We had them all – the capitals of the Baltic Sea: Rostock, Gdansk, Kaliningrad, Riga. And now? Narva-Jõesuu. Narva-what? Before our sailing tour started I have never heard of this town at the Estonian-Russian border - now it feels like my living room. Everything is so cosy here, so close. Our festival is beautiful located right at the little harbour, everything is just around the corner – from the deck of the sailing ship we can look right into our Info-Tent onshore.

Some little boys turn up – desperate to help us decorating the festival area. Bikers on oldtime motorcycles appear, driving in a circle, once, twice and disappearing again, children build tiny wooden ships with sails out of newspaper and give them a swim on the Narva river, the kinobuss vikings dress into rabbit and fox and run into town to do some promotion - of course Garen joins them with the orange fork (this fork…if you haven’t read this blog before: the fork is with us! All the time! It was made during a workshop at our very first festival in Rostock….since then the fork walked around the Old Town of Gdansk, it met many Russians at the hangouts in Kaliningrad, it turned into an installation in Riga at the historical storehouse and today joined the carneval in Narva-Jõesuu. I think it saw more of the Baltic Sea region than anybody else of us).

We arrived in Narva-Jõesuu very early, one day before the festival. At 5 o’clock in the morning I was behind the stearing wheel shipping into Narva Bay – pitschnass – the rain streaming down my face, freezing because of the cold cold wind. „Noooooooo!“ I thought, „please, we need good weather! Everything is planned open-air…“ I fell into my bunk, tired, discouraged….but just some hours later the clouds disappear, the sky lightens up. The following evening we are already screening the film-program on the sail of the ship – something I believed never to come true, being soaking wet arriving in Narva-Jõesuu.

Thank you, Mr. Weather God! And thank you Narva-Jõesuu for welcoming us so warmly and turning the festival into this familiar happening….just like a party in a big big living room.