City of Cents

The following interview is an excerpt from Eesti Ekspress, originally conducted in English by foreign correspondent Jaak Reisik-Unt:

Good newspaper friends, after many cooperations with our cooperation partners, the looking up of the true identity of blog-writer Mingus allowed to be revealed a contact. This contact agreed to meet with myself in the restaurant Restoran Ö here in the Estonian capital Tallinn. While I am waiting, I am certain of this restaurant being for exclusive people indeed. Already during ten minutes I see President of the Estonian Republic Toomas Hendrik Ilves sitting at a neighbor table with former Environment Minister Villu Reiljan. Now they are standing and shaking one another’s hands. Mr. President Toomas Hendrik Ilves waits while Mr. Reiljan disembarks the doors of the restaurant Restoran Ö. And I have just received a friendly look from the Estonian President. He approaches to myself.


President Toomas Hendrik Ilves: Mr. Reisik-Unt, pleasure to meet you.

R-U: The pleasure is all to me, Mr. President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. To what do I owe this pleasure?

Ilves: We had an appointment, didn’t we?

R-U: I have an appointment with a blog-writer who uses pen name Mingus.

Ilves: Shall we sit down then?

R-U: You are Mingus, Mr. Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves?

Ilves: I could not in good conscience allow myself to be considered otherwise.

R-U: This is certainly a shock and surprise! I am shocked and surprised. I was never having to guess it was you, Mr. President Ilves.

Ilves: I hid my true identity well then, it seems. Let’s sit down.

R-U: Yes, of course, certainly, sir. May I ask a question? Why you hide your real self?


Ilves: There were certain things that I believe needed desperately to be said, but you’ll understand that my position could prove quite precarious were I to openly speak of such things. And if I had been open about it, no one would have believed, for as Sean Connery said in The Untouchables, “Who would claim to be that who is not?”

R-U: Indeed. I have always been big fan of his poetry.

Ilves: He’s an actor, in a movie. James Bond?

R-U: Yes I know. He also is a poet.

Ilves: He is? I’ve never heard of that.

R-U: Well he is. And I am big fan. You haven’t read him?

Ilves: No, I can’t say I have.

R-U: That’s ok. You should read him. He’s very normal writer.

Ilves: If you say so.

R-U: Let us to start the interview then. What made you first want to write the blog Tartu – City of Good Thoughts? And why Tartu, not Tallinn? Do you hate Estonians? Why you so angry with my—sorry, “our”—small country Estonia?

Ilves: I think I can remember your questions, but remind me if I don’t. As I said, being a politician, especially the president, affords me little opportunity to speak openly of things that are not of a populist nature. And I like writing. But I was never very good at it. I guess that’s why I studied psychology and ended up working as a DJ for Radio Free Europe and then got into politics. So the two just sort of worked well together.

R-U: And Tartu? You live in Tallinn.

Ilves: That’s just my cover. If I said I lived in Kadriorg, people might suspect it was me. There aren’t many Americans living in Kadriorg.

R-U: But you have so much photographs from Tartu, and the place Karlova.

Ilves: Yeah a lot of them I just stole from the Internet if I didn’t have the right one in my computer. And no one checks piracy in Estonia. It’s safe here.

R-U: So the other photographs you took yourself? No one noticed you walking around?

Ilves: Yes, I took them myself. I used several costumes.

R-U: Really? What are some examples? What was your favorite? Did you dress up to look like Estonian sumo wrestler Baruto?

Ilves: Um, no. But I did wear contacts and regular pants and coat, and not my trademark bowtie and national clothes from Viljandi. Surprisingly, that was enough to go unnoticed.

R-U: I see. And your writing style. You are sometimes much funnier than I thought an Estonian president could be. But sometimes your style seem to fall. I want to say, sometimes your jokes are not funny. Any comment?

Ilves: Thanks for the compliment. But I think that my jokes are funny. If it’s not funny, then it wasn’t a joke. You see, I’m a novice writer. I’m trying to find my voice. I look at the first posts and they’re very different from the last posts. We’ve seen a lot of development, and if it continues at this rate I believe that every man, woman and child in Estonia will be able to understand my humor and what I’m trying to say. I must tread carefully and with caution, however. But if we work together, there is no reason I wouldn’t become the greatest writer ever.

