Tartu - City of Good Thoughts

City of Cents

2009-03-23T00:57:00.018+02:00

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

2009-03-20T10:05:00.007+02:00

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

2009-03-19T09:45:00.007+02:00

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

2009-03-18T13:11:00.005+02:00

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

2009-03-12T10:23:00.006+02:00

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

2009-03-09T12:39:00.006+02:00

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

2009-03-06T11:07:00.006+02:00

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?

City of Gems

2009-03-04T08:39:00.020+02:00

There’s a difference between the shade of a building and the shade of a tree. You will feel it in the forest. One reason why Tartu is so refreshing is there’s a combination of both, even downtown. There aren’t many cities in Estonia or indeed the world that have hilly landscapes underneath a lot of the districts, and forests to match. Last weekend we had a thick blanket of snow and no wind, resulting in wintery shadows from the half a foot of snow on every branch, roof, fence and gutter. I went out yesterday to photograph some of my favorite gems of the city, and although the effect wasn’t the same as when the snow was fresh, I’d still like to share them. And my thoughts of course.

Setting off on just one particular walking route from Karlova, there’s a staircase behind the old manor house with a view of portions of the city. Not to sound artsy fartsy, but you really do get a sense of entering something when descending here.

A bit later when entering the Old Town area, you see another staircase leading up to the university’s library. Tastefully restored. Soon there will be buildings on both sides. I expect it will create a hidden escape route.

After crossing the Old Town, one of the city’s coziest niches is Lepiku Street, at the edge of Supilinn (Soup Town). You can see up the slopes of Toomemägi (Dome Hill), over people’s backyards. Lepiku is interesting because it looks like a driveway, then has a couple twists and turns, opening to a normal street with beautiful architecture, some of it restored too.

Admittedly, it’s a nicer walk in winter because sometimes the city government likes to leave downtown streets unpaved. In summer, Lepiku looks like there are regular tractor rallies held.

The far end of Lepiku. It’s possible to continue past the edge of the road, through the various no-man’s lands that dot Supilinn.

It’s a fantastic district really, and the residents are thoroughly proud, if underfunded. I personally wouldn’t want to live here, as the houses are simply a bit cramped together for my tastes, but it’s a highly enjoyable walk.

Next is the comfiest street in Tartu. It’s changing in that it used to be peppered with shops that have been replaced by supermarkets in the area, but it’s largely restored now too. There’s even a dental office at the top of the hill. Across the street is a house whose second floor was rented out for supposedly forty thousand kroons, or around three thousand dollars, a decade ago. An Irish guy lived there. Rumor has it he stole a bunch of money from businesses and fled.

Here you can see a school and a frat house overlooking a back yard. Years ago while crossing this plot after a concert in the Botanical Garden, we passed by an old sheet metal garage that was seemingly on fire, there was so much thick smoke coming out. Turned out there was no fire. All the smoke was pot.

Coming back along the river, there’s a modern glass block of flats. I wouldn’t mind having that view, and the locale is certainly worth some cash. The down side is, there’s a largish grocery store on the first floor. “Where do you live?” –Over Kroger.

Closer to Town Hall Square is a pair of swing benches by the water. Reasonably quiet and private, it’s a good place to read, rock a baby to sleep while sipping a coffee or share a beer in the evening with friends. One year during the Hansa Days festival, I remember there was a line of foreign tourists waiting to sit for a few minutes here. I suspected someone was selling tickets, but no—they just really wanted to sit here.

Here’s a good place to feed the ducks.

And here’s a better one. From along this stretch of the river, up to the bridge, are probably the best views of the city, in that you see the old market and the new glass structures combined. It’s just behind the open-air market.

The market is a lot of fun to visit. Organic produce in summer, some haggling, various languages and accents, and in the corner is usually a child selling some puppies or kittens. In winter they mostly just have everything indoors, and what’s still outdoors is a market for discount clothing. It was a cold day for this walk, but between the racks of fur coats and coat hangers with breasts, I almost wanted candlelight.

Finally on the way back home to Karlova, I pass by the now infamous Snail Tower, home to a couple people, another dental office and a thrift store. Our painter worked in the flat that was sold here, and said it was horrible. Cramped rooms and the round walls made it impossible to furnish. Here you can see another no-man’s land between the water park and the tower. Eventually, this prime piece of land will be a large, expensive (and much needed!) educational facility, something akin to an interactive museum. Maybe that’s where the Staircase to Nowhere will lead.

None of these places are on the tourist maps. They give a true sense of the many shades of the city my family and I live in. I’m glad we’re here, and I’m glad I have the courage to say what I feel.

City of Oil

2009-02-27T17:36:00.005+02:00

Paldiski is a small industrial town west of Tallinn. Just over four thousand people, it’s home to a former Soviet submarine base with a couple nuclear reactors and a big oil company called Alexela. Alexela basically imports various petrol products and then sends them on to other countries, with a bit of processing as well. It’s big, big money. It’s oil.

The largest Estonian owners are Heiti Hääl and Tiina Mõis, the former Hansabank owner. What Alexela specifically imports is left-over petroleum products from the West that can no longer be used as fuel in developed countries (this includes Estonia). So they add tap water and up the octane level a bit and send it off to Africa—where the standards are a bit lower—and these unusable waste products are used as car fuel. It must be great for the environment. They jokingly call it African Blend.

But I won’t dwell on the environmental issue here. I’m gonna’ talk about corruption again. There are toxic fumes released on a regular basis from Heiti Hääl’s terminal in Paldiski. Now surely there are governmental fines and such to take care of these little slips of morality, right? Of course there are. This is Estonia, land of the just. Just me me me.

If the level of “ambient air pollution” is exceeded, the Environmental Inspectorate has the right to fine Alexela. And fine them they do, pretty often too. And I suspect that Alexela wants to be fined, because they will gladly pay the pittance of a penalty to demonstrate their adherence to the law. One such infraction was releasing more than fifteen times the lawful limit of pollution into the residential area of Paldiski. Heiti’s minions were fined twenty-five thousand kroons, close to the maximum allowed. Now, what causes this is that when pumping fuel from the terminal onto a ship, the faster they do it, the less money they have to pay for the use of the tanker. Meaning that a process that should by law take two weeks takes instead two days. The faster it’s pumped, the more fumes escape. Mr. Hääl saves millions and doesn’t try to save his voice in announcing that he lawfully paid the fine.

You should also know that the Estonian government gets about three percent of all the money made from this substandard gas. It also doesn’t take a certified genius to read between the lines and answer the question—why doesn’t the government up the fines? Make ‘em hurt? Probably because people in the government get their three percent as well, right? The government also turns a blind eye—meaning pocket-change fines—to the fact that Alexela processes several highly toxic and explosive substances that they don’t even have a license for.

Heiti was quoted once as saying that he gets blamed for any bad smell in Paldiski. If they patch up pot-holes on the road, there’s a complaint. He’s also quoted as saying “Shit happens” in response to a question about a petroleum facility he owns in Sløvåg, Norway that exploded and poisoned the entire town’s population. A water sample was taken and analyzed. When opened in the lab, the entire building had to be evacuated.

Not surprisingly, investigators have attempted to collect statistics from doctors in the Paldiski area regarding pollution-related illnesses. There have been no responses. The doctors aren’t talking. We can rest assured that their salaries are not high enough to hide the truth. They’ve had a shady visitor or two to explain how things are.

Oil and business are ugly the world over. And government. Let’s not forget that one. It would take a lot more than the population of Paldiski proper to really change anything. It would take the whole country, which is small. But if it’s not happening to them, they don’t care.

City of Anonymity

2009-02-25T13:23:00.006+02:00

In the privacy of one’s own home people tend to exhibit a number of mannerisms that are, as my Southern fourth-grade teacher used to say, “rude, crude and socially unacceptable.” This can range from satisfying itches of a personal nature to contributing to global warming on a homeowner’s scale. After all, if George Berkeley’s tree falls before an audience of none, does it really make a sound?

What the practice of anonymity fails to take into account, however, is what I will refer to as a delayed audience. Of course it’s embarrassing if you’ve done something in your living room, and then someone knocks at the door. The exact same effect can happen in the office toilet, although your anonymity is somewhat more protected. Public toilets on the other hand will almost guaranty impunity.

And the common philosophy behind these drive-bys is that there is someone who will clean it up, regardless of severity. Imagine using a portable toilet at an outdoor concert. There’s no way you can be blamed for sun-colored matter deposited on the toilet rim, and if you are, you can safely disappear into the anonymity of thousands of intoxicated revelers.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I worked in my state government for a number of years. The capital building to be exact. I used the same restrooms as senators and the governor, and the same battle scars were routinely visible on the marble floors and mahogany seats as I see on the linoleum floors and plastic seats of Estonian offices. People are the same everywhere, right?

More or less. The only real difference in facilities is that I’ve never seen a toilet brush in a public toilet in America. They’re almost everywhere here. I like how a lot of people are trying to promote a flush-and-brush campaign in Estonia, but honestly, who wants to touch one of those things if no one will know it was you who made the mess in the first place?

The greater the anonymity, the greater the mess, everywhere in the world. As the using population begins to shrink, so should (and does in America) the mess. Well, more precisely, messes happen, but they will be cleaned up more often if the appropriate tools are provided. What happens in Estonia is that there is a unisex office toilet, and a concert mess. This says one of two things—people just don’t understand that the list of suspects is quite small, or they just don’t care. Men need to take into account that women sit, and women need to take into account that certain unflushable products should be discretely placed in the trash bin. Both genders should understand that if a person suffers from what the Estonians refer to as “open belly,” it is in fact possible to keep it a secret from the rest of the office rats.

The janitor will come, but not immediately after your morning calisthenics. The true nature of a person really shines in anonymity. I’ve learned this personally through nameless comments on this blog, and it’s also highly visible in traffic culture. Our company used to share a toilet with the Õhtuleht newspaper, somewhat less respectable than the Postimees. I don’t know what they did in that toilet, but every day it looked like someone had let loose a litter of hamsters. There were tons of tiny bits of torn paper all over the floor. And hardened specks of matter formerly known as liquid all over the mirror.

I really, truly wish I could find stink bombs in Estonia. That would be fun. The publicly available sort is a small glass capsule that, with the slightest pressure applied, cracks open, unleashing sulfur derivatives that “smell like rotting food and carcasses.” Place one under the toilet seat and wait for the next person to sit down.

I was having a drink in an American bar once and noticed that a little rubber fly was placed in each urinal. When asked, the waitress jovially replied, “Guys like to aim at them.” Enough said. Brilliant idea really, and I recently saw a rubber fly in a Tartu toilet.

As nifty products slowly cross borders and enter the City of Good Thoughts, let’s hope that nifty little behaviors like wiping the seat and flushing also fill Tartu’s toilets—public and private alike.

City of Monkeys

2009-02-20T16:31:00.004+02:00

It’s probably safe to say that everyone by now has heard of the New York Post’s political cartoon depicting Obama as a chimpanzee fatally shot by police officers, saying now they’d have to get someone else to write the stimulus bill. There’s outrage throughout the country, and there’s outrage at the outrage. Who’s right?

I read a few of the letters to the editor at the NYP. Before I talk about why this may or may not be a bad cartoon, I’d like to point out the hypocrisy of a lot of these readers. Some of them said that as President, Obama should be treated with respect. Well, we certainly didn’t treat Dubya with respect. Regardless of whether or not he deserved it, he was the butt of more blatant criticism than I can comprehend. I also remember a famous poster showing chimps making funny faces that were then matched by various facial expressions of Dubya’s. But Dubya’s not black, and no one got offended. Except maybe Dubya.

Let’s not forget that Curious George was based upon a boy with Down’s syndrome who perished in a Nazi concentration camp.

It probably goes without saying that portraying a black man, prez or not, as a chimp has racist undertones. I mean, the cartoonist could have used any animal. Why not show a bullet-riddled alligator? Obama doesn’t have green skin, and there’s no retarded Darwinist analogy of black people being descendants of the Lizard Man. In the end, I think the cartoon is the result of a gross misunderestimation of how people would react, and equally gross judgment on the part of the artist and editor. Quite obviously, if the thing was meant to be outwardly racist, it would not have been published in a publication of the NYP’s standing. The press isn’t that dumb.

My question is, why bullets? Is it ok to shoot handguns at the Commander-in-Chief? Given recent controversies with police brutality, I would have found it much funnier (or funny at all really) if the little primate had been Tasered (Tased?).

What’s the difference when black people are referred to as monkeys and Russians are referred to as bears, or French frogs? That’s easy. There’s never been a joke about amphibian ancestry in France. And everyone still remembers Denmark’s printing of cartoons about A Certain Someone who is important to the Islamic faith. Aren’t Americans and Danes supposed to be known for tolerance? Sure, there might be a problem with a woman wearing a headscarf in her driver’s license photo, but surely there can be a compromise that allows the rule to be followed and the beliefs to be respected.

I have never watched Oprah, but Mrs. Mingus sometimes watches it. She called me in to see a segment where they used actors to test the general public’s reaction to certain situations. One was an Arabic woman in a café and a racist waiter refusing to serve her. No one defended her, and in fact several people said stuff like, “Yeah, it’s about time someone stood up to those ragheads!” There were several other such examples.

Racism exists in America and Denmark, and anyone who says otherwise is no more intelligent than that dead chimp in the cartoon. What does this have to do with Estonia? This topic has already been covered here, right? This time, my point is that even the countries we look up to for money and guidance have flaws. We can either learn from their mistakes (or should I say “You—Estonians—can learn from our—America’s—mistakes) or copy and paste all the laws and clothes, changing them only to fit linguistic differences and eating habits. That would suggest that no matter what kind of hell history has put you through, you will never be better than us unless you try.

Or I could say it another way. Others’ actions are no justification for yours. I—a citizen of a flawed state—have every right to criticize the actions of another flawed state. Estonians have the saying “silence is golden,” but really silence is tolerance. A good judge of context knows when this is a good or bad thing.

Incidentally, at the same time this cartoon was published, a totally unrelated chimp went wild and mauled its owner’s best friend. The police fatally shot it.

City of Smoke

2009-02-19T13:26:00.006+02:00

In past posts I’ve made fun of mistakes found on menus and such in English, and even in Estonian. Someone goes to the trouble of charging an arm and a leg for a leg of “meat” in their new, posh restaurant, but they can’t be bothered to so much as use spell-check before having their menus professionally printed and laminated. But the absolute worst example of Baltish in language I’ve seen is the Äripäev’s English site.

Essentially, the journalists themselves, I assume, translate brief summaries of their own articles, and then publish them on line. Sometimes you get whole sentences that make perfect sense. Other times you get whole paragraphs that are pure nonsense. For example, today Marge Tubalkain-Trell translated a quote as, “Is this one says a proof, or just it is an impulse to start an investigation?” I have a pretty good idea as to what she is trying to say, but even with the context I’m still not sure.

I personally and several acquaintances have offered proofreading services to the Baltic Business News. Nary a reply. I guess the garbling is on purpose.

Anyhow, the real thing I wanted to talk about here is the subject of the article I quoted. Titled “Wrong Time to Fight with Cartels,” it’s about the reaction of the Ministry of Justice’s new war on, well, cartels. It’s been discussed here at City of Good Thoughts before. Apparently, there’s some governmental opposition to anti-cartel legislation. Smoking Kalashnikov?

At the risk of sounding like a McCarthyist-Dubyan witch hunter, anyone who is against anti-cartel programs is probably associated with a cartel. What’s wrong with lower prices, right? During an economic crisis like this one, it’s only natural that deflation would occur. And it is slowly starting to happen in Estonia in a few places, but I’ve also noticed that a lot of prices have recently skyrocketed, as much as fifty percent! Some idiots are committing financial suicide by thinking that if they have fewer customers, the ones left would be willing to make up for the loss by paying more. These black sheep will be thinned from the herd soon enough.

But Toomas Luman, chairman of the Estonian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, says that in today’s climate, the state’s actions against cartels are pointless, according to BBN. He further states that cartels are impossible right now, and even the idea of a cartel in a country the size of Estonia is pointless. Another gem of wisdom from Mr. Luman is that when people have money, prices naturally rise. Obviously there’s some truth to it, but in a cartel-free market, more cash and hence demand would bring about more supply and hence competition and lower prices. The only prices that have really dropped are computers, but that’s because everyone already has one.

Risto Rüütel, a “competition lawyer” (does that mean synchronized suing?), says that “companies have more cartel plans” during a recession, again according to BBN. That makes perfect sense, too. Additionally, Toomas Prangli, another lawyer, claims that cartels in Estonia are an “open secret,” and that “the resources of the Estonian Competition Authority are too small to catch the cartels.” There’s a Competition Authority in Estonia? That’s certainly Baltic business news to me.

But if it’s so widely known, what is Mr. Luman afraid of?! Surely it would be unthinkable that a man associated with business would be receiving money from businesses?

City of Weather

2009-02-18T14:48:00.007+02:00

Estonian weather is fairly mild compared to what I was used to back in the States. I primarily lived in two states in fact. One had a continental climate, which means extremes of heat and cold. I remember days when the wind chill (what the temperature feels like taking into account the wind) was around fifty below Celsius. Also tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, and lots of snow. In the other state, it was subtropical. The heat index (what the temperature feels like taking into account the humidity) was often above forty Celsius. Lots and lots of rain, but not for long periods, and the occasional hurricane.

All things considered, Estonian weather is not that bad. People complain of seasonal affective disorder—winter sadness—and it’s a real thing, but the oft-grey skies and black ice of winter really don’t affect me that much at all. The summers are usually nice. Lots of sun, and overall the insects don’t, er, bug me.

The single biggest difference, however—and it bugs me a lot—is weather forecasting in Estonia. The meteorologists here would have a better chance of predicting the next pope! I mean honestly, how can you update your weather Internet page and show that it’s going to be a sunny day if it’s already hailing outside? I suspect these people who predict the weather never actually go outside or open the window.

Estonia doesn’t have its own weather satellites, and as far as I know they don’t use weather balloons that often, but they do have access to all the same info that is internationally available. CNN does a better job of predicting Estonian weather than the Estonians themselves. I’m sure the local meteorologists understand how to interpret the data, but I suspect the problem is in its presentation.

No one—I repeat, no one—can with a hundred percent accuracy say what’s going to happen with that cloud on the horizon. But there is a thing called statistics that will give you a pretty good idea of what that cloud is thinking. Is it going to water your lawn, or is it going to wave as it flies by, or is it going to blow the hell out of the local trailer park? There’s a seventy percent chance that it will water your lawn. You know how I know? Because that is what happens in seven chances out of ten when that particular cloud comes round.

Usually in the West, your friendly meteorologist slash weatherman on television will tell you what these chances are, and viewers can make up their own minds. Ten percent chance of showers? I guess we can risk going to the park today. In Estonia, the weathergirls pose in Playboy. In this photo, you can see a warm front moving over the beach.

So the problem is not really magazine appearances of course, but simply telling people what they think will happen. You can’t publicize a forecast by saying it’s going to rain or be sunny. The weather doesn’t change by twenty-four-hour periods. Say it’s likely to be sunny in the morning with a strong chance of rain in the afternoon. Maybe even give the numbers, if you’ve actually done the math. What seems to be the case is that the weatherman somehow knows that there will be a sunny five-minute window and so a little sun is posted for the day’s weather, with total disregard for the other twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes of sleet. Mrs. Mingus’s father relies solely on Finnish meteorology to find out what the Estonian weather for the day will be like.

