Luckily, I have never been afraid of looking like an idiot.

I spent four weeks surrounded by boxes, drinking wine out of a cappuccino glass and struggling with mysteries like Where is the switch for the kitchen counter light? and How do I connect the dishwater to the water supply? The heating system is building-wide but no one seems to really understand it. You know those Star Trek episodes where everyone on a planet or ship is totally dependent on technology developed by someone who is long gone, and now no one knows how it works. That is what living in this building seems like, sometimes.

Many Estonians were concerned that, having barely learned Estonian over the past few years, now I would give up completely and learn Russian instead. The truth is, I have spoken more Estonian in Paldiski than I ever did in Tallinn. I start every conversation by asking if anyone speaks English or German and the answer is almost always the same: Estonian or Russian or get out of here, I don’t have time for you.

I feel like an imposter as an adult, living in an apartment which clearly is not the type of apartment that someone like me should live in, which you can tell by the toolbox in the middle of the floor and all the recycled jars on the windowsill with the labels only partially peeled off.

There’s a library in the lobby, one of the many small reasons that helped me to fall in love with the idea of moving to Paldiski. They have an international section which includes four German books and two shelves of English literature.

I approached the front desk with an Estonian book that I’d won in a photography contest, much like a cat might bring a mouse as a gift: not that it thinks you need a dead mouse, it just wants you to know that it cares. The librarian spoke very little English and encouraged me to speak Estonian instead. I stuttered a few broken words and she smiled. There was an Estonian language cafe every Friday afternoon, she told me, where they studied Estonia. She would see me there.

This did not appear to be open to negotiation.

The following Friday, I grabbed an old notebook and walked down to the library. There were half a dozen middle-aged women, all Russian speaking, ready to learn Estonian.

The other women, including the librarian, used Russian as a lingua franca. When it became clear that I wasn’t keeping up, the librarian decided she could get me back on track using Google Translate.

She pointed at a textbook and said teadus and I looked blankly back at her. She tapped into her phone and turned it towards me. It said Science is evil. I stared at her. She smiled at me.

I knew the word for book so I tried to clarify the situation. I pointed at the textbook, which seemed to be a rather dull introduction to geology, and said something along the lines of “the book is bad?”

Maybe the question mark didn’t come through so clearly. She blinked at me in silence for a moment, and then she went back to speaking to the other women.

I have since learned that teadus simply means science and there was no value judgement involved. I have no idea what she thought I was saying.

Every time I wrote in my old notebook, the page fell out, leaving me with a pile of unordered scribbles clustered like autumn leaves around a tree. After an hour of this, I began staring out the window, remembering the hours of being trapped in a classroom as a teenager. I had hoped never to relive those days.

The librarian smiled at me and asked a question. I had long since lost track of the conversation. I picked one of the many words that I did not understand and repeated it: Merevetikad. What does that mean?

The women all started speaking at once in a mixture of broken Estonian and Russian.

“It’s in the water.”

“It’s near the rocks.”

“It’s also in aquariums!”

I took a guess: “Is it seaweed?”

One of them nodded yes, that was the right word. The others smiled at my success.

“You eat it,” I said, in Estonian.

Everyone started speaking at once. “What?”

“No!”

“It’s not cabbage!”

Coral, maybe? “Australia,” I said, which got me more dubious looks. I tried to draw coral and they all nodded, yes, that was it. The page fell out of my notebook. I wrote CORAL on it.

“Ei,” said the librarian. “See on korallid.” No, that’s coral. Well, yes, quite. But apparently not merevetikad.

Another woman drew detailed rocks and then waving leaves between them. Surely, this had to be seaweed. Defeated, I got out my phone and pulled up a photograph on Wikipedia.

Everyone cheered, calling out “Da!” and Jah!” happily.

“Sushi,” I said, grumpily. “You eat it.”

The cheering stopped and they stared at me, confused. “Merevetikad,” they said.

But then something like a light bulb appeared over the face of one. “Oh! Sushi!” She switched to Russian, speaking rapidly, but I caught the words merevetikad and Japan and a glance at me, hopefully explaining to them that seaweed was, in fact edible. They decided that they’d spent enough time on me and the conversation moved on, not that I ever understood why they were talking about seaweed in the first place.

The following week, I discovered that the language cafe was advertised for a minimum of A2 Estonian, a level of language ability which I did not yet have. It seemed I might get out of this class after all.

I spoke to the librarian, explaining that I didn’t want to hold the class back.

She agreed with me that yes, my Estonian was terrible but that was why I needed to keep attending!

The next session, she focused on teaching me to introduce myself. “Hi. My name is Sylvia. I live in Paldiski. I am a mother; I have one daughter. I am a writer.” The other women introduced themselves similarly and we each talked about where we had come from: Paldiski, Kaliningrad, Ukraine, Russian, Tallinn and California.

After that, I was allowed to sit quietly and listen. The conversation got quite animated at one point and I caught the words music and Zanzibar and Bohemia and tried desperately to work out what they were talking about. If you can get from that to “Where is Freddie Mercury from?” then you are doing better than I did.

I skipped a week, locking myself into the apartment so that the librarian couldn’t catch me skipping the class. The library closed at seven, at which point I was safely able to leave the house. But the following Monday, she saw me dashing to the elevator and stopped me. “You are coming on Friday, yes?”

“Yes,” I said, “of course. I was just busy…”

She waved away my apology. “You are coming on Friday.”

I’m discovering a lot about myself in this new life. One is that librarians terrify me. The next time I skipped a class, I hid inside my apartment until the following Friday, just to be safe.