Days of Thunder

On the Sunday after Aksel's birthday, the Austrian girl who was looking for a host family came to our house. Everyone except Aksel was there to meet her. We visited and learned about her and the work that she is doing here. She is working at the orphanage in Elva, but has nothing to do for most of day because the children are in school. She is also living in the old orphanage building all by herself, which is incredibly cold because there is no central heating, so she just heats her room by building fires in the fireplace.

We all talked for a long time and eventually moved to the living room. She stayed for several hours, and I hope she ends up staying with us, but we haven't heard from her since as far as I know.

After school on Monday, I went to Lounakeskus, a mall, with two friends from school who are both exchange students. One of them had wanted to get doughnuts, so I suggested Lounakeskus and so we went and we went straight to the doughnut stand as soon as we got there. To get to the mall, we just caught the 18 intercity bus and it goes there as its first and last stop. After getting doughnuts to share, we wandered around the mall for a bit before Brittney pulled us into the pet store.

It was a big pet store and in the back were cages and pens with a variety of animals. There were parrots, songbirds, squirrels, and a kookaburra in the cages. In the pens there were hedgehogs, prairie dogs, and lizards. There were also two porcupines and an assortment of rabbits, spiders, and fish. There were only two cats and no dogs. It was just like a miniature zoo.

Afterwards, we made a beeline for the bookstore, Apollo, on the second floor. After some meandering through the movie section and aisles of Estonian novels (and books in English on sex positions) we found the foreign language fiction section. Here I struck gold with a book called Stormdancer. It was highly recommended; genre: Japanese Steampunk. On the back I found a review praising the book from my favorite author, Patrick Rothfuss. It was love at first sight.

On the trip home, I started reading. The beginning was a bit hard to follow because of the Japanese names that I found hard to follow because of there foreignness, a bit like Estonian names to me, truth be told. A day or two later, as I started to read in earnest, I found the writing wonderful and quite thunderous, just like the characters. I highly recommend it to Josh and Emily and Dad and Grammie, and all others reading this post.

Magnificent book, full of poison and thunder. The sequel came out last month. It's called Kinslayer. I don't know much about it, only that the author doesn't like happy endings and people have cursed him for it.