Estonian University of Life Sciences

You are probably eagerly awaiting the new blogs, because it has been a while.
So without further ado, here is Sami Sahin's report of our visit to the Estonian University of Life Sciences in Tartu.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome on board. This is your captain speaking.. Today is May 15^th, we are already on the 10^th day of our PhD trip. Having had a nice sleep in a hostel in the small cute Estonian town, Tartu, we left for the visit to Estonian University of Life Sciences. I should say that for a nice sleep you do not need a nice hostel, you only need to be ‘nicely exhausted’.

On our way, as it has been repeating for the last four days, Ekaraj was offering his Finnish cookies to everyone at the expense of getting the same response “No, again come on Ekaraj, you...”. I think he will never give up until he finishes his to-be famous (or already famous) Finnish cookies and most probably he will end up offering them to people during the first coffee break in Wageningen, but I will make sure that I won’t be there at least.. After a short bus drive, we arrived in the Estonian University of Life Sciences where we were hosted by the department of Food Science and Technology. After the welcome speech of hosting Professor Väino Poikalainen, two other staff members gave an introduction talk about the Estonian University of Life Sciences. Then it was Remko’s turn to introduce Wageningen University and our group. After Remko’s talk there was some time for conversation before the coffee break, which raised some common interest for collaboration, especially for the preparation of some teaching materials. Then we had our coffee break with some typical Estonian pastries. After the coffee break, Kasia, Jacqueline, Nirmal and Ekaraj presented their works. Among all the speakers, including the professors, Ekaraj (today’s hero) was the only one who drew applause twice. When he was just on the stage, he was bombarded with camera flashes and kept his positive energy and smiling posture all the way through his presentation, which brought him an extra applause at the end. After Ekaraj’s presentation, Marta gave the presents of our hosts that we brought from Netherlands and we had a tour in their ‘micro dairy factory’ where they have bench scale facilities for product development and analytical instruments quality tests. At the end of the lab tour Remko used his artistic skills to give one more wise lesson “three glass of a day..”

After the laboratory tour, we had our lunch and we were ready for a five-hour bus drive to our next destination, Riga. As I was the first one to be captured while sleeping in the bus in one of the very early days of our trip, I started a research from that onwards on the tendency of people to fall asleep. The results showed that number of people falling asleep increases exponentially with the number of days passed during the trip and today I was one of those few people who did not join the great sleeping orchestra.

Some of the 'musicians' of the Sleeping Orchestra

At about 7pm, we arrived in our hostel in Riga. Having put our stuff in the hostel we went out for dinner and had a city tour guided by one of our host professors from Latvian University of Agriculture, Ruta Galoburda who made it a great tour for us by telling all the legends and stories about the history of Riga. At the end of the tour which was about 10pm, we went back to hostel and enjoyed the showers. This was about a nice sunny spring day that started in a beautiful Baltic country and ended up in another one. Well, ‘Tot ziens’ and please keep following us.. Hope to meet you again in another day...