Hello, dear readers of the UT Blog!
It’s been a few days since we’ve made the first post about making a decision to stay here and finding sources that are good enough to keep you updated about the ongoing pandemy. We hope you liked the content! 🙂
Today, we’d really like to “demonstrate” how a day passes for us, especially when we have to stay indoors for a quite big portion of the day. Sounds boring, right? We don’t think so!
First of all, a big portion of our day is spent literally in front of the computer and sitting on our chairs. Wondering what we’re doing? It’s usually studying and completing tasks. All of us – students, teachers and UT staff – are going through disparate (not desperate!) situations right now, as we’re all trying to adapt to a completely new concept of online learning.
If you ask us how we’re coping with it, then we’re definitely still trying to figure out how to conduct practical things in a theoretical way. If your days are not as productive as you would like them to be – no worries! This is also a period where getting used to changes will take some time. Trust us, next week everything will be better and you’ll feel much more normal!
Probably the best practice we can make nowadays is to organize time! Although we’ve plenty of time to do many things, we saw that without planning, days become wasted. So, if you are not a fan of using a calendar, then this time is the perfect time to acquire the skill! Believe us, by starting every Monday with writing deadlines, courses to follow, and upcoming tests, the week becomes much clearer.
If you’re wondering which type of calendar we’re using for school, then I guess we’re still in the old-school paper-based calendar version. By adding mini daily tasks, we can see the whole picture of the week! But if you can manage with the calendar in your phone or your computer, then it’s also perfect (and probably much easier!)
Apart from these technical issues, let us talk about some other changes that this “life with less social interaction” brought us: our daily habits of shopping and ready-made food consumption! As we really like cooking and trying out new recipes, preparing food for at least 3 courses a day was not a climb to Everest for us. However, the planning process is still taking more time than our expectations, but this definitely pushes us hard to be more productive – so that’s still great.
Another mini trick that we use is to prepare a “common base” for one meal on weekdays, such as for lunch; we create a base – like a salad – that can be eaten for 4–5 days, and every day make minor changes to it, such as changing the sauce, adding meat or different constituents, etc. This gives us many advantages, as we both save time and do not get bored of eating the same thing throughout the week!
But here’s a mini DISCLAIMER: We are not sharing any kind of nutritional advice here. Please try to avoid eating just one way; a balanced diet and not forgetting about the vitamins will definitely make you feel more energetic – and your body needs them to function perfectly, especially these days! 🙂
As everyone has a right to reach food at any time, we’re definitely not hoarding food, so that other people who need it can get it. However, as the matter of “social isolation” is present, we try to do weekly shopping to reduce the amount of time spent outside shopping.
This week, we tried an interesting way – it’s called “click and collect”. With this method, you can select your desired food items – not only food, but practically anything which is available in the supermarket – and then the shopping work is done for you. Then, in the arranged time interval, you will be notified when your order is ready via SMS, and your shopping is done. Congratulations! You haven’t spent any time inside a supermarket to search for food, and stayed home as much as possible.
Finally, considering that every nice thing has a value proposition in life, this service also costs something – in our case, it was 2 euros. However, we definitely recommend it to those who don’t want to go inside shops or have to stay indoors as much as possible. Also, if you don’t feel like going to the market at all for pick-up, then you also have the “home delivery” option – but beware that the time allocation might not be free the next day. In our experience, some of the products we ordered were sold out, so they called us for notification – and you can make additional changes, too.
The best part of this was that it was a good Estonian practice in a real context, where we could use mitmused – Estonian plurals, different nouns, and sentence forms!
Thank you for joining us this week, too! If you have any comments and aspects you would like to hear next time, then please let us know through the comments!
Until then, stay safe and healthy…
All the best!
Ege & Efe