What is truly surprising though is that they give four-day forecasts when they can’t even tell you what’s happening right at this moment. Sounds like they need the Weather Rock.

In all fairness, I do find the weather strikingly easy to predict in Estonia. Look at the two or three web portals and newspapers that have forecasts, and plan for the opposite of what the majority of them predict. And remember, kids—if they say it’s going to be sunny, for heaven’s sake, don’t go to the beach and fly a kite!

City of Butter

2009-02-17T15:49:00.007+02:00

One of the problems of nuclear technology, of course in addition to its sheer destructive power if used as a weapon or not used properly, is the immense responsibility that goes with it. Sure you get energy that’s clean on some level, but it’s expensive to say the least, and you have to spend a lot more money trying to keep marginal countries like Pakistan and India from getting it too. You wouldn’t want an arms race between Estonia and Latvia.

This responsibility is why South Africa, during Apartheid, successfully developed and then immediately destroyed its weaponized nuclear capabilities. At least they did one thing wisely. Now everyone knows that Israel has the bomb, though they still don’t admit it publicly. Probably because Armageddon is supposed to take place on their property.

Estonia wisely has stayed away from Russian gas. Much of the rest of the EU has not. Luckily, Estonia has a small deposit of oil shale that is big enough to power the country for at least a few more decades. But it’s dirty, and pricey. The only real benefit is that the ash left over is literally creating the biggest mountains in the Baltics (future ski resorts?). So it’s not too much of a surprise that Estonia, which has knowledge of nuclear technology, wants to split the bill for an atom-splitting plant with neighboring, non-Russian countries.

Now obviously I wouldn’t say that Estonia wants the bomb. They wouldn’t even be able to deliver it. I’m just worried about the state of quality in construction in these parts. I don’t think I would trust a nuclear facility physically built by anyone from Estonia. Maybe Latvians and Lithuanians, maybe not.

But then again, having a bomb hidden away somewhere might be a pretty good deterrent against a possible Russian reinvasion. Seriously, that’s the only reason Estonia has a military at all, and the only reason Estonia is in NATO. Iraq wanted Kuwait’s oil, but in the future when there’s no more oil I doubt Latvia would invade Estonia for its wind.

Estonia is required to spend around two percent of its GDP on military uses. There’s obligatory participation in Dubya’s Coalition of the Willing or whatever, and then there’s military hardware and infrastructure in Estonia proper. A million people though. And Estonia knows there’s no way to stop a full-out invasion from Russia. That’s why the sole plan of all things military here is simply to survive long enough until Western reinforcements arrive. That’s the official position, really.

But would the West really risk a nuclear confrontation with Russia for a million people? I doubt it, in all honesty. So why is Estonia spending its two percent on armored personnel carriers and howitzers, things that are easy for a jet fighter to take out? A great amount of Estonia’s military brass has extensive offensive experience from Afghanistan due to conscription in the Red Army. The Soviets got their asses kicked there similarly to how the US got the boot from Vietnam. They should know that Estonia needs mines and missiles, not tanks and targets.

City of Checks

2009-02-17T08:10:00.008+02:00

Driving down the Estonian countryside you quite often see abandoned Soviet-era kiosks. They’re usually something resembling a hexagon or oval, and for years served as primary shopping points and gossip centers for locals. A Finnish company called R-Kiosk now has a monopoly on the kiosk market in Estonia, letting passers-by buy smokes, Cokes and porno mags on their way to the bus stop. But Soviet-era kioskery does still exist in many ways here today.

The main thing about a kiosk is that you can’t pick up items yourself. You have to order them each individually, and the cashier usually is an old woman who inspects everything through her bifocals and even grunts in disapproval if she doesn’t like your choice. But this lack of self-service still flourishes in most pharmacies and countryside shops. You can pick up a bag of pasta yourself, but the expensive items, like cheese, are behind the sneeze guard.

If you speak Estonian or Russian, the only real problem you’ll have is impatience in lines. Especially as there’s usually but one worker, and the pensioner in front of you is busy counting coins and complaining about the cost of bread. In modern grocery stores, the situation is of course much better. You can wait in line to select live fish from the tank, and then wait in line again at the four manned cash registers—out of twelve total.

Then along comes a grocery store in Keila, near Tallinn. They are the first in Estonia to have self-service check-outs. Scan, bag and pay, and you’re on your way. About time, too. The only problem is—in the States at least—there are so many options and buttons to push that it’s actually faster to go through the line, if the line is empty.

Olev Mäll, the equivalent of the manager of the shop in question, states: “The technology behind the self-service check-outs is brand new and really quite fascinating.” And he’s right, it is quite fascinating, but brand new? It’s at least a decade old. He then contradicts himself: “Studies carried out around the world have shown that losses haven’t increased in stores where self-service check-outs have been in use for a long time.”

And I’m sure he’s proud of what his shop offers. Estonia is the IT capital of the world, but Lithuania already has more than eighty of these auto-check-outs. After all, it’s a huge leap in technology going from kiosks to self-service. These things are pretty pricey too, I would imagine. But there was a missed step in the evolutionary process of grocery sales. What about the express lane? Ten items or less? The idea behind self-service is that if you just want to pay for your gum, you don’t have to wait behind someone buying for a company party. I have never seen an express lane anywhere in Estonia.

Maybe it’s because they don’t offer classes for cashiers to be express cashiers. I was surprised to hear that cashiers in Estonia actually have to go to school to be what they are. I worked as a cashier for two years in high school. It wasn’t that hard. You just have to learn the difference between different types of lettuce. To work the express lane though, you need to know what broccoli looks like too (I can’t tell you how many times a cashier has asked me what it was, so they could enter the right code).

At least cash is a thing of the past for all intents and purposes. I think that if we ever switch over to the euro, we won’t even notice. I still can’t believe that Americans still pay with checks at the check-out. I didn’t think to look if you could pay with a check at the self-service check-out.

City of Signs

2009-02-16T13:05:00.005+02:00

One very cool thing about Europe—most of the world in fact—is that the cities were built before the car was invented. The older the city, the more winding the narrow little medieval streets get. Tallinn’s Old Town is a veritable labyrinth of passageways and corridors, some no wider than the hall in my flat, yet they still have street names. Maybe a scooter or bike could navigate these places, but it’s best to go it on foot.

Most of North America, on the other hand, was designed specifically for automobiles to traverse. Sixteen-lane highways might prove difficult to maneuver on to the newcomer, but the signs tell you where to go, and you can usually trust them. And the signs are designed for spacious streets. If you understand that basically everything is permitted except what is expressly forbidden by the signs, then you’ll have no problem on the expressway or suburban drive.

The international system of signs uses a different logic. Essentially, you can only do what the sign tells you is allowed. Granted, it would be an effort in futility to use language in a system that stretches farther than the Crown’s reach, but the ensuing language of symbols and colors isn’t much better in many cases. Instead of saying that a street is “One Way,” the appropriate sign would just be an arrow against a background of a certain color. The burden of knowing the system rests on your driver’s eyes. And what if you’re colorblind?

Some of the signs are just silly. A white circle with a red ring means that what is inside the ring is forbidden. This applies to the speed limit and types of vehicles. If the number fifty is inside this red ring, then you can’t drive over fifty. If a motorcycle is in this red ring, then you can’t drive a motorcycle there. Often the ring has nothing in it. Logically, it means nothing is forbidden. It really means “Do Not Enter,” even though the real “Do Not Enter” sign looks pretty much like the North American version (i.e. why do they have two signs for essentially the same thing?).

What the Estonians do sometimes is place a sign that says “Stopp” with two p’s. It’s not a typical stop sign, but it’s the mark showing where you should stop your car at the real stop sign that is usually right next to it. The sign is just intended to let you know that you should stop your car before the stop sign, not in the middle of the crossing road. That comes in very useful sometimes. What do the Latvians who drive in Valga think about it?

The single most frustrating piece of signage is the right-hand rule sign. It means you can keep going if there’s no one to your right. If there’s someone to your right, you have to yield, and they have to yield to their right (oncoming for you) and so on. Often you get all four directions stopped and waiting for someone with a Hummer to decide they have the priority. The North American four-way stop rule would be a brilliant replacement for this nonsense. Whoever got there first is, well, first. That way you don’t have to wait for ten cars to the right to drive by before you can go for no other reason than they’re to your right.

This sign is also used to keep the speed down. Yet in my neck of the Tartu woods, a little place called Karlova, most of the pre-automobile-era buildings are built right up on the corner of the street. You have to stop fully to be certain there’s no one to your right. So the speed aspect of it is null and void. You might as well use the traditional stop and yield signs that the rest of the world uses in these places.

But here’s the paradox. In the absence of a sign, the right-hand rule applies by default. There is also nothing to tell the driver that your lane has priority if the crossing road happens to have a yield sign. You can only figure this out by looking at the back of the yield sign itself, which is often not visible from where you are, or it’s another sign that has the same shape. This is how the law is written, too. It’s intentional.

Yet the morons who plan the use of these signs still feel the need for certain city roads to have a sign indicating you’re on the main road, and that all others must yield to you. Fine. It works. But either do it all the time, or never (and at the very least, indicate to those not on the main road that they’re not on the main road). Don’t use three different systems, and inconsistently at that.

I remember a couple years ago the guy responsible for designing Tartu’s traffic was boasting in the newspaper, saying something along the lines of “the art of traffic is one of compromise.” He felt he’d done a good job. Forgive me my belief that the art of traffic is one of logic, safety and fluidity.

City of Forgiveness

2009-02-12T10:30:00.005+02:00

Parallels can be drawn between anything. In Umberto Eco’s book Foucault’s Pendulum even Mickey Mouse and a Certain Someone born in Bethlehem have something in common. I have always believed that the power of analogy is the most powerful of mankind’s tools. One good example would be how the Golden Rule (Do unto others...) was acted out during the heyday of the Cold War in the form of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Another thing that happened during the Cold War was that a bully from the east held a lot of the kids on the playground prisoner, chained to the iron fence. He even amputated a few fingers, and the scars are still visible today. Eventually these kids got free and now usually walk softly, but they don’t have a big stick. They have a friend who has a big stick though. A couple friends in fact.

But what will stop the bully from coming back? One of the former prisoners seems to be razzing the bully whenever he can, and attracting that kind of attention might not be a good idea. Still, what can you do when you’re provoked so often?

One of the problems I have with a lot of the Russians in Estonia is that their patriotism is one of convenience. They have chosen to stay in Estonia for various reasons, but as the Bronze Night demonstrated, their loyalties in many cases lie elsewhere. What can be done? Estonia has already passed language laws effectively forcing Russians to learn Estonian, and on paper, they have made every effort for the “non-Estonians” to integrate in schools. But the terms “language laws” and “integration” sound like throwbacks to what Estonians refer to as the Russian times. Meaning the Soviet occupation.

There is one thing we will never see in our lifetime though. The Estonian kid on the playground will never walk up to the bully and say, “It’s ok, I forgive you.” At least not until the bully apologizes and takes responsibility for his actions, and certainly not while he’s holding a big stick up in the air and clubbing neighbors with mustaches on the head. Germany has publicly apologized for its war crimes on many occasions, but then again it was kind of forced to. Will Russia ever face the music? Will America?

The Russians in Estonia need to understand that they have already made their choice to stay here. They need to get off the fence. They need to admit that while they as a people are proud and honorable, their former government has not always been so, and they need to stop saying that Estonia owes them a debt for liberating them and building their decrepit highways. Perhaps they should assemble and make a public statement along those lines. I think the Estonians would really appreciate it.

The Estonians need to tell the hundreds of thousands (is it that many?) of Russians in Estonia who don’t have Estonian citizenship to get their asses in gear, choose to formally stay or leave. And they need to say it politely. And they need to make it easier for these Russians to get these passports. Now I know that the Estonian man doesn’t want some bearded coffee-drinking Yankee to tell him how to go about his business, but it needs to be said. Russia has already demonstrated its willingness to attack other countries cybernetically and militarily simply due to how their brethren are treated. As long as Putain (sic!) is alive, Russia will be unpredictable, underhanded and dangerous. Estonia needs all the allies it can get, and that includes the “non-Estonians” in this country. The government (and sometimes the people too) work hard to accomplish this, I know, but they need to work even harder.

Parallels can be drawn with Nazi Germany and the Great Depression. Russia is already blaming Estonia for tons of stuff, and it effectively has no freedom of speech.

City of Perspective

2009-02-09T08:14:00.011+02:00

In a Tartu bookshop I saw a book titled Face Painting for Kids. Lions and tigers and— Jamaicans, oh my! I can’t pass up commenting on this, although honestly I don’t quite know what to say or make of it. Is it just nothing, or is it offensive? The book is a hundred percent Estonian. Not a translation for the local market.

I feel it is wrong on some level yet I can’t identify it precisely. Instead, I’ll just examine what I do know. A book like this would never be possible in the States. In addition to not being able to look at someone oddly who’s not exactly the same as you, without risking a lawsuit for emotional damage, you can’t really talk about these things. Unless there’s no one from the affected group to be offended. I doubt the Martians have rallied to fight the mocking of their green skin.

No one really dresses up as an Indian (sorry—Native American) for Halloween anymore. And if they do, they certainly don’t paint their faces red. The Cowboys and Indians days for children are over. They’ve been replaced with shockingly violent video games that tolerant, non-racist parents give their kids, the objects of their hope for a better future.

I watched a trial run for Estonia’s hopefuls for Eurovision yesterday. I think both of the black people in Estonia participated in it as well (except for a couple imported basketball-players). So there’s no one here to be offended at this book teaching kids how to make their faces look like a different race. The Rastafarian costume is a not-uncommon one in the States, minus the makeup of course. Then again in the States, someone can be trying to point out the only black guy in the crowd for whatever reason, but instead of saying, “It’s the black guy,” people actually go to the trouble of saying, “It’s the guy in the blue shirt, carrying the bag. Oh—he just waved, did you see that?! He’s the one who helped me pick up the pieces of my cell phone when I dropped it.”

Are there any groups of people in Estonia who could be offended by having a costume of their likeness sold in bookshops? I guess a costume with long, curly moustaches and a shish kabob skewer over the shoulder wouldn’t upset the Georgians or Armenians too much. But maybe a costume with long, curly sideburns and a yarmulke would not be too popular. What about Russians? What physical traits could be attributed to them? Estonians love to make fun of them, so why not dress up as a Russian? I guess they don’t look different enough.

This makes me wonder if Jamaican kids dress up as white people for Halloween. Do they tuck in their shirts and pretend to drink coffee, the way we pretend to smoke ganja? And do they paint their faces to look like a peach? This reminds me of a South Park episode I saw years ago. Some Chinese students were making fun of white kids. They taped their eyes wide open.

I went to university in a city hell-bent on being left. The Ku Klux Klan applied for a permit to march down the main street. The Right to Free Speech granted them their permit, and when the day came, the whole downtown was a ghost town. On a funny but harmless side note, the Estonian term for FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) is KKK.

Back to the face-painting Jamaican thing. I cannot for the life of me find anything wrong with this. Estonians are often criticized for their use of the word “neeger” to refer to blacks (pronounced “NAY-ger”) because of its resemblance to the “N-word.” They fail to take into account the other N-word—negro. That’s what it’s really for, it’s not meant to be offensive, and so it really should not be. It doesn’t mean your average Estonian is not racist, but then again most racism is a result of ignorance with regard to a given race. This average Estonian is not a white supremacist, however.

The only thing I can do is not buy this book. There’s nothing wrong with it, but the little Yankee chipping away at my shoulder is still whispering something in my ear when he sometimes stands up. And I have to listen to him, because no one else is saying anything.

City of Cops

2009-02-04T16:48:00.008+02:00

Twenty seconds after starting to drive my kid to school this morning, I realized it was one of those days when everyone in traffic was in a foul mood. All drivers were late getting somewhere, cutting each other off when possible—contrary to yesterday, when people were going out of their way to get out of my way to let me turn. Entropy at work I guess.

Driving down Vabaduse Street Mrs. Mingus and I saw the remains of a wreck. It appears that the driver of an Opel blew a red light and ploughed into an oncoming Volkswagen. Der People’s Car was a showroom advertisement car, with the name of the dealership on it. Good publicity too in terms of safety: the crush zone worked, and the front of the car was neatly pancaked, but the passenger didn’t seem to be battered.

And with an accident, there’s going to be inconvenience as photos are taken, wreckage catalogued and emergency vehicles do their thing. My question is, why were the firefighters, at the busiest intersection in town, telling cars to stop while the tow truck blocked the entire intersection, dozens of meters away from the wrecked cars and not moving, and yet the seven or eight cops on the scene stood off to the side laughing with each other? A quick wave of a white-gloved hand would tell other cars to beat it.

It didn’t last too long though, and we were on our merry way. I thought of other incidents I had experienced with the police. They’re either completely useless, or very attentive. Probably just depends on what mood they’re in, like the traffic.

While walking to a local gas station to get some gum, a vodka bottle exploded next to my head against a brick wall. Then the two drunk guys across the street tried to lob another but my friend and I took refuge in the gas station. While I was calling the fuzz, a patrol car randomly arrived and parked next to the bottle brothers. I told the dispatcher I would talk directly to them and went outside, making my accusation. They promised to take care of it, so we went back to the gas station. When we went back outside, the police had left—had left the two idiots out there, who were now waiting for us. We took a cab home—three hundred meters. An anonymous letter to the paper resulted in an interview and a rather scathing article, not my intention. Within the week, the Tartu police chief had resigned. Whether it was connected or not, I felt pretty cool.

A friend of a friend was punched in the forehead while having a nice conversation with a guy in Zavood, the popular bar. I wasn’t there, but witnesses said it was completely unexpected and definitely unprovoked. The friend looked like a raccoon afterward, both eyes completely blackened. He filed a report, was kept at the station for three hours while they tracked the perp down and found out he’d conveniently left for London. I don’t know the ending, but there was a warrant for his arrest waiting for him at the border.

I once had suspicious phone calls for a period. I emailed the police, asking them to investigate. The next day they showed up (even brought an interpreter just in case!) and took a statement. They couldn’t find anything because the number originated from abroad, but they were very professional about it. The Environmental Inspectorate was also prompt in conducting investigations into who had dumped construction waste at our summer cabin, but good luck solving that one.

Excellent response to a car accident I was in. But a friend had to call them once because of an axe fight (an axe!) outside her window. No arrests and the Estonian and Russian gangs involved continued to have Georgian Olympic contests on a number of other occasions. Meanwhile, people are continually creaming each other on the Tallinn–Tartu highway (never seen a cop there) and the police are ticketing jaywalkers. A friend was ticketed for that while the guy next to him, also illegally crossing the empty road at night, was not.

I don’t get it. Cops are underpaid the world over. The Estonian cops are not any smarter or dumber than, say, American cops, and are probably just as honest. They’re just hugely inconsistent.

On an extremely positive note, people were generally afraid to call the cops for any reason back when they were known by their Soviet name: the Militia (sorry but I don’t know how else to translate the name). Calling the cops nowadays is no longer considered a bad idea. Useless on occasion, but public trust in the police is sky high. Good job!