R-U: But Mr. President, it’s just a blog. Do you—

Ilves: That’s Estonia’s problem. We limit ourselves too much with realism. We can’t dream. A lot of people dream of leaving, but these same people are the ones who give up, thinking “What’s the use of cleaning the streets if no one else will do it?” They’d just as easily prefer to live in Finland, where other people do clean the streets.

R-U: Is that Estonia’s problem then?

Ilves: Like every country, and especially small countries, we have a limit to our mentality. A big country, like the US, can have multiple views but they still have a common national character. Our country, as you know, is very small. We don’t have access to that kind of range of different views, so while we do have a national character, ours is from a smaller fundamental base.

R-U: I don’t understand…


Ilves: Most people here tend to think the same way because we’ve all had the same history. Not me, but my people. You don’t have to change the minds of hundreds of millions to make them agree with you. You just have to influence a few. Luckily for Estonian politicians, Estonians are more or less like-minded in their political beliefs simply because there are so few of us. We may not be able to agree on how to arrange voting precincts in our cities, but we all want to stay politically independent of our Eastern Neighbor. Speaking of that, why do we always say “Eastern Neighbor?” It’s pretty obvious we mean Russia. “Eastern Neighbor” sounds like something your poet Sean Connery would say.

R-U: Who?

Ilves: Um, right.

R-U: So you’re saying that due to our size we’re easy to control, to influence?

Ilves: To some extent yes, of course. But my point would be that while we all have common goals—we as in Estonians—there aren’t many of us, and we also have this nasty history of being occupied by all sorts of neighbors. This has created a certain mindset that we still suffer from today.

R-U: Suffer? I would think that we’re a young people and are just now starting to grow—

Ilves: No we are an ancient, proud people. We are a small part of the few who remain from a people once so numerous and widespread that we covered the majority of Europe and what is now modern Russia. We have had the unfortunate fate of occupying a wonderfully important piece of land.

R-U: Wonderful? It’s mostly swamp, and no real resources.

Ilves: That’s not true. We may not have mountains, gold or oil, but we have forests, a renewable resource so long as we take care of it properly. But our greatest resource is our people. The people need taking care of as well. If you don’t care for the forest, the trees will often be unusable. Diseased, too close together (meaning they can never reach full size and potential), and forests need to be diverse. If there are many species of tree and one species is diseased, the forest will still survive.

R-U: So this is to mean that you want immigrants here? Like Germany and Turkish peoples?

Ilves: No, no that’s not what I meant. We have diversification. All the peoples from the former Soviet Union are represented here, and a quarter of the population is non-Estonian. I mean Estonians themselves have to be diverse. Right now, we basically have people in the countryside, and city people. The city people are in turn divided into workers and upper class, the elite. There’s no real middle class. People either scrape by in life—even professors in universities—or they’re fantastically rich. Those who were smart enough and fortunate enough to be able to requisition state assets after reindependence in the early nineties. But these people are not true Estonians. Not my ideal of Estonians, I should say at least.

R-U: What this mean?

Ilves: They took what they could, putting it to good use, too. But they turned their backs on their fellow countrymen. Standard capitalism, but my ideal Estonian is one who pushes forward and pulls others along with him. These people just step on heads.

R-U: But these people—you mean wealthy businessmen—financed your political ascension.

Ilves: That’s just politics. Let’s not talk about that.

R-U: Heh-heh, okay. So what you propose doing to control this?

Ilves: I don’t know. I really don’t know. There are few lessons from history to instruct us here. But to continue with what I was saying, we’ve always been occupied by someone, never allowed to decide for ourselves. This is Russia’s problem too. We’re not so different really. Had we had Russia’s size, and the contemporary history, we would have invaded the rest of the world, too. And Russia has always had a strong central leader, for better or for worse. They’re not used to thinking for themselves politically. Those who do are repressed. It’s not quite the same here of course, but we don’t like being told what to do by people who just a few years ago were the exact same as everyone else. We’ve traditionally been a peasant, agrarian people. One peasant doesn’t like another telling him what to do. The way I see it is stubbornness is a tool. The only way you can really fight an oppressive, occupying power is to drag your feet, refuse to learn the new ways of the master. It is now time for our people to retire this tool. This stubbornness.

