Christmas in Estonia was like Christmas at home, but with more snow, pickles, fat and vodka. Christmas dinner was on Christmas Eve, which I spent with Millerine's family and their Australian Cattledog, Repsu. They drank and chatted to each other in Estonian, while I drank and chatted to the dog in my own native tongue, ocker Aussie. On Christmas day we took the dog for a walk and threw about a frisbee in the snow. No backyard cricket or beach action, sadly.

It was -13 degrees celsius when I woke up this morning. I just returned from trying my new ice skates on a pond about 200m from the house. There are people on the harbour drilling small holes in the ice and fishing, which is very cool.

Tomorrow I head to Barcelona to meet up with my younger brother and sister for New Years.

I have a job. It's not very interesting. At least not yet. I'm doing some kind of partially IT stuff at the Tallinn office of a Swedish online poker company called 24hPoker.com. By far the most interesting part of the job was the first couple of days, where they flew me to a conference in Helsinki. It was all expenses paid and they put me up in a 5 star hotel. So work for me was attending a short conference, playing a poker tournament at the casino, eating very well, and having the bosses get all the employees very drunk. Much fun. It turns out that I'm not a fantastic poker player. Good for me.

The second night was a typical Helsinki evening out on the town. Awesome. After hanging out with the Swedes I accompanied some locals to a bar called Kaarle. A fantastic place, absolutely packed full of happy drunk Finns singing along to local music. One of those places where everyone is your best friend, even if you don't buy them a drink. I did see some evidence of the social problems afflicting Finland though. The bars close at 4am, and it's very difficult to find food after 5am. And I'll stick to the theory that Finnish girls are a little on the weird side. Entertaining though.

It's been good to hear from many of you. 'Tis always good to get an update on your far away lives.

Wally