City of Tenderness

2009-01-30T12:51:00.005+02:00

Mrs. Mingus had to have an MRI yesterday to identify a lower back problem. To prepare, she had to be sure there were no more little Minguses on the way. So I went to buy one of those little pee things. After waiting in line, it was finally my turn, and I simply asked for a pregnancy test. I could feel every person looking at me (the whole pharmacy going from quiet to silence was a big clue, too), wanting to see what the foreigner looked like who thought he’d knocked up another Estonian. Then the pharmacist asked which one, so I replied, loudly in a mock drunken voice, “The cheapest one.”

I somehow managed to keep a straight face, as did the woman. But then she started talking to me in a baby voice. A very soft tone, full of what is known as palatalization. This is basically a phenomenon where the sound produced, in English, by the letter y is added in certain places. It’s really the only non-phonetic element of Estonian. The word “pall” (ball) in Estonian would be pronounced similarly to “pile” in English. But unnecessary overuse sounds like baby talk and can make a person sick, à la “Oh my little baby waby, do you have an owey wowey?”

It is usually women who talk like this, if at all. It’s not really that common. And usually they work in a place that requires some silence—a pharmacy, library. I hear guys doing it too. There’s one on the radio, who truly sounds like he’s about to break out into the goo-goo ga-ga. And a lot of lawyers somehow. But it’s not an everyday tone of voice. The situation dictates its use.

Grunting, “Gimme’ that wrench.” At night, speaking Infantile to the wife, “Whatever you want is fine with me.” Maybe it denotes a level of respect, or expectation of what you can comprehend?

Or here’s a wild theory: it’s an extension of pillow talk, those lovely whispers in the ear that, like Aleksander beer, will get you in the mood. Bedwise dissatisfaction is extended to everyday life in the form of a babyish cry for help? Naw, I doubt that.

But I would much rather hear sweet nothings whispered in my ear in Infantile instead of the snarls and growls so many Western women speak with. Estonian women may often speak in falsetto, or the head voice, but a lot of Scandinavians sound like they have smoked for decades or they scream bloody murder on a regular basis. This includes the Finns, so it’s not some Finno-Ugric thang.

For a while I thought it was smoking. When I lived in Denmark most of the women I saw smoked. And they had raspy voices. At the same time in Estonia, the same number of women smoked but still had soft voices. Scratch that theory. I can only think of two other things. The frequent use of hard consonants required in the respective Nordic and Germanic languages might wear out your vocal cords somewhat. Estooonian, with all its vowels, is softer on the palate. But Finnish might be an exception. There’s a certain machine-gun quality to this tongue that its sister language lacks.

The other option would be how loudly you speak. A dearth of decibels would certainly prevent your throat from aging past infancy. And Estonia is definitely a quiet country. You can always hear the foreign kids at the playgrounds because they’re the ones making noise. So are the Vikings and Celts and company loud and obnoxious, or is Estonia just quiet? Would self-esteem somehow factor in to this again, or would this just be another cliché of my own creation?

City of Women

2009-01-27T11:32:00.005+02:00

One of the first things that impressed me, or that I even noticed when I arrived in Estonia, was that the border guard officials who checked my passport were women. A little while later I exchanged some money and noticed there was a woman on the hundred-kroon note. I also saw a statue of a woman. This created a first impression in my head that Estonia was a very matriarchal society. They were even playing Xena: Warrior Princess on a bar television somewhere.

Soviet-era propaganda drove home that all people were equal (though some more than others—ha!), but it seems it was just so they could get women to work in factories and such. Apart from the right to vote, not much of that women’s lib stuff survived the fall of the wall.

There are powerful women in government today, strong matriarchs in families, lady cops, and Estonia boasts one of the highest employment rates for women in the EU, or indeed the world (but a closer look at that number will also reveal that it’s largely due to women working full time into their seventies), but a commonly prevailing attitude is what gets my attention. There is often a very clear line drawn around what is commonly referred to as women’s work, and tons of guys I’ve seen would rather not ask a woman something if there’s a man available for questioning.

It’s not at all as bad as I’ve just described it, admittedly. I even work in a company owned and operated by women. In fact, every boss I’ve had in Estonia was a woman, and upon reflection, all but two of my American bosses were also women. I guess I couldn’t imagine working for a man.

Yet there is a babe culture in Estonia. I don’t mean Paris Hilton party girls, but women who think they must wear even more makeup than Southern whites in the States. The fingernails, the high-heeled shoes, the ass-tight pants and miniskirts that only come down to the navel. I’m not complaining at all—I just can’t help but notice it, of course. When I taught English I always greatly appreciated that a lot of the girls looked like they were coming directly to morning classes from the nightclubs. And it’s not limited to Estonia. It’s an Eastern European thang.

My question though is why? Why wear shoes that are difficult to walk in? I’m a guy, I believe in comfort and functionality, so I don’t understand it. I’ve asked some Estonian women this, and with regard to the shoes, they believe it is because it makes their legs look nice. Same with the makeup and the little glittery shiny silver cake decorations they wear on their eyelashes. And they want to reveal their bodies more, obviously to attract attention. Wolverine-style fingernails certainly accomplish that part.

But what if they already look good? What if they already have beautiful legs, amazing eyes and nice, er, fingertips? It makes them feel better about themselves. Fine, I can accept that. But why would they need to feel better about themselves? I don’t agree that women as a species need more reassurance than men. Everyone likes and needs it. But I do agree that women are more communicative than men. Or at least they are less likely to hide their emotions and needs. But what creates this greater need? There are babes in the West, but not nearly the proportion as in Eastern Europe.

I’ve seen a lot of middle-aged men, the ones who are old enough to have worked in a Soviet-era factory, simply refuse to believe that a woman could know anything about selling a car, for just one example. And there’s some truth to it. Not many women know cars in Estonia. But they sure as hell could if they wanted to. It’s entirely up to women to stand up for their rights, interests and anything else they want. Another common attitude though is that a lot of Estonian women like the current situation. Act stupid, and you get out of work. I am more of a feminist than a lot of the Estonian women I know personally. And if women want to dress like this, it’s entirely their right. I’m just exploring the why.

Hopefully a lot of this nonsense about not wanting to deal with women will just die out with the Soviet generation. But the self-esteem part and the ensuing symptoms of babeness will not. It will take dialogue, something a great number of Estonians unfortunately are not wont to participate in. At least you can enjoy the view though, right?

City of Ga Ga

2009-01-23T15:46:00.009+02:00

Protectionism can manifest itself in funny ways. The French regulate the price of bread, and that stems from one of their revolutions. Something about a prison in the heart of Paris. They also regulate the radio so that at least two-thirds of all songs broadcast much be French in origin (just in French—or specifically from France—I’m not sure). Estonia apparently has a similar regulation saying that two-thirds of its broadcast songs must be no younger than twenty years of age. Not certain though what that would be trying to protect. Surely not nostalgia from the times of its Singing Revolution.

When my first experiences in Estonia are relived in my memory, they are all played to the soundtrack of Superhits of the Eighties. The first time my wife and I went on a date, they played Phil Collins’s Another Day in Paradise. In fact, they played the whole CD while we ate dinner. When we ordered dessert, they played it again from the start. We went to a nightclub that night (Atlantis) and they played Elton John’s Nikita. The floor was packed with couples.

More than ten years later, they’re still playing the exact same music. Not in Atlantis, but in a lot of places. In the past week alone, I have heard In the Army Now no fewer than six times, on various stations. I also know all the lyrics to a great portion of Elton John’s other hits from two decades ago, though not the cool ones, like I’m Still Standing. If they have to play music from that era virtually non-stop, they could at least play Devo, Guns N’ Roses, Van Halen—anything but Wilson Phillips or Shakespeare’s Sister.

So why is this? I’ve always assumed that it’s because of money. Radio stations have to pay royalties each time they play a song, so maybe the fees are lower if it’s older, less popular? But in the States, there’s basically a flat rate as far as I know. It doesn’t matter how big a hit it is or was. I have no idea about how Estonia pays. I assume it’s not the same, as otherwise they would play more modern, good music. Or maybe it is the same, and the station managers or whoever chooses the tracks just don’t know any better.

I cannot, however, subscribe to the idea that the radio plays music specifically catered to the market. A lot of shops play Raadio Elmar on the speakers, and that’s all Estonian, all eras. Most younger people listen to boom-boom techno on the radio, with the occasional rap slipped in. And tons of restaurants and bars still play Phil Collins albums, stuck on repeat.

Most businesses in the States will subscribe to satellite radio. Hundreds of channels with professionally mixed music available day and night with no ads, albeit for a hefty monthly fee. They don’t have that here, except in Selver grocery stores (it’s called Radio Selver I think). But what they do have are fully state-of-the-art stations with homepages you can listen to, if you want Phil Collins on your computer as well. They also have subcarriers on their broadcasts, meaning you can see the station identification, artist and title on your car radio. So it does not appear to be a lack of funding.

Sun FM has a pretty good show from time to time. Not sure who the deejay is but his taste is similar to mine. Comfy mix of Motown, funk and modern American rock. The kind that you can play for hours and not notice a difference between the songs—great background music, like Green Day.

I don’t go to clubs much at all anymore. Never, in fact. I therefore have no clue what I guess would be considered good, modern music. There’s one web radio station I listen to, but it’s fairly alternative. Market research suggests that musical taste is derived to some degree from what is heard on the radio. You don’t choose what is played, like at home, so you hear new stuff, and you start liking it subliminally. Maybe that’s what’s happened. Maybe the people do like this music. They were forced to hear it when there was no fair alternative, and now they stick to what they know—that song stuck in their head. That’s the only reason I bought that Wilson Phillips tape way back when. No wait—I won it. I was caller nine.

City of Inaugurations

2009-01-20T10:08:00.011+02:00

Part I

What kind of blog would this be without mentioning today? There will be a new President of the United States, legally elected for his first term. His publicly stated intentions are essentially to reverse a lot of the damage done by Dubya, and he has, perhaps insightfully, chosen a lot of Republicans to be on his team in an effort to bring more unity to a country that only seems able to galvanize itself at the moment of being attacked.

It’s amazing how short the public’s memory can be. Mob mentality. If an individual could only remember this long, he would be considered an idiot. Dubya is only unpopular now because there’s a so-called war that keeps dragging on, and the economy. Let’s reflect on what else he has done. He cheated to get elected, probably had some prior knowledge of the events of September eleventh, used this to invade Afghanistan (don’t forget the pipelines), started spying on his own people around the world and without the proper permission, held thousands of people prisoner without recourse to the courts, rolled back tons of legislation guaranteeing freedoms—including Constitutional guarantees, slashed Social Security and anything else with the word “social” in it to pay for it all and causing retired people in their seventies to work at the front door of Wal-Mart, fabricated evidence to send us into a second wildly unpopular war, and did nothing to prevent the current economic crisis despite the warnings from, well, everyone. He also took a dump on the environment.

To give him credit, he did make a contribution to pop-culture. Bushisms, Bush-speak, whatever you want to call it. “People say, well, do you ever hear any other voices other than, like, a few people? Of course I do.” He said this just last December.

To Dubya I say good riddance, and thanks for the mop.

Part II

My daughter was watching the news with me last night and they showed a clip of the current and coming Presidents walking together. She pointed at Dubya and said, “This is Bush, a bad man.” Then a minute later pointed at the other: “Obama’s a good man, and he has an orange tongue.” I have no clue where this tongue thing came from, but I know the first part of this sentence would be hilarious if taken out of context.

Black people in America, and in fact the world over, have good reason to celebrate today. A black president in a former slave-owning country. This is a good thing (the president part). There have been other blacks in high positions lately, but not like this. Condy didn’t cut it, Colin lied and then ran away, and Jesse didn’t get elected.

I too feel proud to be American today, and for the first time in a long time. Still, my home is here now. But it makes me think—what about all the Estonians in exile? The children of war refugees, or the refugees themselves, the few that remain today. Estonian Estonians call them foreign Estonians. They can now come home and be president, too.

It makes me wonder about labels for people. African-American, Estonian-American, and so on. The “American” part is second because that’s where they live. Would it then be politically correct to call me an American-Estonian? Or does it also depend on where you’re born? Meaning I will always be an American immigrant and my children will always be the American-Estonians.

Basically I see a similarity in Obama becoming president and what has happened in Estonia in the past couple decades. A similarity, mind you—not the same thing. The foundations have been laid for the hopes and dreams of an entire country, and the sky’s the limit. So why don’t the exiled Estonians come home? There are no more deportations, no more lack of freedom, and that’s why they left right? If they were to say they simply don’t want to leave what has become home for them, fair enough, and I completely understand.

And I don’t know many, so I don’t know why the ones who stay abroad don’t come here. But what of the nationalistic sentiment? Are these Estonians patriotic, or is their nationality nothing more than a dinner party topic? Why don’t the Russians in Estonia want to go back to Russia? They certainly have that option. Is it a fear of leaving home, or a fear of a decline in living standards? And could the same be supposed of Estonians in exile?

My children have dual citizenship. I want them to grow up feeling a part of both countries, knowing both countries. They will celebrate two independence days (three actually—Estonia has two), and they will have the freedom to do whatever they want. Except that the Estonian government will make them choose one citizenship over another when they turn eighteen. Funny how a country so worried about its declining population would make a restriction regarding who can be Estonian. Even funnier is how the exiled Estonians are still allowed to maintain dual citizenship, even if they weren’t born here like my kids.

We live in interesting times.

City of Circles

2009-01-18T10:43:00.004+02:00

When I lived in East Germany I used to walk across the river border to Poland almost every other day for fantastic pizza and cheap smokes. It was run down back then—haven’t been there since—even compared to Estonia at the same time, but the single most interesting thing I noticed was the network of roadside billboards. A suspiciously large number of them had advertisements informing the reader of what physical abuse was, and that the reader should stop beating his wife.

Now I have never seen a similar ad in Estonia, but I know for a fact that a lot of men—in the countryside at least—beat their wives. So this problem does exist here, like it does in every country in the world. The background for this is broad and varied, and the reasons so numerous that I won’t even attempt to delve into them in a blog. But I read something recently that could come as a slap in the face to a lot of people.

Physical abuse isn’t the only form of abuse. There is also emotional—actually it’s the core of all forms of abuse. I did a bit of research on this type of treatment with children and learned that common behaviors include belittling the child, inconsistent punishments and consequences, harassment, ignoring and being generally cold, and isolating and rejecting the child and their feelings.

After reading this I kept thinking about it while I went for a walk, and on no fewer than three occasions I saw a mother holding her child’s arm and severely criticizing the kid’s behavior, even calling the kid names. This was done in full public view. Kids will be kids and need guidance, but this goes beyond a simple reprimand. It’s more like recrimination. I’ve seen this for years but never really paid attention to it. The mothers all had one thing in common—they squeezed their eyebrows together and left their mouths open when not speaking. And is it mommy’s fault? There’s a good chance it’s a chain reaction—this is statistically a direct result of an overbearing daddy.

So I did some more reading, to see what would happen to these three kids when they grew up. And learned that most forms of child abuse are learned from their own experience as children. (Yes, technically what these mothers did is child abuse, and it’s not just the mothers.) These kids can look forward to adulthoods where it is difficult to believe what other people say, even in the face of overwhelming evidence; they will ridicule other people for small things; there’s a good chance their own children will be violent in schools; emotional isolation (and not being able to deal with your own emotions); the need to go to extremes in order to feel normal, accepted or even noticed; substance abuse (including alcohol of course); less functional immune systems; and generally not spreading enough love. The daughters will have particularly low self-esteems and engage in risky sexual behavior.

This sounds eerily familiar.

There are governmental and transnational organizations for combating more extreme forms of abuse, and Estonia participates. The Estonian government even recently set up a child abuse hotline. But again, this is intended for extreme cases—beatings, severe neglect and the like. If emotional abuse is in fact as widespread a problem here as I am beginning to suspect it is, what can be done about it? You can’t just approach one of these angry mommies or silent daddies and tell them to calm down or start talking. They have to have grown up, learning this through experience. No governmental hotline or support group can do this.

Regardless, the first step would be identifying the problem and accepting that it exists. I think the media would come in very handy with this one.

All this can put a lot of pressure on parents, and perspective would be greatly needed. Parenting is like baking bread: the ingredients, kneading and rising need to be just right, because once the bread’s in the oven it’s all up to the dough that you yourself have made.

City of Holes

2009-01-14T10:47:00.004+02:00

One thing that’s cool about Tartu is that every time construction is about to begin on a new building downtown, it’s inevitably delayed by months of archaeological digging. I remember years ago just before the restoration of St. John’s Church was completed, a graveyard was unearthed in front of the church on Rüütli Street. For about three months, maybe longer, you could see skeletons in the ground.

Construction of the new Kaubamaja Department Store was similarly delayed. Scientists and archaeologists were examining the remains of discarded food scraps from the former Toidutorn fast food joint I guess. Petrified chicken burgers. Yet on Vanemuine Street, across from the main post office, another empty lot is going to be filled. There are fewer and fewer scars left over from dubya dubya two every year.

The Postimees newspaper yesterday revealed the specifications for the new box. I’ll just say it once—another box? I looked at the architect’s webpage, one Emil Urbel, and with the exception of the front arch of the Kalev Spa in Tallinn, every single thing he’s done could be easily reproduced with Legos. Anyhow, I’m very glad they’re filling in that hole. And the building won’t be so bad I think, if not unoriginal. The problem I foresee is the parking scheme.

There’s one subterranean parking level for a grand total of twenty-two cars. The building itself will be over five thousand square meters. That’s at least a hundred workers. Where are they going to park, especially considering that no one carpools? It’s already difficult to find a spot in that area, and crossing the intersection there can take up to five minutes, as there’s no traffic light.

It’s a major hub for pedestrians walking in all directions and virtually every car entering downtown. Currently, there are four zebra crossings and traffic is controlled by the often unwise and much overused “right-hand rule.” I’ll expound on this law in a future post. Needless to say, the city government, at the very least, should install traffic lights there. And why not get the developer to foot the bill, as they’ll only be exacerbating the tight squeeze?

Official policy for the city government is to encourage as much center-of-town construction as possible. There are property holes and gaps everywhere, they know about it, and they’re acting to prevent urban sprawl at the expense of a decaying downtown. Instead of allowing a house to be built, they allow apartment blocks. And that’s fine and dandy. It makes the city look alive. Parking policy however? Let’s just bump up the rates for the few spots that are already there.

What does the city government do all day?

Perhaps one possible solution would be the popular Park and Drive programs of the West. That way you can still drive to work, if you absolutely don’t want to take a bus or walk, but you park out of the immediate center and take a bus to the doorstep of your office. And possibly somehow make bike lanes that are separated from traffic? Admittedly however, that would be pretty difficult to peddle to the public, as it would involve making car lanes narrower. Tartu is, however, only a hundred thousand. You’d think parking and traffic wouldn’t even be issues.

City of Solitude

2009-01-13T14:21:00.006+02:00

For such a small country, Estonians go to great lengths to be unique. This is surprising, as any Estonian who has ever been a tourist abroad is instantly granted one-of-a-kind status. Is there an Estonian in every port? Maybe. But Tartu goes further in its quest to be different.

I don’t want to harp on names again but I couldn’t resist commenting on what I read in the Postimees newspaper today. Last year’s most popular names were Laura and Rasmus. Now it’s common for everyone in the States to have friends named Mike, John, Jennifer and Sarah, but they’re all relatively equally popular. Laura and Rasmus beat out the competition with a big iron stick. However, the City of Good Thoughts and Ideas saw some unique innovations—Alondra, Caroliisa, Cherily, Chriselle, Ciara, Crislyn, Dayna, Edithtrin, Isaura, Jolandra, Jonne Bel, Keidy, Kenely, Mirellibel, Relibet, Rineth, Selina, Shanet, Skayler, Aler, Arkos, Bairon, Brayen, Cevin, Dante, Devon, Erdogan, Manuel Prasad and Rolf Hrothgar. There seems to be a fascination with the letters C and Y, letters that don’t really exist in Estonian.