R-U: We Estonians are stubborn?

Ilves: Yes. That’s one thing I learned from growing up in the US. People listen to each other.

R-U: They didn’t communicate under Bush. Country was most divided in decades.

Ilves: True. But the Americans can often admit when they are wrong. Estonians cannot. They save that little embarrassment, the kind that everyone in the world has to endure from time to time. They hold on to it, letting it poison them, until the day comes when they can no longer work together. Little things, like not knowing who an actor is. To lose face in front of someone in Estonia is to also lose respect for that person. You’re embarrassed, so now you hate me. And fear of this happening causes a silence, an inability to communicate.

R-U: …

Ilves: Do you have a response?

R-U: I think you’re wrong.

Ilves: That’s all?

R-U: Yes. So in one sentence, how would you describe Estonians?


Ilves: Let me think for a moment. I guess—I guess I’d have to say that we are a people who are strong in resisting the ideals of others—and this is both wonderful and horrible—but I think the Estonian man’s greatest enemy is not the Russian man, it is the Estonian man. We fear one another, we have low self-esteems (this is very important in psychology, I think) and this is a root of a whole host of problems without which we would be one of the strongest nations in the world. Kennedy said it best when he said something about fearing fear.

R-U: Roosevelt you mean?

Ilves: Which one?

R-U: Franklin.

Ilves: No, it was Kennedy.

R-U: I see. And after a year of writing your blog—it is one year, correct?

Ilves: Yes, one year today in fact.

R-U: After one year, have you seen changes in anything you’ve written about?

Ilves: Actually yes, a few areas. More parts of the city use granite for the winter ice on roads instead of that kitty litter stuff. And a lot of businesses are more polite. Probably just due to greater competition with the current economic climate and young people especially being exposed to more of the rest of the world. But still—it’s progress.

R-U: So what your plans are now that you have come out of so-called writer’s closet?

Ilves: Funny way of saying it, and funny that you asked. May I use this interview as my next post?

R-U: Yes.

Ilves: Then this interview is my one hundredth and final post. One hundred posts, one year. Twelve months. Or as we say in Estonian, kaksteist kuud. It’s time to retire Tartu – City of Good Thoughts.

R-U: You’re ending your blog?

Ilves: [Laughing hysterically] Yes.

R-U: What is funny? Please tell me. I want to laugh too.

Ilves: Nothing.

R-U: Do you have any future plans?

Ilves: I’m the President of the Republic of Estonia.

R-U: What you mean?

Ilves: No.

R-U: Um, I meant with writing.

Ilves: Oh that. Yes—restaurant reviews!

R-U: Restaurant reviews?

Ilves: Yep. Every time you dine out is an experience. Food, drink, people. The reviews will really be short stories. True stories, and there will be honest reviews, but it will be a reality-based collection of short stories.

R-U: Can you as President eat out in public and not draw too much attention? Can you afford it?

Ilves: I have disguises, you forget. And I can afford it because I’m a politician.

R-U: Well, Mr. President of the Estonian Republic Toomas Hendrik Ilves, I thank you very much for your time. You are very normal person.

Ilves: Yes, thank you too. And to my readers: See you very soon in a restaurant near you. Thank you for your support! [Whispering] Hey Jaak, can I bum a smoke?

R-U: Yes, of course.

Ilves: Thanks man.

R-U: But you can’t smoke in here. You must to go out.

Ilves: Sure I can. I’m the President.

City of Karlova

In the past I’ve noted how there are simply too many festivals and theme days for the small city of Tartu to accommodate, how they often overlap. A tuba festival islanded among the hip-hop venues of an international extreme sports exhibition. Tartu definitely likes to toot its own horn, and that makes good marketing sense. A lot of the city’s quarters have followed suit, most notably Supilinn (Soup Town). These people have more pride in their part of Tartu than anyone else.

