Introduction to Elektriteater

For quite a time already, I have now been in a group of volunteers for MTÜ Elektriteater. Elektriteater is the only art-house cinema in Tartu, focusing on independent and European movies. It is my favourite cinema and since finding out about the place in autumn 2014 I have been an avid visitor. (The first movie I saw there was Frank, which was great and the second movie, Only Lovers Left Alive, is still one of my absolute favourites.)
In summer 2016 they had planned to show cinema outdoors in different locations around Tartu. They were looking for volunteers for the outdoor cinema and I applied and was picked out for the outdoor cinema group. After helping the Elektriteater people over the summer, I got into a cool inside circle volunteer Facebook group. Occasionally there are some smaller projects with which volunteers can help. I also was one of the volunteers making the outdoor cinema last summer.
 The people there are friendly and warm and the whole place always feels cozy and welcoming, which is the reason I'm always happy to go back and help them with various tasks or just sometimes invite my friends to see movies they would otherwise never see. (I recently went to see Bad Black, an action movie from Uganda with my classmate Ingrid.) Previously, I have for example helped with selling tickets, moving their office and decorating the cinema with real grass for the special screenings of movies by the Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki.

I will add a link about the Miyazaki retrospective because this event was just the best.
https://elektriteater.ee/galerii/hayao-miyazaki-retrospektiiv/

Some dull badminton and a lazy Saturday

I did not enjoy this wednesday's badminton training nearly as much as usually. There was a new girl and I started the training together with her. We did some exercises with her and I somehow ended up playing with her for the entire one and a half hours, which, to be honest was quite tedious and the time felt passing sloooowly. But it was okay,because she needed someone to play with and I think she learned a lot in the process, as it was her first training. We also did some kind of a running exercise where we ran slowly-fast-slowly-fast etc for 3 minutes. This was some very intense running and I do not remember running as much in the nearer past. I think I had not done any running in my badminton trainings before.

Another thing I did this week was that we organized a study day with my friend Monaliisa. We thought that we could get together on Saturday and study together. We hoped that our studying would be more efficient together by motivating each other and keeping the each other from procrastinating.
We didn't do that much studying, to be honest. But we did try. I think it for some reason just was a particularly lazy Saturday, so we both felt like resting (and watching a cool TV series together and cooking cinnamon buns). To be fair, we also managed to do some studying in the evening. Mona actually even completed the whole task she planned to do. In any case, the day turned out really nice. Maybe there's more motivation to study next time!

Introduction to badminton

At the beginning of the school year, I decided to try playing badminton. I had previously played table tennis for about two years and felt like trying something new. Badminton seemed like a sport I'd enjoy playing and my now former classmate spoke very highly of it. I also had my father's old racket which he doesn't use anymore, so I had that going for me.

I made some calls and found out that no training sessions with people my age had space for me,but I was forwarded to a training group with some casual player from all ages. The oldest player there is around 60 years old and I am now the youngest. Most of them are 25-35 years old. I am a somewhat anxious person and joining such new groups can be difficult to me, but hopefully this is a friendly environment in which to face my people-fear. 

So now I play badminton there. I go to the training once, sometimes twice a week. I think that I'm doing pretty well, considering that I had not played badminton ever before. We play quite a lot of doubles games with random pairs and I am not the worst opponent and teammate. My pair does not always lose. I believe here my previous skills from football and table tennis, especially in foot movement can be surprisingly useful. However, one challenge is to forget some hand action learned in the table tennis lessons and learn more specifically the badminton racquet technique.

I have no other goals or ambitions with badminton than just to have some physical activity and enjoy the process. I have never really liked participating in tournaments and all kinds of competitions. I did not enjoy the football tournaments I participated in when I was younger that much and playing table tennis I after some time decided not to go to any more competitions. Too much stress, sweat, people trying weirdly hard all around me. So, with competitions not really being for me, my goal with badminton is just to continue doing it and hopefully also continue getting better at it.