Something else that is surprising is that for a country that loves dogs, Estonians are very choosy about what pooches they are actually willing to own. I see the occasional mutt here about as often as I see purebreds in the West. If you have a canine in this country, it has to be a full-blooded golden retriever, German shepherd, dachshund or—heaven forbid—toy poodle, and it has to have the almighty papers, proving that it is of royal blood. I built a snowman with my daughter that had a royal turd sticking out of its abdomen (the neighbor’s certified dachshund was given free rein in the backyard, blanketed with the white stuff).

So why all the fuss about dogs? Because a mutt is normal, average, regular? Are Estonians somehow projecting their own feelings of inadequacy by living out secret fantasies with their Labradors and Land Cruisers?

And Latin. While historically this language was used in medical diagnoses to bypass linguistic misunderstandings, Estonia is one of the few countries that still uses it today on a large scale (a couple other Eastern European countries use it too). Even the Main Building of the University of Tartu has its Latin name in big letters, and the library as well. I mean what’s the point? I’ve studied in four universities, each in a different country, and this one is by far the least down to earth. Even much of the non-academic staff wear the obligatory flowing garments of the self-proclaimed intelligentsia—you can always spot them on Town Hall Square. They’re the ones with the big earrings, long scarves, shawls and I even saw one guy wearing a cape who entered a university building. Professor Bruce Wayne?

A lot of people rest on the laurels of their last name, regardless of what you do yourself. I'm better than you because my great-uncle wrote a poem. The Miina Härma School—a public school—is rumored to go so far as to turn kids away just because their parents aren’t rich, or don’t have a job that grants them the right status, even though their kid’s a whiz and scored higher. You’re a mere accountant? Please be so kind as to remove your child from our gymnasium.

There seems to be a manhunt for identity going on here, and the spotlights are trained everywhere but Ground Zero. Estonians fought and sang for the right to be, well, Estonian. “Is this the Estonia we wanted?” It’s a popular catchphrase used by the media, and the overwhelming response is apparently “No comment.” The Treaty of Tartu was obviously signed here, and the names of the fallen, written on a marble tombstone, are not Cevin or Brayen, and the epitaph is written in Estonian. There is much to be proud of here—I’m jealous that I have no Estonian blood in my body. So what happened to the real Estonians?

City of Rats

2009-01-09T16:21:00.006+02:00

When you think of cartels you think of some South American drug lord in his jungle palace watching Scarface and petting his own personal puma with one hand and holding a glass of guaro in the other. You do not think of the legal definition, which is essentially a group of businessmen secretly agreeing to fix their prices, thus avoiding fair competition. Every modern country tries to fight this, and Estonia just joined the ranks.

But it’s when they joined that gets my goat. All the inflation of the past few years and not one investigation as to why. Officially inflation was at a high of around eleven percent. In reality, it was well over a hundred percent. It happened incrementally so no one would notice at first. A two-kroon spike on a box of Cheerios would go unseen, even though it’s ten percent right there. When it happens again the next month, and the next month, you quickly end up paying double.

Gas prices and excise taxes aside, someone’s gettin’ greedy and I think I know who. This past week the Ministry of Justice announced it would be combating cartels with new, stronger legislation. Before last year, there was not a single case or charge filed against anyone. Now suddenly there are two small cases about to go to court, even without the new law. And this is a good thing, right?

It should have happened years ago. Now that deflation is expected, there’s no more windfall profit to be made, so no one in the Ministry of Justice is getting paid off. Everyone’s already taken their booty and Minister Rein Lang’s pockets are fat. So for him, it’s a win-win situation—his buddies are rich and he takes credit for finally doing his job.

But prices aren’t going down, like they are in the rest of the world. That’s a smoking gun right there.

Estonia’s population is such that it’s hard to hold public office and not have conflicts of interest. It probably really is just coincidence if the prime minister and the richest four or five businessmen were old college frat buddies. But the public displays of back-scratching could be trimmed a tad. I’ll be watching to see if anyone prosecuted for price-fixing (and price-gouging!) has any friends in high places. I’m assuming not.

One of the ideas behind the new legislation is a leniency program, commonly known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Do I rat on my accomplice and get a smaller sentence, or do I keep my mouth shut, running the risk of a full sentence because he ratted on me? This program has been shown to be very successful in other countries, and it makes sense to do it here. And it’s about time too, but yet again I want to stress the sheer irony of the timing.

It will also be interesting to see how far Estonian business friendships go. We’ll either see a slew of ratting or not one little mouse peep.

The Ministry of Justice also claims that cartels in Estonia might be responsible for as much as a quarter of all inflation. I find this to be a gross underestimation. The number is probably correct, but on the wrong side. It’s probably responsible for three-quarters of it. Hard to believe? Not really, as you would be absolutely astounded to see how many of the businesses in Estonia are owned by just a handful of people. An economic oligarchy, as it were.

City of Meat

2009-01-07T11:39:00.006+02:00

After studying the pig sculpture at the meat market in more detail—the one at the end of the last post—I came to the conclusion that in a way, it’s fairly morbid. Not because it’s a statue of a pig, but a statue of a pig showing all the cuts of meat. It seems to go beyond the mere celebrating of death that so many holidays do. Don’t get me wrong, because I think this is one cool pig, but if you look at it through star-spangled blinders it would never fly in the States. Which is precisely why I like it.

I’m no vegetarian, and in fact I probably should eat less meat, but still—now that I have this image in my head I almost sort of feel sorry for the monster sows and hogs sacrificed every day so the Heart Attack Fairy will come round for a visit earlier than expected. Most sculptures are in honor of something. Tribute. But this offers no redemption for the poor swine’s shanks. It basically says, “We’re going to eat you.” I wonder what sort of weird three-dimensional art they had in the former Stalingrad.

There is another work of modern art in Tartu—the Father and Son statue. This sculpture is so odd that tourists and locals alike routinely have their pictures taken with it. Why? Because the baby is almost as tall as the dad but his schlong is gigantic in comparison.

Estonia is very European in that it accepts life and all its natural aspects. In fact, it goes even further. There aren’t many European countries where a group of sweaty guys would stand around naked drinking beer together, and frolicking in the snow in the same manner. I’m talking about the sauna, of course. While the rest of Europe doesn’t do this, they have no problem with it when visiting Saunaland. But try to get an American tourist to follow suit in their birthday suit. If they go at all, they usually go bundled up in the very towel they’re supposed to dry with after, rendering it useless.

Then of course there’s the legendary mixed sauna, that king (or queen) of all secret fantasies deep in the countryside on a dark winter night.

So my question is, why is America so prudish? It’s the capital of violent television and film, there are multiple cities where prostitution is legal and there is a highly developed network of swingers’ clubs. But if you say “fuck” on the tube or if Janet Jackson’s jewel-adorned nipples make a public appearance at the Super Bowl, a program almost strictly for men anyhow, people don’t stop talking about it for years, and the networks who aired it are heavily fined by the government. I remember a cop show from the nineties that was considered a breakthrough because some guy in the locker room briefly exposed the region north of his shanks.

It is, after all, the land of the Scarlet Letter. When Bill Clinton got his willy slicked the whole country was disgusted. In Europe, however, it gave him more respect. Not the adultery aspect mind you, but the fact that the US had a president who exhibited a human side. The French of course considered him one of their own because he kept a mistress.

Estonian does not have a rich vocabulum vulgaris but the people are not afraid to use what they do have. American English, however, publicly shuns any sort of profanity. Why? Well, “profane” itself essentially means “not of the church” or “not initiated.” So my unbaptized daughter is profane. Again, it comes down to religious, dare I say Puritan, roots. While that conclusion is not at all hard to come to via any path you might take, it still says a lot about the country’s foreign policy. While Estonians all think they know better than each other, America as a country thinks it knows better than anyone else. Whereas almost all the governments on the US’s shit list are also religious at the core.

Why is our deity better than yours? Because ours eats pork and doesn’t bathe with women.

City of Leaves

2009-01-05T16:11:00.005+02:00

The New Year always tends to bring out the best in people somehow. It might be all those resolutions people make, even though less than four percent are ever kept for longer than a week. It seems that many people in Tartu have decided to try to be nicer. Now I know it sounds plain odd that an entire city might try to turn over the same new leaf, but being the eternal optimist that I am—ahem!—we just may be witnessing the start of something big. Or people are just relieved that the last year in particular is over. I know I am.

After my being shut out of the post office before Christmas and left without a gift, I received an apology from Eesti Post. They didn’t admit they’d done anything wrong, as they were just following the rules, but they did say they were sorry for any inconveniences, no buts.

Mrs. Mingus gave me a cheese box to keep in the fridge. It was a bit big, so she decided we should get a smaller one. The shopkeeper said no problem, go pick one out and we’ll refund the difference. She even smiled. We tried the new one out and the lid didn’t rest on the tray part well, so we exchanged that one too. Again, a smile and no hassle.

Santa gave the Mingus family a Nintendo Wii. One of the controllers doesn’t work right, so I went to the shop to find out how to get it fixed. Initially they wanted me to return the whole console, even though I’d explained that it was just the controller, as the other was fine and I even tried a friend’s on my system, and it was okay as well. I stated that it was unacceptable to wait for a month while the controller in question was checked out by one of their in-house Wii experts, and the shopkeeper acquiesced and told me to just return the controller with the receipt, and smiled.

Two Rimi grocery store cashiers have greeted me with a Happy New Year and smiles, and one even told me to have a nice day.

On Saturday night Flasher T and I went out for drinks at Pool Kuus. The bartender didn’t have change for me and profusely apologized, offering a larger discount for the next beer. I didn’t redeem it because the room we were sitting in filled up with skinheads watching television in a bar on Saturday night—it was a cold night to have a bald scalp—but still, I never would have expected that kind of service.

Except for the post office, probably none of these people got an extended holiday. So what gives? Why’s everyone being so nice? Not that I want to look the Tartu Meat Market’s pig sculpture in the mouth, but it would be a good idea to figure this out so it can be repeated more often.

City of Meaning

2009-01-03T21:29:00.005+02:00

Over the years I’ve studied a few languages, Estonian obviously being one. And the first thing you usually do when you start with a new language is learn a few fixed phrases, typically along the lines of “Hey how’s it going?” and “One beer, please.” Ironically, I’ve never studied English in this way. Seriously, why should they offer a class in an American university on daily British English?

There was a group of English during my first stint studying in Europe. At our first encounter, one asked me, “Are you alright?” I didn’t know he meant “How’s it going?” so I looked to see if I was bleeding, then asked “Yeah, why?” I also didn’t know “fag” meant “cigarette.”

Years before Austin Powers, I hosted an Australian exchange student. The first thing he noticed in my home was a poster of two people dancing closely and the word SHAG in big letters. He timidly complimented it, and my mother responded, “I go shagging every Wednesday night!” The poor guy didn’t know how to respond, and we didn’t know there was a problem. Later of course we found out that “shag” means “sex” but in South Carolina it’s the state dance. Lots of relieved laughing.

When Americans greet each other, people under the age of fifty will normally say either “How’s it going? or “What’s up?” The standard responses are, respectively, “Fine” and “Not much.” They’re not asking for information because they honestly don’t want to hear it. It’s just a pleasantry, the infamous small talk. Often, if you pay attention, you’ll notice that “How’s it going?” is followed by “Not much” and “What’s up?” is answered by “Good.” And if you don’t like something someone has offered you, you lie and say it’s “sooo good,” and smile as you force down another helping.

These things are just forms of communication. Say one thing but mean another. But it goes way beyond words, of course. What’s acceptable for one culture may not be for another, and this needs to be taken into account when the two sides meet. More specifically, both sides need to take it into account.

Estonians don’t like to admit they have the same patterns. If they don’t like the food, then it’s “interesting” and a second helping is not taken. Maybe they just don’t want to eat more because they’re concerned about their waistline, but a lot of foreigners can find it insulting. I’m just pointing something out the way a tourist book would tell first-timers in Estonia that you have to make eye contact when toasting.

And some people do know this, but go too far. I had a dinner guest who described my food as interesting once, but he still cleared his plate and continued to take extra helpings. Instead of the obligatory extra scoop of food, he thought he had to finish all the food. All the food on the table, I mean. He didn’t look too good after four burritos. Cheers for making the effort though, I thought.

My favorite courteous word in Estonia is “normal.” In English and as far as I know most other languages, it means something is average, or basically what it’s supposed to be. Estonians however use it quantitatively. “How’s the food?” –Very normal. I’ve even heard conversations where someone says, “This is pretty normal, but this is especially normal.”

It’s the much sought-after Estonian compliment, but until you’ve figured it out, you’re not quite sure if you’re being complimented or not. You might as well tell the host their luscious dinner spread is edible. Which of course is an insult, although the opposite is intended.

Years ago when I volunteered teaching English at the University of Tartu, I was speaking to my “boss,” a nice older woman, after having just come in from the bitter cold of January. I had on my hat and coat but without gloves my frozen, numb hands were still in my pockets to keep them from falling off. A man whom I’d never seen before entered the room and immediately started scolding me for speaking to a woman with my hands in my pockets, and added that “we foreigners” needed to learn some manners. Hmm, well now I know.

Ten years later, I still can’t figure out what a lot of Estonians mean by their words and actions. And based on experiences in the States in November, I can’t figure Yankees out either. There will seemingly never be a shortage of work for philologists. Is that why there are so many in Estonia?

City of Faith

2008-12-31T12:27:00.008+02:00

Self-esteem is a funny thing. If you have a low self-esteem, you’d expect your behavior to be, well, quiet, soft-spoken. And generally it is, but come a crisis situation, or when someone needs your help in a shop, it can manifest itself as being demeaning toward others, not believing what others say, and somehow the low self-esteem can even appear as its mirror image—you know better than everyone else, until proven wrong. And when you are proven wrong, you revert back to being soft-spoken and quiet.

A good friend, mother of three, visited last Friday night from out of town. Her youngest kid got sick around midnight and they decided to drive home at three. She was later taken to the hospital after her fever spiked and a few other similar bad symptoms appeared. The diagnosis? Bacterial meningitis.

After hearing the news, I immediately started researching it so I could know what symptoms to look for in our kids and ourselves, as well as common treatments. Every governmental website from the West said that if you have come into close contact, like we did, you should immediately start on wide-spectrum antibiotics, even before the results of the spinal tap are in. This has reduced mortality in the West to only two percent in children. In Estonia the respective number is ten percent, and now I know why.

The doctor on call at the children’s hospital on Sunday basically laughed at us for being concerned and wanting antibiotics for something that was at that moment undiagnosed in us. We contacted the head of the hospital on her private number, and she was immediately concerned and ordered just what we needed, and instructed us to go right away because bacterial meningitis is no laughing matter. The on-call doctor must have been embarrassed because she never showed up, instead dispatching a nurse to see if we exhibited any symptoms.

Our friend, back home, had called an ambulance when her kid became lethargic. The paramedics and doctors scoffed and chided that this must be her first child. After the diagnosis, their behavior changed and they were as quiet and soft-spoken (and unseen) as our on-call doctor.

I myself have an undiagnosed heart problem—cardiac arrhythmia. There seem to be no triggers, but I’ve had four episodes, waking up at night and there’s just no rhythm. It’s not painful, but it’s fairly uncomfortable if your heart isn’t working properly. After the first episode, the doctors were baffled and said we should just wait for another episode to see what happens. I did get the exercise stress test, echocardiogram and a Holter monitor, but everything seemed fine. After the second, third and fourth episodes in two years, however, the doctors are saying we should wait for another episode to see what happens.

One funny thing I’ve noticed about a lot of Estonians—they don’t believe something until they’ve personally seen it, and even if they have no clue, they can’t ask for help. Like men getting lost and not asking for directions. It seems that these people have absolutely no faith in themselves, and even less in others.

If I’m right about this lack of faith—I mean, I can’t think of anything else it could be—then it’s possibly one of the great mysteries of the early twenty-first century. A perfectly capable, maybe even good, doctor is unwilling to do their job because they believe if they don’t act, they can’t make a mistake. Extremely talented Estonians terrified of showing their true colors. Reminds me of the ostrich sticking its head in a hole. Which of course is not true, but still.

I wonder where Prime Minister Ansip sticks his head. He’s the ultimate boy who didn’t cry wolf until the wolves were already obese. But seriously, so many people here don’t want to try or consider anything unless they’re absolutely sure it will work. That’s obviously just a cultural thing, compared to Americans always having an opinion and not being afraid to voice it. Two extremes on the axis.

After lots of meningitis research, however, I’ve read tons of horror stories in America of kids dying from being undiagnosed until it’s too late. The problem in Estonia is getting treatment (specifically, getting the doctor’s attention), but the problem in the US is diagnosis. Most doctors will just look at the symptoms and say it’s a stomach virus or some such. No tests. The Estonians, however, will routinely due blood work, which will at the very least point them in the right direction. Our friend’s kid would have probably died by now were it not for Estonian-style bureaucracy. How’s that for irony?

My New Year’s resolution is going to be to compliment other people when they do a good job, or even if they just do what they’re supposed to do. Maybe if I can give people a little faith in themselves, they might pass it on.

Hang in there Little D—we’re all thinking of you!!!

City of Salt

2008-12-28T15:40:00.010+02:00

Over the holidays we’ve done a lot of recreational activities. Such as eating out and going to the movies. The new Cinamon cinema complex in the new Tasku mall is pretty cool, I must say. But there are so many little things about Tasku itself that are fairly odd, I must say.

Most people don’t know about the underground parking garage. It’s just past the bus station on a street that has been made one-way due to the new traffic scheme due to the new mall. The turning lanes are a bit psychotic. But if you park in the main garage, you’ll undoubtedly get a bit frustrated trying to maneuver.

The signs they put up after opening show how much planning they put into building the place (see the next photo).

We went to the movies last night—Madagascar Two. Not a bad kids’ movie, but there were bits of extreme violence involving a lion, an old woman and repeated punches in the face. The real safari, however, was visiting Tasku itself. We wanted to grab a bite to eat before the film so we went to the pasta place on the first floor by the main entrance. While the wait is very long and the food extremely salty, it is pretty good, especially considering that prices range from forty to sixty kroons. But the line was too long, so we went to Rehepapp, the restaurant with chickens and eggs that you get to by walking through a sporting goods store.

The food there is a little less than edible—we didn’t finish our soup—but our elder kid wanted to play in the sandbox. A big, beautiful sandbox with log walls. The owners decided to oil the walls and fill it with sand before letting the oil dry, and now our kid’s clothes are covered with oily sand that we just can’t get out.

Then I couldn’t wash my hands because there was no soap in the john.

I also couldn’t help but notice, when walking out, that the mall itself has an unusually high number of pillars. Compared to a western mall, it seems that the developers took lots and lots of shortcuts. But it’s a direct result of what people expect. Regardless, I would not want to play hockey on an indoor rink that they would build. I am also afraid of touching the walls in the book shop (see the last photo).