And Karlova. A poor working class region with charm and potential enough to become Estonia’s Magic Kingdom. After Tallinn’s Old Town of course. Every once in a while I get a pamphlet in the mail, announcing a town meeting. I never go because I know what these things are like. Fantastic (and horrible) ideas that don’t stand a chance in Narva of ever being carried out. But the dreams are there, and little by little solid foundations and more asphalt are being laid so they can come true.

Karlova is filled with wooden buildings and even a manor, some dating back a couple centuries and others dating back to last year. It’s cramped in areas but it’s green too. There is a specific type of tree that grows everywhere that people love to pick on. Every couple years they cut off all the branches, leaving them looking like dried up Joshua trees in the desert. Apart from the maple alleys and chestnut alleys and these wannabe bonsai alleys, that’s about where the green stops.

Almost every building is heated by wood, and sometimes you see decorative firewalls between the buildings. Every flat and house has at least one car that they park on the street instead of their driveways or backyards. But the people here are no-nonsense. They don’t subscribe to the green pipe dreams a lot of the rest of Estonia’s “Bohemian” people do, such as the romanticism of giving birth in your own home, skipping vaccinations and driving hybrids whose electric supplement produces more oil shale pollution than a regular gas engine that burns eighty-seven octane. Karlova keeps it real.

Here you have the people who drive old Beamers and Audis as well as university professors, sharing flats in the same building. There’s just not as much pretense.

They’re slowly improving Karlova Days, a neighborhood block party that quite honestly has proved quite pathetic. At least it’s in a park now instead of on a street. The Fire Department (locally called the Rescue Service) even participated in last year’s hoedown. But the sentiment is there, even if the neighborhood open-air theater that was in some guy’s backyard is not anymore.

There even used to be a pharmacy. Closed. Tons of local shops. Closed. Now suddenly there are two new cafés (one is opening soon), two new playgrounds and even a B&B. Signs of life stirring in the sea of Soviet ruination, akin to the first amino acids sprouting flagella. Karlova is the vintage clothing capital of Estonia, and somehow the local shoesmith has managed to stay in business, as well as a handful of handicraft shops. The art school now offers a bachelor’s degree, and there’s a business that deals in weddings and funerals. Loyal customers will only visit that place once though.

What do I see for Karlova’s future? In twenty years, the place will either look exactly the same, or they will restore a lot of the cobblestone streets and open the ground-floor boutiques to pubs and bakeries. It’s not the nicest place to live, but it is aesthetically more pleasing than potato fields of drywall suburbia. People just have to choose what they want.

City of Jobs

There are various ways of choosing someone for a vacant job. The traditional résumé, a job ad in the paper, word of mouth—these are just some possibilities for bringing boss and worker closer for a potential marriage of employment. From all the applicants, the best will be chosen. Some countries, like the States, go so far as to require that a quota be met based on racial backgrounds. And that’s a great idea from a certain point of view—it forces certain prejudices to be overcome lest you face the wrath of the Feds. For all the differences of opinion—ahem!—between Estonians and Russians, that doesn’t really seem to be much of a problem here.

But how can you guarantee that job hiring is fair? Sure, if you can count to ten and you have your cashier’s diploma, you can easily find work scanning groceries. You don’t even have to put the stuff in a bag because the customer is happy to buy his own and do it himself. But what about higher jobs for hire?

Companies typically have no problem with this. They pay their bosses well, and they can choose whomever they want because they’re not publicly owned. Of course there are still problems in every country in the world regarding gender equality at the workplace—fair pay, for example—and Estonia is no exception. My question, however, is the following: can a government-funded organization select a candidate based on friendship? Could the University of Tartu or the Baltic Defence College choose a new department head or director without fairly considering all the options? Technically, no. In practice, yes.

