On Saturday the culture steppers took a trip to the open air museum! This museum is a short bus journey out of the city centre and I definitely recommend that you visit it. Katrin from the Estonian institute told us that Estonians love to come here and that there are many events here throughout the year! So this museum is a must if you would like to learn more about Estonian history and culture! This museum uses a few unique ways to help people discover more about Estonian history. it's great to be able to learn outdoors, and since the natural world is such a big part of Estonian culture, it makes sense that this museum combines a museum with nature. There are numerous traditional Estonian buildings, many of them are original structures from the nineteenth century, relocated to the museum. It really felt like I was stepping back in time exploring them! We split into small groups and followed an adventure using our smartphones. This had a map of the museum and various puzzles to solve once we reached the locations on the map. This was a cool way to help us to interact with the objects and also the people working in the museum! I won't spoil the puzzles for you, but I will share a picture of one of the objects we found that was part of the trail - the Lestovka, used for prayer in the Russian orthodox tradition. Later, the people working in the museum told us about some of the traditions at the Setu farm part of the museum site. As I've already mentioned, I love to learn about culture through food, and today was no exception. We got to drink some tea prepared in a traditional way, with some sugar that stays in your mouth while you drink. We also tried a traditional cake, which was apparently very healthy! There are some goats living next to the farm house, so we also said hello to them! There was a small exhibition on various cultures living in Estonia, including Russians, Armenians and Polish among many other nationalities. We were encouraged to research a particular group and then to share what we found with the rest of our party. It was really great to see that we were encouraged to learn about even more cultures living in Estonia! This was a fantastic learning experience and if you want to visit the museum I strongly encourage you to do so! I will try to go again before I leave because there wasn't time to see everything there because it is so big! The rest of the culture steppers will have another chance to visit in a couple of weeks, so I hope they will take the opportunity (I'll add some of my pictures on the facebook group to show anyone who didn't go this time how interesting it was)!
Hours this week at placement: 6 hours
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LaurenI am an IMAESC student, English teacher and adult education researcher from the UK. Categories
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