So we went to the movies. It’s cool that you get drinks and such at the same time as you buy your ticket (if you haven’t already bought it via your cell phone). They offer drink-and-popcorn combos. We chose the one where you get two popcorns and two sodas. I wanted Pepsi and Mrs. Mingus wanted the orange drink. The cashier said they both had to be the same. I asked why, and the cashier responded that you could only enter one drink in the computer, even though the sodas themselves all come from the same machine. I suggested that she enter orange and just give me a Pepsi instead, that it would be our little secret and I didn’t think the computer would get angry. She hesitated, considered it, then exhaled loudly while pouring it and gave me a look like I owed her for going out on a limb. Even though I was the one who decided not to call the popcorn police.

I could have left the popcorn in a cow pasture over winter it was so salty. And whatever you do, don’t lean on the armrests if you have your drink there.

We took our baby too, in the carriage. The escalator was broken on the way out so we had to ask for directions to the elevator, which was unmarked.

I’m very well aware that it sounds like I’m complaining about nothing, but the whole point of this blog is to point out things that are easy to fix and that most people are afraid to say anything about. If the cashier for example is too anal to give you the drink you want, it’s going to get you in a bad mood. That bad mood will just add salt to other people’s wounded moods.

City of Hos

2008-12-24T10:21:00.008+02:00

Gingerbread cookies, the scent of fir in the living room, a warm light in the fireplace and a strong glass of egg nog are a few of the things that represent Christmas for me. Now that I have kids, making gingerbread cookies and the really cool tradition of a little elf sneaking into the little ones’ room while they dream of sugarplums and slipping a piece of candy in their slipper, left on the windowsill, are welcome additions to the holiday season. And wrapping lots of presents. Ho ho ho!

That is, if you can get the presents. A long long long long time ago, before the wind and before the snow, I ordered my older kid’s gift from the US. After seeing on line that it had been in Estonia for more than a week, I finally got the package slip in the mail yesterday—come pick me up! it read. So, off to the post office. Ho ho ho!

My number showed fifty-seven people ahead of me, so I reserved a spot in the corner and waited. Santa Claus called me and because I couldn’t hear anything due of the noise, I stepped outside. A moment later I tried to go back in. They had locked the doors. I knocked, it opened and I was informed that they had closed at four in the afternoon, two days before Christmas. I showed them I already had a number, three people in front of me at this point. No can do. Ho ho ho!

The post office woman rudely told me they would be open again next Monday. I showed her my watch and cell phone, synchronized to atomic time, and the time was two minutes before four. Her watch, however, was five after. She shut the door in my face. I knocked again and yelled, so she could hear me through the bulletproof glass, that I now had nothing to give my kid. She shrugged and walked away. Through the window I could see my ticket number called, and imagined my child’s Red Rider BB Gun spending the holidays alone on the shelf because of that unhappy woman. Ho ho ho!

Christmas means a lot of consumerism. It can be a bit off-putting, honestly. This year doesn’t seem much different due to the Depression either, what with all the crowds and traffic. I can’t remember the number exactly, but I think the Postimees newspaper listed forty-one percent of Estonians as not even wanting a present at all from Old Saint Nick. Where’s the Christmas Spirit? Ho ho ho!

The city government did a good job of decorating the downtown area I must say, and the little market on Town Hall Square is very cozy and inviting. As are the two massive snow hills for children—they even carved out stairs and corridors. However, traffic is a bit over the top. Not the amount of cars, but how they behave. In trying to make the light, they routinely block off intersections and pedestrian crossings, in turn preventing other convoys of traffic from proceeding. A simple police officer out there using hand signs would clear it up. And generate tons of cash from fines for a cash-strapped government. Ho ho ho!

While crossing the zebra on Kalevi and Riia Streets with my kid in tow on her sled, a large double-trailered Maxima (grocery store) truck decided to take a shortcut and almost ploughed us both over because he didn’t look first. Then he rolled down the window and yelled at me to get out of the road. It’s the same one in the picture. Ho ho ho!

As we prepare to have the first white Christmas in years, I can’t help but wonder if the forty-one or whatever percent of Estonians are right in not wanting to celebrate anything. It’s hard to have Holiday Cheer if so many people are angry. Or maybe they’re angry because, well, because they want to be? Ho ho ho!

Anyhow, I guess I need to go Christmas shopping now. To anyone who reads this blog, I do appreciate it and hope you enjoy it—it’s been a wild ride for me so far! Merry Christmas! Ho ho ho!

City of Bars

2008-12-21T16:06:00.006+02:00

For the past few years the Estonian government has been touting its economic management skills by showing everyone else in Europe that it is possible to simultaneously be a eurowelfare state and a progressive economic power with a budget surplus. A surplus of several billion kroons. Lots of praise and oohs and ahs, but what happened to that surplus? Was it invested, or just saved for a rainy day, or was it foolishly spent right away?

I used to work in my state’s government back in the Golden Age of the nineties. I thoroughly remember how my state alone once was able to produce a surplus of two billion dollars, while at the same time reducing unemployment to two percent, far below the ideal level. There were some legislators who felt it a good idea to invest or save the cash. Others, however, felt the need to give it back to the people in the form of a one-time check for a couple hundred bucks, which likely greatly benefited every bar in the state.

The cost of carrying out the Refund, as they called it, due to issuing millions of checks, was a few million dollars right there. And what happened a couple years later, once I was safely in Estonia? A lot of the legislators I worked for were charged with bribery, racketeering and other cute felonies in a federal sting. They are in jail now.

Ironically, several foreign observers had visited us to see how to do things. The same way how eurocrats visit Estonia in droves to learn from the Estonians’ e-government and now-dead tax laws. Will we soon see half the Riigikogu, or Parliament, behind bars? I mean, where’s that surplus money now? It sure would be nice to have.

The government here isn’t responsible for the “economic downturn,” as everyone’s calling it, although I think it’s pretty close to a full-blown depression. But they sure didn’t do much to prepare for it, despite warnings from everywhere in the world. What is their response? Well, a lot of the things that made Estonia cool are being changed.

Employment legislation—the amount of advance notice for a layoff has been changed from up to half a year to fifteen days, with similar cuts in severance packages. Sorry kids, two weeks before Christmas my boss fired me because he didn’t manage his business well and the government wanted to make life easier for him.

Home foreclosures—people maxed out their loans at the tip of the housing bubble, and now they owe more than their home is worth. Kudos to the local banks for being so willing to work with people in need, rather than just treating them like a number and kicking them out one after another. But at the same time, debt forgiveness would do wonders for the economy. Where could you get the money to fund something like that?

People have no choice these days but to pay bills on line, something a lot of Americans are still skeptical of. But if you have no choice, then it should be free, right? No, each transfer costs six kroons. Really, that’s the only thing about the entire system that bugs me. So if you have, say, cable, phone and cell, heating, electricity and general utilities such as water that are often paid directly to your apartment association, you spend easily thirty-six kroons a month on spending money, plus monthly card fees (fifteen kroons). Multiply that by a very conservative number of households—two hundred thousand—and you get more than ten million kroons just like that. Plus every time you pay by debit, the bank automatically gets three percent of the total transaction price. I can’t even begin to imagine how much that would be.

Yet why punish the bank for being a successful business? That’s just it though—if you want to function legally and normally in modern society, you need credit cards, bank accounts and so forth. Therefore a bank is a privately owned public service, but it has all the social responsibility of a local bar.

Banks could stand to redirect their monstrous profits to debt forgiveness, or at least grace periods. The government should be held accountable for squandering billions in surplus during what quite honestly is a national emergency. And maybe we should focus not so much on making life easier for a company owner who is forced to lay off his workers because otherwise he would have to dip in to his own excessive salary for a few months.

Estonia sets examples for others. Let’s not be the example of what not to do. Let’s raise the bar.

City of Lines

2008-12-19T11:41:00.003+02:00

Procrastination is something we’re all guilty of doing. Why do today what you can put off till tomorrow, right? If you have a job, you do the bare minimum of what needs to be done. Especially if you work for the minimum wage. Money is a good motivator. Yet sometimes I think that there are duties that aren’t written into the job description, but everyone knows about.

Pride, for example. You want to do your job well, even though you know you won’t get a raise for it. I might not care if the gum is full at my cash register, but I will wipe up the spilled milk on the conveyor belt. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do. There is a line of course, in two senses. People depend on your being quick and efficient, the ones waiting in line. And the line to be crossed. How far should you go to do the right thing at work?

Mrs. Mingus was at the post office yesterday, waiting in line to send off a last-minute Christmas package like everyone else. Out of all the registers in the main downtown office—I think there are six—only three were open. About thirty people with tickets that had a lower number than hers. In this situation, sometimes you think you’re going to get old and die before your number is called.

A guy died waiting at the post office. Well, she thinks he died. She first noticed the elderly gentleman only when all thirty of the more fortunate ticket-holders started running toward him or calling the paramedics. His wife (same age, so I assume they were married and not just partners in life) was holding him up, but apparently he had a heart attack while sitting on the bench, and just sort of froze in time and space.

Within a very short and respectable time, the ambulance came and took him away. It was probably the “reanimobile,” the one that reanimates you. During these three minutes, not a single postal worker reacted in any way. The manager didn’t come out to supervise anything, and the cashiers didn’t so much as look up. It’s not in their job description.

This morning after dropping off our eldest at school, we went for morning coffee and breakfast at the Kaubamaja Department Store, top floor. They advertise breakfast, so you’d think they’d have, well, breakfast food. They did have bacon and toast, but no butter or eggs. I asked if they had butter for my toast. Instead of going to look for it, the worker asked another one to get it out of the fridge in the kitchen. She snapped back, “We don’t have any butter.” None at all? “No, we’re out.” Do you have any eggs? “No!” Are you sure? You didn’t even look. “No!”

But when I tried to get the free refill on my small coffee before ten, the cashier said it was ten oh one, even though her computer screen showed nine fifty-five. So what difference does it make to her? She’s not losing any money. Why restrict the client? The only reason I waited till the last minute to get my refill was because I had to wait ten minutes for the first one because the cashier wanted to straighten up the boxes of juice rather than refill the water tank in the coffee machine, even though there were three or four people waiting for their morning jolt.

It’s amusing the priorities that people can have. You need coffee and this guy’s almost dead, but first I have to make sure the juice is in order.

I also find it amusing how local businesses tend to wait until a given product is sold out before ordering new stuff. So many times I’ve tried to buy chick peas, but they’re simply absent from the store shelves for months at a time. That’s why when I see them, I buy a dozen cans at once. Maybe we all do and that’s why they’re always sold out. But then shouldn’t the manager understand this and order more? It would make sense and money.

City of Names

2008-12-16T11:35:00.008+02:00

My kid started complaining that a boy at school had hit her. She had both eyes intact, so I decided not to say anything to the teachers—yet. But I was curious as to who this little mongrel was, so I asked for the name. Ralf Rocco. Not just Ralf, but Ralf Rocco. Makes sense too that the local kindergarten kickboxer’s name would sound like Rocky Balboa.

This boy, I’m sure, is a good kid, just going through a hitting stage like all little boys and girls do. But he will never be called just Ralf—he will always be Ralf Rocco. This annoys me for a number of reasons. First, just the spelling: Ralf is obviously Ralph, but phonetically spelled, as is the norm in Estonia. But if you Estonianize one name, why not the other? Why not Rokko?

Another problem is that Estonians don’t have middle names. Nor do they care to understand the concept. To them, I have two first names, and a last name. That means, anal as they are, that I can’t just sign my name Mingus M. Mingus, but I have to fully write out both “first” names. What’s more is that I’ve had trouble picking up packages at the post office because it’s addressed to Mingus M. and not Mingus Mingus, as my ID shows. My kids have Western-style middle names, but at school and at the doctor’s they have double first names. Never in my life will I call my kids by their middle names (as middle names are usually something embarrassing), but they will hear it every day, all day. Pity the poor French who live in Estonia and have up to four middle names.

But the biggest problem I have with little Ralph Rokko is his parents. First of all, aren’t they patriotic? Don’t they want to give their kid a real Estonian name? A brief look at the Ministry of the Interior’s website will reveal that Ralphie’s folks aren’t alone. The most common names this year so far have been Kevin, Marten (and Martin), Robert, Laura, Ken, Karl and various combos of these names. This tells me that Estonians are ashamed of their culture. And also that they are thirsty for middle names.

Other extremes of Estonianized names are Älice, Kätlyn, Džeimz (James) and the now-famous Mann Jaana.

Second of all, this is hopefully just a fad. Dweezil Zappa at times is certainly pissed at Frank for giving him the name of the hour. And his sister, Moonbeam. I sure know I wouldn’t take a guy named Ralf Rocco seriously as a doctor or investment banker. The poor kid is doomed to be a factory worker because his parents thought they were being cool.

At the same time, Estonia is one of the highest-ranking countries in the world for citizens legally changing their own names in adulthood. Maybe the Ministry of the Interior should take action. Well, it has in fact. Unless you’re married to a dirty foreigner like Mrs. Mingus, your name choices are somewhat limited now. Multicultural marriages are also limited to names common in either culture. But are the people in the Ministry capable of recognizing when a fellow alien has crossed the line? I’m sure an Estonian/Mexican couple could get away with calling their newborn Masa Faca. The old lady in the Family Statistics Department, where you register births and names, sure wouldn’t know the difference. The Ministry itself has two official English names apparently, according to their own homepage. Interior, and Internal Affairs. Sounds like the cops.

There are some Estonian names that just make me laugh, because of the English meaning. My favorite is the name Tiit (pronounced teat, like a nipple). There are three minor celebrities named Tiit Made, Tiit Sokk, and Tiit Sukk. These guys could never travel in English-speaking countries because the border guard just wouldn’t believe they were real. I imagine American footballer Dick Butkus also has problems. And poor Dick van Dyke, the actor. What were their parents thinking?

The Ministry of Internal Affairs could at least allow middle names so when Mr. Balboa grows up he could get some respect.

City of Hygiene

2008-12-15T00:48:00.006+02:00

Diversity is usually a good thing. As Thoreau put it, “Man … were made several in order that they might be various.” I don’t think old Henry had odors in mind, though. If you could visibly see the spectrum of smells, then Tartu would have good reason for calling itself the City of Good Colors. It’s all here. Eleven years ago when I first stepped off the train, I noticed a distinct oily odor. I just figured that’s why it was called Tar-tu. Because it lasted way past the train station. (It’s gone now though, I think.)

A lot of people in Tartu wear very strong colognes and perfumes. The kind that lingers in the stairwell long after your neighbor went out the door. That’s why we don’t have security cameras in our building. A lot of men act like they’re alpha males, strutting the way they do because they think their family jewels need extra space. These dudes usually sport a full-on Nike gym suit wherever they go. Maybe they work out like they want people to think, but if they do, they’re forgetting to shower. And use deodorant. With anti-perspirant.

It’s usually comical to see a female postal worker with fake fingernails that could be used for ice-climbing and those little silver balls on birthday cakes hanging from her eyelashes, but who smells like she personally has been delivering all the city’s mail-order packages. Yet she does want to get noticed…

Nike dudes consistently spit. I don’t know how they do it, but it’s always a well-formed ball of white foam, and they seem fairly adept at hitting a specific spot on the asphalt. When I try to spit, usually because I’ve inhaled a gnat, it goes everywhere and I need a tissue. I need to breathe in more bugs so I can be as good as them. Because spitting and stinking are masculine, apparently. I can, however, hock a lugey.

No wonder Estonians always take their shoes off when they go home. They know what they’ve been walking in. Americans, on the other hand, seem completely oblivious to the fact that someone’s peed or puked on the pavement, and they’ve walked in it, when they leave their shoes on at home, and even lounge around on their bed fully foot-attired. The baby also crawls around naked on the kitchen floor.

Pillow hair is constant amusement to me. Guys dressed in freshly ironed and pressed Monton suits going to work looking like a cow licked the back of their head.

I heard a tale that a used hygienic product for women was neatly placed on the top of an open waste basket in the office water closet. My friend said it looked like modern art. That reminds me of something Robert Deniro said on a comedy show, talking about suspected terrorists. A man named I-Zheet M’Drurz left skidmarks when fleeing after trying to attack the sewer system with a dirty bomb.

I don’t get why people can’t use the little toilet brush and remove their prints from the scene of the accident. And peeing on the seat? Is it too, well, heavy for you to lift, or?

Deli workers constantly cough, sneeze and wipe their noses before handling raw meats. I see it daily. An Irish chef I knew years ago, when he first opened the kitchen at Wilde in Tartu, was astonished that “the best chefs of Tartu,” who apparently were on his staff, didn’t know to use plastic gloves in the kitchen. He told them that even when cutting bread, you have to use at least one. The next day they wore the plastic glove on the hand holding the knife. I’ve even sent back rum and cokes because the knife used to slice the lemon had also been used to cut meat, without being washed.

I ordered a calzone at an Italianesque restaurant in Tartu’s new Tasku mall. I just happened to turn around as the chef was yanking it out of the oven because it was on fire, and I saw him blow it out before putting it on my plate. At the University Café once, our food was delivered with a really long, bright orange hair sticking out of the sour cream. We immediately complained to the waitress, who had really long, bright orange hair, and she pulled it out and just walked away. No apology for shedding on our food, no offer to replace it.

Tartu’s nursery school teachers have been quoted in the newspaper as saying that a household’s hygienic habits are best reflected in the children. They wash their hands more at school than at home, and kids cough in others’ faces.

The French were supposedly the first to use perfume to overpower the scent produced by certain bacteria breeding on the body as a result of infrequent bathing, which the nose instinctively (and rightly) regards as less than pleasant. However, recent breakthroughs in technology, such as running water and soap, have rendered it obsolete.

Apart from brushing your teeth and flossing, what is probably the single most effective practice of hygiene is the sauna. It really empties out those sweat glands and pores. But one visit a week does not replace the need for booster bathing. Estonian men claim to go take saunas that often. I just don’t often want to go with them.

City of Parasites

2008-12-11T12:51:00.005+02:00

Every country has certain peculiarities in their speech habits. Sometimes it’s a facial expression, sometimes a catchy word, and sometimes just a completely different way of speaking. These things are contagious and if you’ve caught it, you don’t notice other people doing the same thing. Here I’d just like to point out a few things for fun.

The Italians like to use their hands and lift their shoulders when speaking. The French pucker their lips while waiting to talk, like they want to kiss you yet again. The English wrinkle their noses and the Germans squint their eyes, as if they don’t quite believe you. The Americans have several little habits, for example constantly nodding in agreement, and sometimes you can even catch the near-invisible quick shake of the head to the side, meaning, “Yeah, I can do it,” or “That’s how it’s done in America!”

The Estonians have the habit of leaning their heads forward repeatedly while talking, and jerking it back for emphasis. It’s a very small, almost imperceptible movement, and it’s more common in older women. But the older women are also the likeliest to make uninterrupted eye contact with you. Watch a TV interview—the speaker will answer the question while looking every way but at the camera or reporter, save for quick glances issued at the same time as an important tidbit of information and a nod, followed by a jerk.

As for parasite words, the white English-speaking world is addicted to “like.” It’s, like, totally funny that you said that! If you pay attention, you could catch the parasitic usage of “like” more times in a minute of conversation than shots you could do in a night. And American women quite often, when speaking “like,” change their eyes and move their heads to the side, sort of, like, mind-shifting. Temporarily occupying another person’s body for the sake of example. She was, like, oh my gosh! Meaning she couldn’t believe it. Quotations are no longer used, having been made obsolete by the modern art of conversational theatrics. The Valley Girls have taken over.