I have first-hand accounts of this having happened several times. A foreign friend—not a “non-Estonian” (Russian) but an authentic foreigner, as in he’s from a different country—applied for a high-level position in a government organization. He was more than qualified, had the appropriate doctorate and so on, but he didn’t get the job. The position itself was rescinded once all the potential applicants had made themselves known. When the position was later advertised again, of course it had been made so specific that only one (surprise!) applicant was suitable. An Estonian of course, friend to many on the panel making the choice. And it was not a surprise that he was less qualified. Just to point out one thing: this government organization is internationally funded.

Another foreign friend was invited to an interview, but he had to pay his own airfare. After the interview he discovered that a choice had already been made, and it wasn’t him.

This is a common problem throughout the country. Public procurements, and especially in the construction sector, are routinely fixed. There is very little transparency. And if someone has been hired legally, they are quite often made to feel less than welcome.

Not uncommon is the practice of making a legally hired employee—a professor or lecturer, for example—so uncomfortable that they resign of their own volition. They just want to get the hell out of here. The same school will publicly say that they want as diverse a staff as possible. One conversation between high-level faculty at a prominent Estonian university, on the subject of putting up multilingual signs for foreign staff and students, goes as follows: “We have niggers climbing all over the place here.” —Yes, we should label the restrooms with chickens and roosters, as they play very important places in black people’s lives.

There was unquestionably a level of sarcasm in this statement, but the sheer fact it was said merits note. Racism and xenophobia are not the issue. Respect and fairness are. If Estonia wants to be part of the world—you know, things like the European Union and NATO—people will have to start playing by the rules. It’s subtle. On paper everything is according to the book, and even in conversation you can’t really find a way to complain about what goes on. But it’s still there, and needs to be addressed.

City of Beer

Just a few thoughts from this past week. Father Mingus visited for an extended weekend, and I was reminded of how small the world really is. Ten time zones away, Father Mingus and Mrs. Mingus’s father both work for the same small company. Father Mingus is from a place called Racine, and Mrs. Mingus’s father is from a place called Rasina. Our mothers have the same birthday, our maternal grandmothers both met unfortunate ends, and our paternal grandmothers died in their mid-nineties (the other grandparents on both sides passed on when we were young children). There are several other smaller coincidences, such as similar first names in the family trees and the fact that as children, we both grew up with our backyards opening to Central Street (Kesk tänav, in Estonian).

Thanks to professional connections, we got a behind-the-scenes tour of the Tartu Brewery, home of A.le Coq beer. In a very old building, the brewery itself is fully modernized and highly automated. Century-old masonry coupled with state-of-the-art technology, it reminded me of what I liked about Europe and Estonia. And the smell. Even the bottle-recycling areas made me want to drink beer. Not A.le Coq though—and definitely not Saku—but beer just the same. After more than a decade of Aleksander, Premium and Special, I’ve decided that for all Estonia’s brewing talent, they all kind of taste the same. Saku is different, however, in that it has a certain lakewater taste. So last night, St. Patrick’s Day, I found myself drinking a rum and Coke. Like most Americans I have a drop of Irish in me, and I’m sure there was a Caribbean island settled by the people who gave the American accent its annoying “r.”

Incidentally, Tartu’s Irish bar—Wilde—has gone bankrupt. The Irish owner has already skipped town, leaving the rent and staff unpaid for a number of months now. This is not the first time an Irish businessman has done this in Tartu.

Anyhow, Father Mingus has the trained eyes of an accomplished engineer and conservative. While he loves visiting his family, I get the distinct impression he would not enjoy living here. One reason I think this is because of the building we live in. We have a nice flat, but the common areas need tons of work. When we bought the place nine years ago, we were assured by the owners themselves that the apartment association was active and had plans to remodel, well, everything. Plumbing, heating system, stairwell, electricity and façade, to name a few. Almost a decade later and the plaster over the back door on the inside is still held up with a piece of tape, and the leaking gutters are destroying the foundational walls.

We have a typical cross-section of Estonians in this building too. Three doctors (two of whom smoke), a family with six adult children (only one still lives here), a widowed pensioner and some students who rent. Six flats in the building, and every single family has at least one daughter married to a foreigner and living abroad. That says something.

