. Germans this time, a group that my secondary school headmaster used to call "empty-nest-tourists" or people who have raised their kids to have their own lives and their own kids and now enjoy a little bit more careless lifestyle.

Number of them stop to look back at us, when we have passed, some gaze at us when we are still passing them as they would have seen a ghost. So they noticed I am wearing colors. Well, it is not that hard to notice the cherrybrown-white-green tekkel on my head - whole Spanish group took pictures of me, when I was sitting on my bench and reading in colors the other day, Japanese not only took pictures, but also asked, "what does the hat mean". Germans, in turn, actually have a clue of what they see, as they also have corporations, but they might have different connotations as in Germany corporations sometimes get unfairly associated with movements even as bad as neo-nazi. Oh well. The tekkel on this side of the Europe carries whole different story.

For me as a Latvian the opportunity to wear the colors when going for a lecture in Oeconomicum or walking down the Lossi street, meeting someone in Raekoja plats or sitting up on the hill and reading - it is an opportunity to state the not-so-obvious. That, although my love towards my sweet, little and absolutely wonderful Latvia has not changed a bit, perhaps only become stronger, Estonia and everything Estonian has grown to be quite a part of my identity. So strong, that my weekly travelling between Riga and Tartu is not "going to school and then coming back" anymore. It is "going from home to home" with the only difference being ability to understand the language used around me.

But hey - I will be able to speak Estonian one very soon day!