And American blacks feel the need to aks for understanding at every turn. You know what I mean? Whereas Estonians want to present as many options as possible when they ask a question. That’s why all the sentences, or questions really, end in “vä,” a slangy word for “or.” Did you go to school, or…? Yeah I know, it’s like pretty weird in English, but it sounds so natural in Estonian, you know what I mean? Or don’t you? But I guess Estonians are very well aware of “vä” and “noh.” “Noh” means “well,” and it’s used to ask for results or to express a lack of having any other way to say what you’re about to say. Well? Did you go to school, or…? –No, it was, well, closed.

But my absolute favorite thing is a little style of speaking that Estonians practice once in a while. It was everywhere ten years ago, then it went away, again limited to the old ladies wearing hats with nipples on the top. Now it seems to be undergoing a complete resurgence, thankfully.

Estonians conserve a lot, and this includes voice and air, but it’s not like they live on Arrakis. This is probably why they often inhale when they speak. Is this what you want to buy? –Jah! (Yes, said while inhaling.) Not a moment to lose, not a breath to be wasted. The combo of voice and inhaling causes the body to recoil a bit, like a howitzer. Sometimes you get lucky and can hear a sentence change over to the other side half-way through. “I went to school today [and now inhaling] but it was closed.” And if you’re really lucky, once in a blue moon the speaker will say a long sentence, inhaled, at the end of a conversation, so you can hear the end of the breath, which sometimes comes before the end of the sentence. No point in exhaling because the convo’s, like, over, you know? The last words are not even whispered, instead consisting of a mish-mash of tongue and lip.

Believe it or not, I have even caught myself doing this. On the phone with my mother, I inhaled while answering a question. She repeated the question, thinking I had choked or who knows what. But while Estonians are still looking for their Nokia, this might be it. Get everyone to inhale at all times when talking. The tourist dollars alone will skyrocket the country to new heights of wealth. Even ex-President Rüütel would be much more interesting when he speaks. And I guarantee that crime would go down. [Inhaling] Give me your wallet!

City of Value

2008-12-08T17:07:00.005+02:00

Not to rehash the previous topic of Estonia’s poor performance in the venerable Big Mac Index, I will merely remind readers that the Estonian people have to work eight times longer to buy a Big Mac than their American compatriots. A recent headline in the Postimees newspaper also revealed that Tallinn was more or less officially more expensive than Stockholm, in that Finns seeking deals now went to Sweden for much of their Schengen-enabled shopping.

America, for those who have not seen it, is a veritable gold mine for deals of all kinds. If you know to shop at outlet malls, for example, you will be spoiled by Timberland boots that cost twenty bucks (with additional mark-offs to boot), Levis for the same price, and KitchenAid mixers for just under two hundred dollars. The respective prices in Estonia are two thousand five hundred kroons, nearly one thousand five hundred kroons and six thousand kroons. You can calculate the exchange rate yourself.

Incidentally, I’ve developed a price equation that is surprisingly accurate. Take an American retail price (not discounted), double it, add a zero and change the currency to the kroon.

Two things need to be kept in mind: the dollar is very weak at the moment, and most of this stuff isn’t made in the US. Even if the dollar were strong, like at its peak of, say, eighteen point six at the beginning of the millennium, it’s still a hell of a lot cheaper there. But the US is unique in every way, as we all know, so I’ll drop that comparison for now.

Why then is Estonia so dad-gommed expensive? I mean, if it’s all made in China and Vietnam, it can’t be the shipping. It’s not as bad as Tskhinvali at the moment, where if you still have a home standing you can’t afford to heat it (official reparations for a flat destroyed during the Olympic War is fifteen thousand rubles, not quite enough to buy a cubic meter of heating wood). But maybe that’s why fifty-eight percent of the Estonian population is considering leaving, if they haven’t already left. They won’t be refugees to North Ossetia like in Tskhinvali, but they are often unemployed construction workers in Stockholm, where prices are beginning to be cheaper compared to home.

I’d like to think that Estonian retailers are doing their part in forcibly reducing consumers’ ecological footprint, but when has a businessman other than Bill Gates ever done anything noble? It’s likelier that they are just incompetent. My job allows me to see a lot of behind-the-scenes, er, scenes. Local retailers buy from other retailers, not manufacturers. They don’t even buy from wholesalers most of the time. In the offhand chance that a locally made product is still cheaper than an imported one, the cheaper product will be made more expensive to match the import’s price. The concept of competition is often lost in the translation of currencies.

This picture shows a low-quality piece of furniture available at the new Mööblimaja furniture strip mall off of Turu Street. The price is in kroons. Someone would only buy this because the price is so expensive. Or so the shop manager hopes. But Estonians are starting to realize that shopping in Estonia kind of sucks. You could easily find a similar “table” from Ikea in Sweden for a few euros instead of a few hundred euros. There are now companies that will drive there, buy the thing you want, and deliver it to your home, all for less than a third of the Estonian equivalent. And it’s probably better quality, too.

Taxes do play a large part in high prices, but in this one thing, the government isn’t completely useless. They understand that lower taxes stimulate the economy. Even with these lower taxes though...

Estonia is one of the top ten freest markets in the world for some reason. Free market means Darwinian economics. I don’t want local retailers to go out of business, resulting in unemployment and alcoholism (and more construction workers), but I do want this Ikea importer to become a millionaire. If you can get better and cheaper stuff to consume, then why support Estonian businesses that can’t or won’t provide it? The only thing that patriotism and money have in common is the portrait on the bill.

City of Sarcasm

2008-12-02T17:08:00.005+02:00

Forms of humor, the use of wit and the employment of sarcasm and irony are as unique to a country as is its language. Furthermore, even individual countries that share a common language can differ sharply. Take for example American sitcoms. While hugely popular in the US, most people in the world who watch, including the English, simply fail to grasp the funny in modern American humor. The laugh machine sure roars when someone’s home video shows a kick to the groin or someone floating an air biscuit at the altar, but the only reason anyone else continues to watch is also the same as why you take a whiff when your friend tells you to smell his finger.

Estonians certainly remember last year’s Eurovision failure. Leto Svet was funny to people here, but not to anyone else. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was bad, even though it was.

Much of the information communicated in English is based on context. If you say you watch The Simpsons, it’s understood that you’re not talking about peering through your neighbor’s window. But in Estonian, you have to specify that you’re talking about a show. If you say you speak English, you have to specify that you speak the English language, and not food, even though the given verb is “speak.” Estonian in this respect is a very redundant language, meaning that you have to give all the information—otherwise it just doesn’t sound right to a native.

Sarcasm is a form of humor that exists in all countries and cultures in one form or another, and to varying degrees. It dates back at least to the Bible. It is considered by many to be the lowest form of wit, in that you insult someone by saying the opposite of what you mean. But according to a three-year old article in Neuropsychology (the medical journal, not the video game), “understanding the subtlety of [sarcasm] requires second-order interpretation of the speaker’s intentions. This sophisticated understanding is lacking in people with brain damage, dementia or autism.”

I should remember that next time my jokes are misunderstood. [Insert winking smiley face.]

Estonians have sarcasm of course, so it’s not brain damage that causes them to often not understand it. They simply use it more sparingly, and when I use it, they are not expecting it, whereas it’s the norm where I come from. It absolutely does not, however, mean that you cannot have some fun.

The best and only example I’ll use here is something I’ve done many times, always while shopping for matches. When I ask the shopkeeper where I could find matches (tikud, in Estonian), she invariably inquires if I mean fire matches (tuletikud), the official term for those things you start fire with. I respond that no, I want sand matches. Shaking her head in doubt, “No, we don’t have those.” I press on and ask if they will be receiving a shipment soon, fully knowing she has no clue what we’re even talking about. “I couldn’t say,” she shakes her head.

I enjoy the sidelong looks I receive just as an Estonian enjoys the grimace on a foreigner’s face when he tries head cheese for the first time.

A Dr. Kate Rankin discovered that the part of the brain that is used to understand sarcasm is none other than the same used to figure out what other people are thinking, a key tool in successful social relations. Without this innate ability (growing a new parahippocampal gyrus could prove tricky, if it’s the right and not the left one), it becomes more difficult to get along with other people. It would stand reasonable to say that sarcasm and compassion go hand in hand, if not foot in mouth.

But people can learn sarcasm. I’ve seen it. And though they themselves don’t use it, they feel more comfortable in the big wide world now that much more of its humor is accessible. If you can understand, you’re less likely to blindly criticize just because you don’t get it.

City of Abandonment

2008-12-01T19:17:00.009+02:00

Most of Estonia does not receive much accumulation in terms of snow. Meaning it snows a fair amount, but it almost never sticks. Instead, it melts and then freezes again before draining away or evaporating. It happens every year and should come as a surprise to no one. Black ice is the norm for a period of several months, and sidewalks are not easily navigable for wheelchairs, sleds, carriages or women with pole-vaulting shoes.

Salt every day keeps the snow plough away. It’s already used on larger streets, so there’s already environmental damage and personal car trauma. We might as well use it everywhere and drive in peace. Saharan dust storms result every spring because sand or cheap gravel more akin to kitty litter is the preferred solution.

But the biggest problem is that people, of course, park where they’re allowed to. Downtown—sure there’s some regulation and it’s somewhat enforced, but what about the rest of the city, where the majority of people live in apartments?

One of the roots of the problem is that people would rather park their cars on public streets than in their own back yards. Look at any large apartment building and you will see something resembling an abandoned field behind, whereas in front a two-lane road is crammed with poorly-parked SUVs and station wagons, severely restricting traffic and putting anyone who has to drive there in a generally bad mood.

There are a number of fixes for this, all easily doable by the City Government. Force people to park in the back if they have space. Get Falck or whatever the security company calls itself these days to enforce it. Tickets they issue will pay for the service itself, if the meter-maids themselves don’t pay the city for the right to ticket, and there will be less clogging of traffic arteries.

Abandoned cars are also a growing problem. Drive by a grocery store any given night after closing and up to a quarter of the lot is still occupied with neighbors’ cars. I understand they seem to have no space at home, but the fact is they probably do. In other countries, if a car is parked in a lot after a certain time for no apparent reason, it can be towed. Or have a clamp, called a boot, put over the wheel that is unlocked only when the owner foots the bill. More money generated for the city.

The snow ploughs did a fair enough job during the recent
“blizzard” (I think officially it was eight centimeters in Tartu, or three inches), considering that cars were abandoned pre-storm every which way on the streets. Parking in other wintery wonderlands follows a “snow day” scheme, meaning that every other day the car has to be parked on the other side of the street, marked by a sign so there’s no confusion. The streets are beautifully clean, instead of tons of grey slush. If you don’t move your car, it’s tagged and bagged. More municipal moolah.

Tartu’s streets today have more than three times the number of cars than at the turn of the century. The City Government’s policy? There is no policy. They built one smallish parking lot downtown at the expense of several old trees. But now there’s a budget crunch, so perhaps it would be prudent if the Town Council got its act together and occupied itself with doing things that cost no money and in fact generate more revenue, such as this quickly snowballing problem.

And check out wrongparking.blogspot.com, where I got this next photo, taken in Tartu. Fantastic!

City of Bureaucracy

2008-11-25T12:36:00.006+02:00

After thinking a lot about what is commonly known as the Soviet Mentality, many interesting examples have presented themselves, along with slightly unexpected theories and results. I have come to the very preliminary conclusion that this mentality is not so much a result of bureaucracy as it is a loss of compassion. Or even humanity? Then again, it seems that they are very closely connected. One thing to consider is that selfish behavior is a direct result of low self-esteem.

A guy who is fairly well known, Max Weber, wrote a lot about bureaucracy in the distant past. He was pretty much for it, from what I can recall from university, yet he left a bunch of warnings of how it would take a turn for the worse in actual practice. The biggest one, in my interpretation, is that bureaucracy would remove personal liability from members of the system. Don’t blame me—I’m just doing what I’m told.

Passing the buck becomes an everyday affair, and I think we’re all familiar with this trend in Estonian politics especially. Just open the Postimees newspaper and read the “Why” section, where questions are asked about “why” something has or has not been done in a certain way. No one ever admits guilt or responsibility. That pothole is still there because I haven’t been told to fix it yet.

People lack the basic social skill of apology.

This trend can happen in a number of ways, and it effectively kills the breeding grounds for original thought, or thinking outside the box. As time goes by, more rules are created, and it naturally becomes more difficult to change the fundamental structure. Contradictions in law can arise, yedda yedda yedda. Common sense takes the back burner.

Anyone who has ever had to deal with “registration” workers anywhere—the women with two colors of fluffy hair you have to give your line ticket number to—will fully understand this.

I read today how, during this blizzard, people in Tallinn were getting their cars stuck and couldn’t move them. Before the roads were even ploughed, the meter maids were out ticketing people left and right. The company that issued these tickets responded that the law was the law. They may be right on some level, but on another level this is a complete lack of compassion.

Refusing urgent medical care until proof of insurance is established, shining examples of mathematic proficiency in shoveling the snow in front of your own garage but not your neighbor’s, anything having to do with public service—these are just some tales of bureaucracy gone wild. Ironically, when I started writing this I received an email from the US embassy stating that I would once again have to appear before the consul with my infant daughter’s passport in hand in order for her to receive a Social Security card. They need her signature.

This reminds me of the little baby in Arizona who couldn’t get on a plane because someone with the same name was on the terrorist watch list.

Overall the problem here is not limited to Estonia—it of course exists everywhere—but I think the Soviet hangover could be making it a tad more painful than elsewhere. Look at consumer protection laws. If you want to make a return the shop is only obligated to follow through if you can give a good reason and if the original packaging is still fully whole. Meaning if there’s any kind of wrapper, you’re screwed. In the US it’s incredibly simple. The shopkeepers only get annoyed if you try to explain why you want to make the return or exchange.

It’s that extra bit that people have to do. Shovel one more row of snow for your neighbor. Think about why someone has left their car in the snow. Flush the toilet before you leave the stall, and for heaven’s sake don’t smoke in front of shop doors just because you can.

If local banks wanted to make extra money right now, they’d outsource their way of thinking to the government.

City of Hope

2008-11-24T10:52:00.006+02:00

The past month was a unique experience in that I travelled through nine states for two weeks before and after this historic election. The entire West Coast was more or less a shoe-in for Obama—the president whose name you can’t say on an airplane. But people were rightly disenchanted with the whole voting process, what with the fiasco of Dubya’s first election.

Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Idaho, however, were different stories. I was caught in the mountains during a snowstorm north of the Grand Canyon during the Big Day (nine thousand nine hundred and eighty feet in altitude!), but by nightfall we were pulling into Salt Lake City and heard McCain’s magnanimous concession speech live on the radio. It was official—we had a new kind of president.

Or so people seemed to hope, from what I saw. Everyone was talking about it, and while I didn’t want to broach the subject of politics with an unknown, probably very conservative, resident of a time zone named Mountain, I did overhear a number of interesting things. Perhaps the best example is as follows:

At a truck stop in the middle of Idaho, which is unfortunately known as a Mecca for skinheads, the cashier had a shaved head, and the obligatory scar to boot. A wiry, middle-aged woman in front of me, a local, was paying for her diesel and cigarettes. She asked Mr. Clean what he thought of our new president. He quietly replied, but loud enough for me to hear (likely due to my skin color), that “the white people” were gathering that evening to protest somewhere. I felt the need to ask why he felt the need to say “white,” as if there were any other kind in that region, but I held my tongue and looked at the newspapers on the shelf.

The woman continued that we should give Obama full support, and the benefit of the doubt, at least until he screwed up. She sounded genuine, and she sounded hopeful. Mr. Clean lowered his eyes in thought and almost imperceptibly nodded, not saying another word.

The people of the Left Coast were the nicest I’d met anywhere on the trip, with the exception of Seattle proper. But the one thing they lacked was a visible sense of pride, or hope. After the election, however, even rural Idaho seemed to radiate with an energy I’d not seen before. It even gave me hope. And Idaho voted for Father Time.

I do believe race played a more important role in South Carolina, where black people are nearly thirty percent of the total state population (here too, the other guy won the electoral vote). Keeping in mind that Obama is only half black, I think the general saying is that if you’re even an eighth black, you’re black. I’d be very interested in knowing how many of the South’s white folk are actually a hundred percent white.

But officially race didn’t matter there, so for the sake of argument I’ll concede them that. What I did repeatedly hear was that people didn’t like Obama’s plan of higher taxes for those earning over a quarter of a million dollars a year. They beat the system, they earned the money, so why should they be penalized? That’s a very good argument, and it would definitely deserve more attention, but considering that McCain’s economic and tax policy was less than miraculous, it’s a weak argument for not voting Democrat (none of the people who gave this reason were wealthy).

Still, there were hints of hope in their voices.

One thing’s for certain—while I still picked up on racial slurs and jokes in the South (and people still whisper when they say “black person”), I was pleasantly surprised by the progress made in the fifteen years since I left. Less of a divide and more of a real sense of community.

If America can rally around a black president and overcome mistakes in history, then maybe there is something to be learned in the international community besides consumerism, unilateralism and religion. Not that Estonia should elect a Russian president, but it could prove interesting.

City of Jetlag

2008-11-20T14:31:00.007+02:00

Waking up to the jetlag of international travel is always fun, especially with two toddlers who have no concept of “before dawn.” But we’re back, happy to be back, and we had a great time. After that post in Portland, I did not have access to a computer that would allow me to do anything but surf various pre-approved sites, much less upload anything, so that should explain the long absence.

In a large boiled peanut shell (I’d forgotten how good they were), we landed in Seattle, spent a week in Portland, including a weekend trip to Astoria and Cannon Beach (The Goonies!), headed down to San Francisco via the Redwood Forest, checked out Berkeley, then drove to Las Vegas via the great cities of Barstow and Mojave. Then on to the Grand Canyon, Salt Lake City, Boise and then flew out of Seattle to South Carolina. There we spent time in Charleston and Columbia, and then went through Savannah on the way to Atlanta, where we got on a plane back to Estonia.

We drove eight thousand five hundred kilometers. Only half of that was on highways.

My initial impressions upon the return, after going to the shop this morning for food, are that young men wear a lot of cologne, there are a lot of old women everywhere, I saw fifty people standing in line for Fish Days at the Rimi grocery store at eleven in the morning, and people actually stop for pedestrians at the crossings.

I was still in American Courtesy Mode when I got to the cash register. My “Hi, how’s it going?” was met with a suspicious stare, followed by a reluctant “Hi.” I was embarrassed and didn’t look at her again, but I don’t think she noticed.

One big difference is customer service in airports. Our travel agent at Baltic Tours forgot to change our tickets when the airline cancelled one of our flights. She also forgot to issue our youngest child the necessary paper ticket, whereas in the modern world everyone else just has e-tickets. That cost us about four hours at the airport. We complained and got no reply. The airport staff weren’t happy with our luggage either. Too many pieces or something like that.

Anyhow, coming back was a cinch. Self-check-in computers let you breeze through the line, no questions asked about our seven fat bags that we checked, and we could take the fold-up carriage on board with no hassle. In Amsterdam, we took a smaller plane and had to stow it under the cabin, politely assured we’d get it back at the gate in Tallinn. We didn’t, and when we asked, the Estonian attendant assured us it would be easier for him if he didn’t have to go look for it (those are his words). I guess he was too busy watching people walk by.

We could not have got to the baggage claim area any faster than we did, and we went pretty fast. Our bags were already waiting. In the States we had to wait about half an hour each time. That’s due to either airport size or efficiency, but I was still impressed.