Yet every time we have a meeting, everyone bitches and moans about how badly we need to fix the place up. I usually suggest we start with one thing, but of course there are other more urgent repairs to be made. So I suggest we do those, but then there are other more urgent repairs to be made. I tried taking the initiative one time and replaced the broken front door lock with a code lock, so we don’t have to go down flights of stairs every time a visitor arrives. Now they complain about not being able to figure out how to push buttons and turn the knob. No wonder we didn’t sell our flat, and frankly I would have good reason to sue the apartment association for directly damaging the value of our property. But I’m no cowboy, and like everyone else, I’m too busy doing whatever it is I do to mess around with things like infrastructure.

It’s funny how buildings like ours survived three waves of invasion in Dubya Dubya Two and half a century of poverty-stricken occupation, but now that Estonia is free and able to heal itself, these buildings are just now starting to crumble and no one does anything about it.

So while the world may be small, people’s minds are even smaller. It takes a continuous, conscious effort to consider people other than yourself. Father Mingus and I see things very differently, like most fathers and sons—he sees a world of numbers and I see a world of people—but we both take initiative. His is a hammer and wrench and mine is a pen (or rather keyboard). Either way, we both try to make things better. Imagine what we could accomplish if we tried to work together. Imagine what the Estonians could accomplish if they tried to work together. After a hard day’s work, we would all have good reason to enjoy a beer in each other’s company.

City of Tickets

Last night the new Cinamon movie complex had a special deal on all tickets—thirty kroons. So we went to see a flick called Defiance, starring James Bond as a partisan Jew in Dubya Dubya II. Good, compelling story, yet Hollywood’s marketing requirements made it a somewhat more realistic version of Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood. The state of the Tasku mall however, where Cinamon is, shows what happens when the rich try to steal from the poor. You go out of business.

On our Stateside trip last fall, I was shocked at how many malls were operating at only thirty percent or less. Most of the shops in a lot of them were empty. I think soon the same may be the case in Estonia, except that most of the local malls all have the same five shops. But Tasku is different in that it is an upscale mall. They have a United Colors of Benetton, after all.

Had. It’s closing. I mean, it’s still open, having a clearance sale of seventy percent off everything, and it’s sad because it’s the only shop in Tartu that sells maternity clothing. And they’re selling everything, as you can see in the photograph, regardless of age. But it’s not the only shop in trouble. Rumor has it the Rehepapp buffet thingy is closing too. Perhaps because it’s overpriced, overstaffed and serves sub-standard quality food. And the three restaurants by the movies are closing too. The Italian bistro, the sushi bar, and the other unidentified and unadvertised place. They’re all the same restaurant really, separated into different sections. The bar was offering half off on all cocktails. Too bad for us the bar was already void of selection. This is the same place where I ordered a calzone and saw the chef blow on it to put out the flames from leaving it in the oven too long. Maybe there’s a reason it’s closing.

Or maybe it’s just too expensive for what it is. This whole economic crisis is a wake-up call for Estonian business. You just can’t charge Scandinavian prices when people still have Russian salaries.

The funny thing about going to the movies in Estonia is assigned seating. Like busses. It’s not first-come-first-serve. They really act like you’re flying in an airplane, but even the airport generally won’t let you choose your seat (much less make you). Last night I tried to buy four seats together, but there were no sections that large available when I got around to it. So I tried to buy two pairs of seats in front of each other. I did it on line. The software wouldn’t let me leave an empty seat between our group and the strangers who were before us. I tried in person to change to the seats I wanted, but the zombie at the ticket desk wouldn’t let me either. I guess I can understand not wanting to leave empty, useless seats in case someone else wants to sit next to us, but there was just one seat left anyhow. A glitch in the system, but Estonians don’t budge when it comes to following the rules.

What I really like about Estonia though is how progressive it is in embracing new technologies. I bought my tickets on line, with the possibility to print out the tickets, but I chose to have the tickets texted to my cell. I just showed them the message and in we went. But, I couldn’t remember the seats, and the e-ticket didn’t show that info either. The ticket-takers were unable to help. But the empty seat next to us was in fact sold. The older woman sitting in it had sprinkled powdered cheese on her popcorn and it smelled like vomit.