US Customs is pretty annoying, as I recalled in the previous post. The Europeans are pretty relaxed. I asked the security guards in Amsterdam if I had to remove my footwear, as we did in the US. They smiled and said something about stinky shoes, and then laughed about the Americans’ paranoia. I also heard a complaint about having to put all your liquids in a plastic zipper bag, as if that would prevent exploding baby food from taking down a jet. But we still got metal knives with dinner.

City of Choice

2008-10-25T10:57:00.012+03:00

Little differences go a long way, even though most people wouldn’t expect them to. The people in Oregon are a unique breed. They seem generally nice and happy to see you, without the false politeness of the South or the overeagerness of the Midwest. I still find it a bit distracting though when shopping. I guess I’ve been Estonianized. I don’t care about how your day is—I just want to look at the shirts hanging on the rack.

I was told once that if you smile or laugh in public in France, and you’re by yourself, people will assume you’re disturbed. Everyone here must be loony. They look genuinely happy.

The most common question is posed when I show my ID for paying by credit card. Where is Estonia? At first I responded by saying it’s next to Finland, or Russia. Vague notion of understanding. So I decided to have some fun. Now I say it’s next to Latvia. A vapid “Oh, right” is invariably the response. Even though they see my English name on the ID and credit card, they still compliment my English. I had no clue that I had an accent now.

The product selection is fascinating. Fifteen flavors of Coke, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see diet celery on sale in the produce section of the grocery store. Every highway exit has signs listing all the restaurants, but they’re so numerous that by the time I make a decision, I’ve already driven past and it’s too late. I have to decide again at the next exit. The selection is simply overwhelming.

Oregon has an amazing microbrewery culture, but unfortunately you can only buy six-packs, so sampling is a little difficult without company. So far I’ve had an unexpectedly good pumpkin ale, and I’m sipping a Pyramid Apricot Ale right now. This is something the Estonians should definitely try, because they’re really good at making beer, but it’s all more or less, well, beer. It tastes like beer. Maybe instead of Orange Vana Tallinn someone could attempt an A.le Coq Rhubarb?

I don’t see many manholes anywhere. Driving is nice and smooth.

But the airport in Seattle was embarrassing. Apart from looking like an old public toilet, we got our bags, went through customs, then had to give our bags up to the airport staff, got on a train to another terminal, then picked up our bags again. After being awake long enough to see two sunrises, we just wanted to get to the car and go.

No. Somehow customs figured out from my “no,” when asked if carrying any fruits and meat, that we had fruits and meat. Thing is, I didn’t know we had fruits and meat. A couple Estonian apples were confiscated from our kids’ snack supply, and they suspiciously eyed the Estonian baby food in an unopened jar. They were worried about the beef it contained, citing Mad Cow as the reason.

Overall, I really got the feeling that I was “allowed” to enter my own country, after some debate. All the paperwork to fill out on the plane, such as listing the value of all my possessions checked below deck and whether I planned on selling them here, was a bit off-putting. Or maybe it was just the effect of being ten time zones away from home. The bureaucracy is somehow funny. The government knows you’re on the plane, they already have multiple listings of your passport number, but you still have to enter it again on the forms. Reminds me of picking up a package from the post office in Estonia—you have to list your ID number and the personal identity number, which is also on the same card, which is also in their computer. Estonia is really on to something with their M-Parking.

I have yet to see any really obese people here. Fat—yes; overweight—definitely. But nothing you wouldn’t see in modern Estonia. Except that I went to a local bar next to the hotel where a friend was staying when he flew out to visit me here. It was karaoke night, and a plus-sized woman was emotionally singing along to a song that was about a mysterious cat with no hair that she wanted to give away for free.

From Portland you can see the infamous Mount St. Helens, which blew up twenty some years ago, and the monstrous Mt. Hood, behind which is a desert. The Columbia River Gorge sports the best windsurfing in the world, and a lot of beautiful waterfalls to match. I’ve also been told to watch for people with shorn black teeth, the result of crystal meth consumption. Very, very interesting place.

Oh, and state law forbids you to fill your own gas tank. Attendants will do it for you because it creates minimum wage-level jobs. Like baggers at the market. Kind of a good idea, really—the service industry is perhaps a bit overdeveloped here—but it’s just more people that you are forced to communicate with. Which is only a good thing, right?

City of Emigrants

2008-10-15T21:12:00.011+03:00

In today’s edition of the Postimees newspaper, the results of an on-line poll revealed some startling news, if accurate. According to the poll, while forty-two percent of respondents replied that they would not leave their homeland, thirty-nine percent said they had considered moving from Estonia, nine percent said they were planning on it, and another ten percent revealed they already lived abroad. This hints that fifty-eight percent of the Estonian population is at least considering leaving. That number speaks with a pretty loud voice.

Why would so many people want to leave? Who knows? But something is making them unhappy, in the officially unhappiest country in the European Union. Is it just because of recent events in the global economy, and it will pass as soon as the dust from the collapse of world trade passes? Who knows? Is it merely a small group of people using big words to get the attention of the government because of small grievances? Who knows?

The last time I was in the United States was in 2005, and before that it was 1999. I remember before leaving on the last trip—I was happy to go see friends and family, and the only things I really missed were the geography and certain foods, including beef. I wanted a reminder of what life was like in the real world.

And while it was good to see those friends and family, and see mountains, an ocean with waves, alligators in a swamp, I was disappointed by the food. After eating mostly organic and homemade food, the stuff over here, if prepared with care, simply tastes better. Even McDonald’s in Estonia is better, because for the workers here, it’s a job that can lead to a career, but in the States, and often in Western Europe, it’s just high-schoolers earning money to pay for their first cars and movie tickets so they can be seen making out with their girlfriends in public. The burger is rarely in the middle of the bun.

The only real differences in 2005 were that people were scared, they were all Republicans, and there were self-service cash registers in the grocery stores. Oh, and DVDs. This time I think people will still be scared, albeit for different reasons, they’ll all be Democrats, and hopefully there’ll be a new surprise waiting for me. Maybe they’ll have stopped writing paper checks? By the end of the trip though I was anxious to get back to the real world—Estonia. It’s small, yes, and people often wear blinders, but life isn’t handed to them on a silver platter. McMansions and McPickup trucks have to be earned (unless you’re a realtor). You feel slightly like less of a number in Europe, and especially in Estonia.

That a majority of the people here want to live abroad is just about as surprising as hearing, after the first couple years of Dubya, that a record proportion of Americans already lived abroad. It’s estimated to be anywhere from five to ten million—roughly one percent of the population. Another one percent of the population is also in prison at this particular moment, also an all-time high. Is there a connection? Well, in terms of the prison number, I certainly hope not, but in terms of the proverbial grass being greener on the other side, most definitely. And it is not greener anywhere, it’s just a different shade of green.

I know a lot of people misunderstand the purpose of my blog. It seems like a whiny, complaint-ridden tabloid. But the truth be known, I wouldn’t live here if I didn’t love it! It’s a free world now, and anyone can live anywhere. The only reasons I say the things I do are because they’re either true, or I just want to point out the flaws in hopes of making it even better. Actually it’s both.

For the next month, I will be a tourist in my own country, seeing the West, which I’ve never seen before. I will see an active volcano, trees wide enough to drive cars through, the home of the Mormons, and I will get hitched again, this time in Vegas. I will likely not find the time or opportunity to post more than once or twice, but within a month, I’ll be itching to get back to Estonia.

One thing I’ve noticed before even leaving is that it’s more difficult to buy things in the US on line with a credit card not issued in the US, even if it’s Visa or MasterCard, American companies.

See you soon!

City of Numbers

2008-10-09T15:21:00.005+03:00

“Estonia is a small country.” Anyone who has ever met an Estonian has heard this statement. And it’s true, too, except that in total size Estonia is number one hundred thirty-two out of two hundred thirty-three. There are one hundred and one smaller countries, including Denmark, Holland and Switzerland. Looking at it a different way, the average size of a country is fourteen times bigger than Estonia. In terms of population, it ranks in at one hundred forty-eight.

Yet it is part of the third largest common market in the world—the European Union, with half a billion people. Sixty percent larger than the US. Theoretically, the EU’s Common Market should make Estonia no smaller than, say, Maine. And both are geographically peripheral.

The expansion of the EU should have allowed Estonia to improve on a little term from Economics-101 called “economies of scale.” For example Wal-Mart, that loved and hated Gigantor of the American retail industry. The larger you are, the larger market you have, the more outlets you can sell in, and the lower your unit cost will be. Everyone wins. This financial car ran out of gas when it rolled off the ferry in Tallinn.

Estonia officially has the highest average clothing costs in the EU, and I’m sure there are a few other things, like furniture. You know something is wrong when Finns come to Estonia to buy cheap booze, but Estonians go to Finland to buy cheap clothes and Ikea sofas. Especially as furniture is a huge industry locally.

So what’s the problem? Again, it’s not everyone, but it’s enough to create a generalization. Most Estonian companies just don’t want to work with foreign companies. They don’t want to merge, they don’t want to sell out. And the biggest reason is they just don’t care, because they think they’re doing fine on their own. It’s a common problem in all the new EU countries. The current financial meltdown will hopefully change some opinions at the management level, but as it stands now, Estonian business is holding the Estonian people hostage. The country is in the top ten for free markets, but I don’t see any consumer freedom. Smaller selection, higher prices, and that’s it.

Go to a clothing store that has prices listed in multiple currencies, do the calculations, and you’ll see that the Estonian price is often upwards of thirty percent higher than the others.

According to the Big Mac Index, which indirectly measures how much you can buy in local prices versus how much you work, your average Estonian has to toil approximately eight times longer than an American to buy a Big Mac. You’d think that’s a good thing, but keep in mind that the National Waistline is quickly expanding. Faster than business, at least.

And business is a cutthroat endeavor. Kill or be killed. Yet some cooperation is required. As individuals continue to look for their “Estonian Nokia,” they’re all stepping on each other’s heads. There are a few state-financed institutions, like Enterprise Estonia, that provide funding for new innovations, but it’s just not enough, even though it’s already more than what most countries do. The problem is mentality. People are still expecting something for nothing, due in large part to the now-popped real estate bubble.

I’m reminded of a children’s story called The Little Red Hen, in which a hen plants her own grain of wheat and later eats the loaf of bread baked from it, refusing to share it with the other animals. Why? Because they in turn refused to help her sow, harvest and mill the wheat. They sure looked hungry at the end of the story though.

City of Smiles

2008-10-07T11:16:00.015+03:00

It has been suggested that the smile can reveal a lot about a person and even a culture as a whole. But be prepared—in order to discuss anything as a whole, the popular “generalization” must be employed as a tool! That doesn’t mean that everybody falls into a given category, but enough of them do to create a dominant perception of a group. As a whole.

The longer I spend outside of the United States, the more estranged I become, quite obviously, to Americana. Things that were normal, everyday affairs now seem simply alien, particularly the smile. Yes, Europeans smile less in comparison, but it’s the shape of the American smile that gets me. Somehow the upper lip is straight, and the lower lip often adopts the shape of a pot, or a pan. Sloped at the edges yet flat at the bottom.

I’ve known for a while that something was wrong with it, but after doing a little reading for the good ol’ blog I think I understand. It’s not a smile. It’s exposing one’s teeth (a sign of fear in our cousin the chimpanzee). And Americans have very white teeth I might add. Almost suspiciously so. Like Northern Europeans dye their hair, so do we our teeth. There’s only one color available though. And about a third of the people in this photo are not white. Can you guess which ones?

How genuine a smile is can be proven by the appearance of crow’s feet, the little wrinkles in the corners of the eye, that appear during the act. This is known as a Duchenne smile. Without it, a smile is nothing more than a mask (or it means you don’t sunbathe, or it’s the result of Botox). Research has also shown that smiles are the natural human response to positive stimuli, crossing all cultural barriers. Slightly contradictorily, however, similar research suggests that all physical reactions (i.e. movements) are socially learned. I think the truth is a healthy mix of both. We’re happy, we smile. And we smile like everyone else smiles. The interesting part is how the American club has every conceivable world nationality as a paying member. And they smile the same.

A real smile is linked to the release of dopamine by the hypothalamus. Dopamine is the happy hormone. It’s also released when you smoke or snort cocaine. Perhaps anti-drug enthusiasts should consider using this in the literature they provide to teens?

I don’t know why Americans feel the need to smile in all situations. Well, I do understand it as the local culture dictates that you must appear pleasant at all times, but I don’t know how this culture developed. The Northern European culture, especially that of Estonia, dictates that you should smile hardly at all. Among friends, after a really funny joke (one not involving a hedgehog), or when super-sloshed, and that’s about it really for the old-school guys. I don’t understand how this would come about either.

But now the American smile is starting to bare its teeth in places here in the Baltics. Far from being able to stop the spread of a culture, we should instead decide if we embrace it or not. Should Estonians continue to repress their smiles, or should they adapt the North American superficiality?

Either way, I’ve learned an important lesson writing this. The straight, unsmiling Estonian face is just as unreadable as the ever-smiling American face. Both faces wear masks, and on rare occasions, crow’s feet can be seen in the eyes of both peoples. I wonder how orthodontics would factor in to all this.

City of Herds

2008-10-01T10:31:00.004+03:00

When shopping there’s a difference between men and women. Most men will enter the shop, concentrating on the one thing needed in this foraging expedition, and make a beeline for the goods, hoping to pay and leave before the wife even notices that he’s in a shop. Most women, however, will browse for hours unwrapping various items and holding them up to the unwilling husband’s back or legs or torturing the kids all day in the same way.

Once in a blue moon, I will look around for something to buy. Not shopping for shopping, but there are several options available and I need to choose between them. So I’ll make beelines back and forth between, say, two shirts, to see which fits best, compare costs, and just let it sink in that I’m going to buy something for myself instead of my wife buying it for me.

Mrs. Mingus and I have both noticed these patterns while shopping. About half the time, one of the items I’m considering, which probably has not been touched by a customer in days, suddenly disappears while I’m looking at the other item being considered. I just put the shirt down, take a few steps away, and abracadabra it’s gone! After several instances of this, I started to get suspicious, so I paid closer attention. It’s another customer, not the clerk.

This reminds me of something I read a few years ago, called “herd mentality.” Basically it goes like this: if you’re uncertain of something, and the fear centers of your brain light up, your ability to choose freely diminishes, and you’re subconsciously given to doing what others do, thus creating the “herd.” The poor guy in the same boat as me, unsure of how to behave in this shopping environment, sees that other people (in this case, me) are considering this bit of food, so he gets it while the gettin’s still good. Had I not looked at it, neither would he have.

Maybe, if I have a bit of time and the right mood, I will start seeking out the worst, ugliest garments I can find, and inspect them when another shopper is in the area. Perhaps that’s how the pink polka-dotted leather belt will find an owner.

This would also explain such phenomena as swarms of people at a used car lot. One person expresses interest in a specific car, and suddenly there are three other guys standing there basically willing to start bidding, whereas two minutes earlier they had been perusing with an expression of automobile omniscience. Makes you wonder if this one person gets kickbacks from the dealership.

But does this indicate a general fear in the population? Or a fear of appearing inadequate, from not being able to make a quick, decisive choice? Or something else? Like a run on the bank. It would, however, appear to explain the National Mood I’ve mentioned before, how a majority of people seem to behave the same way while driving on different days—sometimes everyone’s angry, other times everyone’s polite.

Honestly though, I’ve not experienced this odd shopping anomaly in other countries. But I have heard tales of the long Soviet lines to buy items as trifling as a thermos. If you’re over sixty and in Estonia, I’d be willing to bet you have several sleeping bags and thermoses tucked away in a cupboard somewhere, in case you need them some day. You never know—better buy that shirt before it’s gone!

City of Software

2008-09-27T11:37:00.008+03:00

Eleven score and twelve years ago, a bunch of rich old white guys decided they didn’t want to pay what they considered to be high software prices without having a say in the matter, and so they digitally signed some emails, fought a cyber war, and poof! they had their own computer and just a few years later created an operating system. And their software was pretty novel at the time, opening windows of opportunity for everyone just like them to plant their own apple seeds.

Over time new software patches replaced gaps in security, upgrades allowed more users, user interfaces were made more transparent and the software programmers were given the right to pay themselves as much as they wanted, with little managerial oversight.

Eventually the software became so complex and advanced that more memory and a hard drive were needed to keep the computer running, but it’s difficult to install new components without shutting the system down for a time. To circumvent this, the programmers created even more patches and upgrades to temporarily fix the problem, but without a system restart the new bits of software could hardly be effective, instead draining the remaining resources even further and thus creating a need for even more patches and upgrades. In time, it took many years for new programmers to learn what should have been simple binary code, and users had no hope of understanding what they were forced to use. The irony is, if the user contracted a virus, they had to pay for technical support themselves. The system was further slowed by spyware and the fact that even in the privacy of their own homes, users were forcibly exposed to ads and threats of what would happen to their eternal processors if their computer crashed and they hadn’t subscribed to an ecclesiastical pension plan in their local chat room.

Meanwhile, most people were in a frenzy to collect as many video games as possible, and new ways of gaming were constantly being developed until the gaming industry was just as hopelessly complicated and corrupt as the software industry. The greed was so great that brilliant ways of acquiring games from the neighbors were employed, but most of the time it just pissed them off and invited bot attacks. Yet the video game platform could not be updated without substantial improvements in the operating system, which just wouldn’t be possible without a complete restart. There were even those who believed that a new computer was needed, taking the ideals and principles from the current outdated system.

It is clear today that the United States needs a new motherboard, and Sarah Palin is not the answer. She is just Bush with a bush. McCain, Obama and Biden, in the end, are not much better. It’s time for a restart. We need to stop playing video games. We need to stop producing spyware. We need to offer free service, upgrades and patches for those who need it, not for those who lost $700 billion visiting on-line casinos. When the CEO of the country’s largest bank can walk away with $13 million in severance pay after the bank goes belly up, and it’s perfectly legal, it makes me want to raise my arms, and I don’t mean the ones with hands and fingers. Even our original programmer said that a restart was needed every now and then.

City of Parks

2008-09-23T19:32:00.013+03:00

As a child I spent a year in a city called Savannah, in the Deep South. Allow me to present an ever-so-brief history of this southern belle of a town, and then just as briefly compare it to that of Tartu. It was founded in 1733—not too old but not too young, even by European standards—by a General Oglethorpe, who drew up interesting ideas for this new settlement. It was the first planned city in the New World, arranged in what became the commonplace American city block system, and every fourth or so block was a public park. Most of these parks survive today, and strolling through Savannah is a step back in time. Just don’t touch the Spanish moss hanging from the trees.

During the US Civil War, a General Sherman carried out his notorious “March to the Sea,” his big flank to cut the South in half while most of the Southern forces were engaged elsewhere. This March was more or less the first time the concept of total war was systematically executed. Everything was burned, and even train rails were bent around trees. These were known as Sherman's neckties (today people use Molotov cocktails).

Aware of this impending destruction, the mayor and women of Savannah greeted the approaching Union troops before their entry to the city, and offered a complete surrender if their city and homes would be spared. Not many other cities have been that smart in times of war (sadly enough, many of the ones who have been smart have not met with sympathetic invaders). Most of the original Savannah still exists today.