An extreme story of assigned movie seating: while coming to Estonia last decade, I spent a week in London. Tired of touristy stuff, I went to the cinema. I was the only person for the showing (Estonians call it a séance, like they're talking to the zombies on screen), and I was assigned a seat without the freedom to choose. An employee walked me to my seat. The seat was broken, so I moved to the next one. The same employee had been watching, and instructed me to remain in my assigned seat, despite the lack of anyone else there. So it’s not just the Estonians.

I’ve had and heard several similar experiences on intercity busses in Estonia. I’m given an arbitrary seat, but someone’s in it so I just randomly choose another. That seat’s ticket-holder later comes and demands that I sit in my proper place, so I move. I’m not a dickhead, so I don’t ask the guy in my seat to move because frankly I don’t care. But my new seat’s ticket-holder comes now as well and kicks me out. So eventually I’m forced to get the guy out of my seat—who refuses because he’s a dickhead—and I’m left no alternative but to get the bus driver involved, as there are no longer any free seats.

This reminds me of going to an American restaurant. The hostess will usually allow herself to be visibly nonplussed if you don’t like the table in the corner she’s chosen for you, even though the window seats are all vacant. That’s why I always insist on seeing the hotel room before paying.

City of Books

New plans were recently announced for an extension of the public library in Tartu. Anything to do with expanding and upgrading a library can only be good. And from my experience, the more modern and high-tech a library is—meaning glass façades and computers—the better. Reading needs to be made attractive, especially as Tartu has more casinos than libraries and book shops combined. And the city has come up with what I believe is a Good Thought. They want to more than triple the size of the current decrepit building in the Old Town. Apart from the mammoth expenses normally associated with such an undertaking, the only real sacrifice will be a parking lot.

The problem is that it’s a brand new parking lot, on Vabaduse (Freedom) Boulevard. I don’t know how much money was poured into this thing, but it must have been a fairly hefty sum. Honestly, it’s the nicest parking lot I’ve ever seen. Cobblestoned, decorative boulders dotting the perimeter, surrounded by trees. It replaced a tiny worn-out and unused field of grass with a dirt path and a narrow road used as a de facto parking lot.

Maybe I’m just one voice of a few, but I believe the Old Town should be for buildings and parks, not cars and car parks. Close off the whole place to public traffic, bar a couple arteries. Street after street is being cobbled, and it truly looks beautiful. The only down side is that several of these new promenades are still open to traffic, yet now there is no curb separating machine from man. The cars are parking up against buildings. It’s not chaos or anything close, though it is perhaps poorly thought out. But for heaven’s sake, if you’re going to spend millions in tax money on a parking lot, you’d better be damned sure you’re not just going to tear it up a couple years later, like they do with every new road in the city. This is strong evidence that the City Government has no clue what its hands are doing.

Can a compromise be reached? Of course. It’s called an underground parking garage. The current design doesn’t have one. In fact, if the city wanted to do it right, they could easily double the size of the parking lot and get the library too. Another recent announcement was the demolition of the old Kaubamaja shopping center, being replaced with a new, large building complete with underground spaces for nine hundred Hummers. That’s great! It’s a local company doing it, not the government.

One commenter on the article announcing the library plans described Tartu as a toothless smile, because of all the empty spaces. He is right. But one by one, as the cash becomes available, the city’s getting dentures. The Vanemuine Theater is going to expand over a useless grassy knoll. For decades, what is now the Hotell London (two l’s) was an empty, bombed out shell. Across the street is still an empty, bombed out plot of land, called Karuplats, because there used to be a statue of a bear, but no more. There’s a lone kiosk at one edge, and a used book shop and fenced-in parking lot at the other. It’s across the street from the library, too. Why not build on that?

One person is directly responsible for this: the mayor, Urmas Kruuse. Past mayors of Tartu are Andrus Ansip, now the Prime Minister; Laine Jänes, now the Minister of Culture; and Tõnis Lukas (Kalevipoeg), now the Minister of Education and Research. Tartu needs a real mayor, someone who loves and serves the city instead of their own purposes. Tartu’s mayorship should not be a stepping stone for higher planes of partisanship. Is this library extension in its current form really necessary, or is it an election erection?

Of course, if the City can get a refund for what it wasted on the parking lot, I’ll be happy. Because I as a tax-payer paid for it.

City of Apples

Sometimes you hear a story so horrible that it chills you to the bone. Other times you hear several of these stories in the same week, or even the same day, and it just makes you sick. In this rant against Estonian medicine, I’ll start off on a personal note.

Our youngest kid has the chicken pox. She also caught a secondary infection. This is a little too much for a child of a year and a half, and last Sunday morning before seven, she started vomiting profusely. All the literature says to call a doctor immediately in this case, so Mrs. Mingus rushed to the kids’ hospital. She took our own thermometer, as the poor girl had a fever over forty (a hundred and four Fahrenheit), but the doctor used the hospital’s own, which showed only a low-grade fever. She wanted to send them home. Mrs. Mingus of course said that she could feel a high fever from her forehead, something higher than the thirty-seven point five the nurse read, but the doctor insisted she was right, that they used that thermometer for everyone. After repeated demands to try another one, the forty-plus fever was confirmed. The doctor hadn’t been using the thermometer properly.

A couple hours later the on-call doctor finally came back and wanted to send her home, visibly angry that a child with such a contagious disease had been brought to her hospital. “She’s got the chicken pox—what do you want from me?” is the general message she gave. Reluctantly, the doctor opened up the blood lab—closed on the weekend—and did her job. An infection. Finally the doctor started paying attention, and my little girl got antibiotics. She’s fine now, but the doctor did in fact knowingly give the wrong prescription, meant for another child with a similar condition, and when Mrs. Mingus called later asking if the violent “open belly” that resulted from the wrong prescription was in fact nothing to worry about, the doctor elicited a passive “sure.” Our pediatrician strongly disagreed thankfully, and we got a new drug.

On weekends, the hospital has a doctoral staff of one. One doctor for the whole hospital. They seem to think that no one gets sick on weekends, because even germs and accidents have hangovers on Saturday. You could call it a lack of funding, but I call it idiocy.

I should also mention that the nurse initially asked if they could come back in a couple hours. Her shift was ending at eight.

On another occasion, Mrs. Mingus complained to her doctor that her toe was numb. The doctor refused to refer her to someone who knew something about medicine, saying instead she needed new shoes. Later, footing her own bill, she went to a specialist in a private clinic. Tests revealed she had a slipped disc, something that if left untreated in her case, could render her immobile for life.

And this one is highly typical of Estonian medicine—a man had a severe earache and went to the ear clinic. They said they needed a referral from his doctor, who didn’t have hours until that evening. So he went to the emergency room. They gave him a referral and sent him back to the ear clinic, which still insisted on his general practitioner’s referral. That evening he got it, and late at night he was finally admitted in the ear clinic, needlessly suffering a full day of excruciating pain. He only had to go to a doctor five times so someone could stick a light in his ear.

Today in the paper I read how an elderly woman had her leg amputated. She was then wheeled into her home, heated with a wood stove, and left to rot. Literally. Social Services did check up on her once, and they’re quoted as saying, “She won’t last long like this.” Social Services did nothing, and she didn’t last long. A Good Samaritan neighbor made a call, and the old woman was found frozen, starved and dead from thirst in a puddle of her own urine.

Why wasn’t she in the hospital? Why wasn’t she in a nursing home? You can’t cut corners when you cut off someone’s leg. I understand that nurses don’t make much money here, but this goes way, way beyond financial motivation. This is a complete lack of humanity, and nothing less. It’s murder. For some reason, Estonian medicine adheres to the principle that if you don’t pay attention to it, then it will just go away.

Some would say that these stories are the result of a few bad apples. There may be some good apples too, but old Granny Smith with one leg—and you and I—grew from the same tree. Something’s rotten, and sometimes it really stinks. How can we let this happen?