Conversely, most of Tartu has been destroyed time and again, most recently in dubya dubya two. Tartu did not have the luxury of being a planned city (fortunately or not), and it suffered the grave misfortune of being bombed and blasted and burned all to hell, but it still survives and thrives today. And it’s got a lot of parks. While no one walked out to ask the advancing Nazis and Soviets to be gentle, there were quite a lot of people who formed a human chain across the country and joined in at the Singing Revolution.

During Tartu’s Reconstruction, the city planners wisely (for once!) decided to reserve as much land as possible for city parks. They were given rare, if sad, opportunities to fill the downtown with tree alleys, lawns and flowerbeds. This prevented more typical Soviet architectural paradises from being constructed in their place, but you can figure out approximately when the city planner responsible for this died. Khrushchev-era buildings started popping up, including this beauty next to St. John’s Church in the middle of the Old Town.

Every park in downtown Tartu is a graveyard where a lot of people died during the war. They’re not so much planned, as in Savannah, yet they are more commonplace the closer you are to the center of town. But you can’t think of them as graves and memorials when you walk through them of course. Think of them as the unique product of war and progress, tradition and rebellion.

And as the modern downtown heats up, so spreads this radiance further and further, as one by one the Soviet-era concrete tiles are replaced with cobblestone, the dirt paths outlined with curbstones, lawns manicured, fountains built, streets lit, and playgrounds opened. You can even see joggers from time to time.

We should all go out and use these parks. The more of us out there, the fewer drunks will sleep on the benches, the fewer teens will smoke who-knows-what and carve their names into tree trunks that grow from their ancestors’ ashes. The city government should continue this park revival. Green cities like Savannah and Tartu are true emeralds to behold, and they deserve some appreciation.

City of Crosses

2008-09-19T13:38:00.009+03:00

From what I’ve heard and noticed, Estonia is the least religious country in the EU. Symbols abound through history, ranging from iconic to political, and foreign influences cannot be denied in this. The new Freedom Obelisk or whatever the English name is for the monument being built in Tallinn’s Freedom Square unquestionably resembles the German Cross, which is political and religious in origin. And that’s explained due to the close histories of these two countries. On a side note, I’d like to point out that there’s not a single Nazi swastika on Germany’s Wiki page.

Tallinn has a beautiful synagogue near Narva Street. I’m not sure if it’s completely new or just rebuilt on the original plot, but it’s there, and no one really has a problem with it. It’s also a bit hidden. The Muslim community in Estonia wanted to build a largish mosque, also downtown, yet it met with fierce resistance. So to analyze this situation a bit, I’ll start out in agreement with the Estonians. It’s their country, and if they don’t want a megamosque, there will be no megamosque.

Yet where is the line drawn? This isn’t Denmark after all. Should a ban on mosques be consistent and expand to include Russian Orthodox churches, requiring their demolition? Hardly. I guess the difference is historical presence. But there are Muslim communities who have lived in Estonia for upwards of two centuries, just as long as the Russian Old Believers. I would never suggest that the mosque is frowned upon due to simple distaste, so it would boil down to a question of population size or architecture. Any potential mosque in the Old Town would have to match the surrounding architecture, understandably. Much like WW Passaaž. And the sheer number of Muslims in Tallinn is nothing compared to the Russians. Oh wait—aren’t most of the Muslims from Russian or Russian-occupied territories anyway? So you don’t want a mosque. Fine. I can accept that, but just don’t rely on a cockamamie excuse.

Belief is in people—it is not defined by geographic borders. If you have a synagogue, why not a mosque? It’s not as if Estonians will have their deeply religious convictions offended. I’d say Estonians aren’t against religion per se, they just don’t care. I don’t wear tweed anymore, but a lot of other people still do. I could care less. And I never wore tweed—just an example.

On another side note, the most successful religion of Estonia seems to be that of Kalevipoeg, which in itself is only a century and a half old in paper form. Here’s a picture of the Kalevipoeg statue in Tartu, next to Tõnis Lukas, the Minister of Education and Research. And next is Robert Knepper, who plays the sexually deviant T-Bag on a show called Prison Break. Is Tõnis moonlighting as a sculpture model and actor? Anyhow, while technically not a religion, Kalevipoeg garners more togetherness in this country than any pope or Mormon missionary.

Speaking of which, I’ve long wanted to chip away on the old sculpture of religion. I respect beliefs and I respect people. It’s the organizations I don’t trust. A few things I’d like to point out for any readers in religious countries (ahem—America). The Bible specifically says not to worship idols, yet you worship crosses and figurines of people known in Estonia as Maarja. You base all your homophobic hatred on a minor rule known as Leviticus 18-22, yet you conveniently ignore the cardinal sin of gluttony. To be fair however, the Seven Deadly Sins are nowhere to be found in the Bible. Kind of like the pope, eh? But honestly, for a religion of love and forgiveness, I can't imagine any organization generating more hatred.

And what is the difference between Western religions anyhow? It seems to be the number of times a Certain Someone has come round for a visit. The Jews believe that this Certain Someone will come soon. The Christians and Muslims believe this Certain Someone has already come, and will come again. The Mormons believe that this Certain Someone already did return again, and will visit once more. The Mormons are also the quickest growing religion in the world. Maybe it’s because they feel more comfortable with frequent Visitors? Or maybe because they baptize us heathens to their faith once we die. That’s right, post mortem baptisms. I guess that’s why their church has the tallest, leafiest genealogical tree in our neck of the woods.

If you’re worried about encroaching religions, pay attention to the Mormons, who have large churches. Pay attention to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have large riverfront churches. Pay attention to the Estonians, who have tall glass churches near the water.

City of Elephants

2008-09-18T13:37:00.010+03:00

There are some things in life I’ll never be able to do, and I just have to accept it. I’ll never get complete and total accent-free fluency in Estonian because American schools start with foreign languages too late. I’ll never be able to make two consecutive free-throws. I’ll never be able to see more than a meter without glasses. And I will absolutely never understand how many European drivers think.

The biggest difference between North American and European driving, apart from the space available, is the logic behind traffic signs. North American signs only seem to show what you cannot do, while European signs only show what you can do. Basically it’s the complete opposite, which leads me to think the French had something to do with this system (they should have quit when they were ahead, i.e. after inventing the metric system). But that’s for another post.

The second biggest difference seems to be how people think. Again, the term “complete opposite” comes to mind. Not opposite as in wrong, but opposite as in different. But understanding the logic of European driving is just something I’ll never be able to do. I can play by the rules, sure, but I don’t understand them.

Something happened about two years ago. I noticed it almost immediately and have watched with slight amusement as it has progressively expanded. People are no longer parking with their front bumpers inside. They more and more often park by backing into the spot. There are many contradictory things regarding this. The idea is to save time when you leave—I get it. But the time spent slowly backing into a cramped space is greater than the time spent more quickly backing out into a more open space. Overall time consumption is not improved. Ironically, the same people who do this are also the same ones who will drive around forever looking for the closest spot possible, rather than parking a bit further but immediately, and then walking the ten meters in ten seconds and being done with it.

We were in the parking garage at the Kaubamaja department store yesterday. We parked in the very middle, and the whole garage was empty save for two cars off in the corner. A woman decided that she had to park next to us, and patiently waited while I loaded the kids in the car and packed up the stroller. I remind you that the parking lot was empty, and she wanted to park right next to us, like sharing body heat would keep her warm in the heated garage. I motioned to her to park here, there or anywhere but she did not like green eggs and ham.

When we were finally in the car, she drove into the spot next to us, and kept going. She parked behind us. She could have driven around in a few seconds instead of waiting a few minutes, but she had to pass by us.

I have seen these people before, and I have driven as a passenger in their cars. They are the same people who take off their seat belts when they are still a couple hundred meters from their destination, so they can jump out of their car faster and get to business. They are the same people who start inching forward when they feel the light is going to turn green so they can get home all that sooner. They are the same people who start passing on the highway before the on-coming car has even finished driving by. They are the same people who wait until the last second to use their blinkers (otherwise they would run out of blinks).

I have seen logic like this before. They’re called elephant jokes, and a couple go like this: why do elephants paint their toenails red? So they can hide in cherry trees. Why do elephants have flat feet? From jumping out of cherry trees. Like morality, humor is relative. It seems logic is, as well.

City of Soup

2008-09-15T14:14:00.007+03:00

No soup for you! Not that many people in Estonia are familiar with a 90s sitcom from America called Seinfeld, but perhaps the most famous story throughout the most popular comedy in the country’s history is the story of the Soup Nazi. Essentially this character makes good soup, and has a soup kitchen with rules you must follow while waiting in line, or the cook will ban you.

Word has leaked out about a place called Ungari Köök, which means Hungarian Kitchen, in Tartu. They sell soup and, um, there’s a line. You won’t be banned though for talking or asking questions, and if you ask for a sample of their food before ordering, they’ll give it to you. They won’t make you feel like an idiot for asking an idiotic question like in most places.

The soup is obviously fantastic, as are the prices. They also sell something called a langosh, a deep-fried potato pancake with a variety of toppings. Nowadays they pat the pancake dry with paper towels after frying, explaining that “Estonians need to go on a diet.” They have some interesting stories about clients, too, and if you ask I’m sure they’d tell you directly.

I genuinely like the place. It’s exactly as good as you’d expect from a sheet metal hut in a grocery store parking lot, which is to say, ten times better than a snobby three-star trend-bomb in the Old Town that specializes in Santa Maria’s ubiquitous potato seasoning (no, that’s not paprika on your fries). It makes two things, and it makes them well. And not surprisingly, they want to expand to Supilinn (Soup Town, a downtown part of Tartu).

Still, people go in on a daily basis and ask if they serve fries, grill shish-ka-bobs and offer sour cream for everything, even though none of these items are on the menu that they’ve been looking at for ten minutes. I am beginning to understand why many eateries see all questions as idiotic questions. And it seems that if someone thinks of ethnic food, it can only mean grilled pork with onion, tomato and cucumber.

But Ungari Köök is thriving, probably because Estonians are already very fond of soups and all things fried. Then down in Võru, there’s Reeder Burritos in the new mall. They’re closing down soon. Which is a pity because the owner makes pretty good burritos, and that using all local products. He says he just can’t get anyone to come, much less try, what I believe is the only Tex-Mex in Estonia (there’s a burrito trailer out in Viimsi, but it’s always closed when I go by). He also says people approach, look at the menu, and then ask if burgers and fries are available. They’re not. So people leave.

Understandably not everyone has the same preferences. I don’t expect Estonians to go from deliciously simple meat-and-potato dishes to being fanatics of cilantro, jalapeños and salsa. But there’s a certain correlation that must be made to the stereotypical American tourist travelling to the far reaches of the planet, wading through gourmet delights that will fuel your soul for a month, only to eat a Big Mac.

I also understand that a business must supply the market’s demand, that creating demand is very difficult without massive marketing. So why don’t people in Southern Estonia want to try new things? Sushi is not a traditional Estonian food, but it’s gaining momentum elsewhere in the country. Pizza is clearly different from the local rye-and-bacon dietary staples. And burgers and fries. And everything else seems to be stir-fried and served over spaghetti. What’s wrong with burritos?

At the moment I can only think of two possibilities. They just don’t care about trying new things, or they don’t want to reveal that they know nothing about the new thing in front of their friends. I would think that the second possibility isn’t as ludicrous as it may sound. I’m sure it’s a mix of many things though. Anyone have any ideas?

Maybe Corrida Grill has the right idea—fusion! The listings are burritos with stir-fried noodles, and tacos with stir-fried veggies.

City of Animals

2008-09-11T15:22:00.008+03:00

As a small child I grew up with free access to the city zoo, which was in the center of town, on a peninsula in a rather large lake. It was nothing spectacular, but they had monkeys, swans, and most of the typical animals in a petting zoo. As an older child I lived in a city that boasted one of the top ten zoos in the country. And it was pretty nice. When you were done looking at the polar bears from the underwater Plexiglas observatory and taunting the tiger to jump over its electrical fence and ravine, you could spend hours picnicking on the hilly slopes of a river valley.

Meaning I have pretty high expectations of zoos. For some reason, it seems that very little of modern Tallinn has developed alongside the water. Most of the shores are for commercial ports, the wealthy, and a long running path and road leading to Pirita. What Tallinn’s zoo lacks in water and shores, it makes up for with gardening. More than makes up for. This zoo is a veritable botanical garden, with exotic animals supplied as a mere public service.

There’s no point in describing the animals themselves, as unless there’s a living dinosaur most quality zoos are the same in terms of variety. Now presentation, that’s the question. It’s clear that this zoo is a work in progress. This next photo shows what was, and to a certain extent still is. The zoo even put a sign up in several languages basically apologizing for it. But the following photo shows a taste of what is and what will be.

We went with some friends who frequent the zoo, and who claim that every time they go there’s something new. I went years ago and remember a lot of empty fields with muddy paths leading off into the distance. Those are still there, though fewer in number, replaced with environments and shelters for the larger animals.

And then surprise! Water! Real or artificial, I’m not sure, but there’s a series of ponds in the zoo, and a labyrinth of boardwalks to explore them in a dry, boatless manner. The kids could spend hours feeding the ducks, swans and apparently Martian birds, and the parents won’t get bored either. The scenery is taken straight from the cover of an old Russian novel.

The jungle house, or reptile center—I don’t remember the name—was so humid that glasses and cameras fog up for a few minutes. You’d better hope you don’t accidentally fall into the alligator pit, like the sign outside warns. So just know that the zookeepers were thoughtful enough to install what’s in this picture, immediately to the right when you walk in.

This zoo is pretty spread out, probably a few hours to walk everywhere, so maybe you should rent the kiddy wagons when you buy your family ticket for one hundred and thirty-four kroons. Not thirty-five, but thirty-four. We’re glad we did because we had to quickly get out of the way of a speeding white delivery van immediately inside the gates, in the tree alley.

The only thing I didn’t like about Tallinn’s zoo was the corporate sponsorship signs in several places. You get free fries at the Golden Arches if you present your same-day ticket at the counter. But then again, they probably wouldn’t have been able to make it as nice as it is without business backing.

My friend did comment that it was more of a Western zoo now, in that the animals weren’t always visible because they had been given hiding places. Well, I guess they need privacy too, and I’d gladly pay entry again to see the ones I missed.

City of Eighties

2008-09-08T22:37:00.006+03:00

This past weekend saw my family and I in Tallinn, and boy what a shock it was! I felt like I was in a different country, compared to Tartu. Apart from most everything in the immediate downtown being more or less new, the people are a different breed as well. Lots of Scooby Doo hair covering the ears, mullets, copious amounts of gel, Miami Vice jackets and of course penis cars. Not the car that has a big hot dog mounted on the roof. Vaiko Eplik was right—the Eighties are coming back.

Off-hand remark, it seems that the less money there is in Estonia, the friendlier the people are. There has definitely been a nice-o-thon in the past few months as the national treasury drains empty. Tallinn I think is still rolling in it. Or maybe they’re just all buying junk bonds and are about to bust as well. It’s like a repeat of the Eighties in many ways. And if I remember correctly, when that decade was over, everyone was poor and became hippies. Grunge will make a comeback, so invest in flannel.

A few things happened that pissed me off though, surprisingly enough. On the highway, I was double-passed. That means that while I was passing a truck, a shiny black car-owner of the Beamer type passed me. At the same time. And the nearest approaching car was not even visible yet. My wife, wise as she is, suggested that now as everyone has a penis car, they feel more confident in their driving. I drive a somewhat strongish car with a turbo engine, and I pass more often, so she has a point. This weekend I drove my in-law’s car, an older Ford. I didn’t pass much at all because the car was fairly weak. But when I do drive my own car, and I pass, I still respect other drivers’ space, rights and, well, I’m just polite. I don’t want to make someone’s mother cry just because my mother didn’t teach me how to wait two minutes.

Here we see people honking so a wedding would hurry up and move away from in front of the church.

Our friends went with us to a mall, one called Kristiine Keskus, because of a children’s clothing store there. We also got hungry and chose to eat at the sushi-slash-pizza restaurant. While it was fairly empty, the waitress did take issue with our group having two baby carriages in tow. In fact, she politely informed us we wouldn’t be served. We stayed anyhow, and the food was fairly decent, although one thing did bug me a bit. The sushi was literally half the price of Tartu sushi, and it was bigger too, again by about half.

And this bit, fortunately I wasn’t there or I would have been arrested. We gave our three-year-old a small container of candies, similar to jelly beans. She stopped on the side of the place in the mall where you walk—out of the way, against the wall between shops—to pull out a candy to give her mother. Some jerk-off wasn’t looking and plowed right into her, scattering the whole box of candies all over the floor. She didn’t cry, bless her heart, as she watched her prizes roll further and further away. She just looked disappointed and sniffled a couple times as she slowly walked toward her mommy.

Mr. Jerk-Off didn’t even look at her, much less apologize.

I don’t understand how people can be so heartless. And for a country that is so proud of its history—as it should be, I might add—it truly appears to have focused on that history instead of the present. Don’t tell me how great you were a hundred years ago. Show me how great you are now. A people with so little respect for their neighbors, children included, cannot survive very long. Kind of like the economics of the Eighties.

But the zoo was really cool. I guess I’ll talk about that next. This picture is of the old Ford I drove. I’d like to point out that the rest of the parking lot was completely empty.

City of Geese

2008-09-03T13:31:00.009+03:00

I’ve collected a few more specimens of Baltish over the past few days, which I would like to share here. One of my interests has always been photographing graffiti. Not because I think it offers a view into the mysterious inner soul of the city, but just because I often find it funny. Someone is obviously going to some effort to risk arrest with the sole goal of saying what they think. Maybe that’s why the words are frequently misspelled or the poetry just doesn’t rhyme the way it should—because the artist is pressured for time.

In a similar fashion, the city government and its henchmen want to create or improve on the city, but due to presumably external forces they fail to plan adequately. The example in this picture is at the field behind the school in Veeriku, a section of Tartu. These are brand-spanking-new (and expensive) lights to illuminate the track in hours of darkness. They are not Christmas trees.

But it’s still better than before. And so are these very nice basketball and field soccer courts at the same school. The only problem is, how do you get inside? They forgot to add doors.

The old Khrushchev-era buildings can look pretty good when they’re fixed up properly, insulating the outer walls so the inner ones don’t allow breezes through the bricks. And if the neighbors don’t want to help out? Well, they will be left out in the cold. When I saw this building I just assumed they were doing it section by section. Then the scaffolding was removed and months went by, with no more work. It’s clear they only did the one part. Which is fine. But shouldn’t they at least cover up the bits of Styrofoam sticking out from the plaster? Not that it bothers me, I just don’t understand how no one cares.

During these trying times of fiscal crisis, largely fueled worldwide by the media, you don’t see that many property transactions anymore. The cool thing is, you do see the stuff that was bought during the boom being fixed up, and quite often fairly nicely. Some people have, in fact, learned to appreciate quality, attention to detail, before blindly throwing their hard-earned kroons into the pockets of some worker who can’t be reached for days after nearly finishing his work because he’s on a drinking binge.

I don’t really like the building in this photograph, next to the old Kaubamaja store, but I do like that they’re trying to make it more presentable, filling in the gaps with asphalt, and even planting grass in the dry dirt. The rediscovery of the curb is also going to go a long way in reducing the amount of dust in the streets.

Generally, it is slowly but surely becoming just a tad bit not quite as easy some of the time to find Baltish.

City of Baltish

2008-08-31T23:02:00.011+03:00

Apart from an MTV Baltic show by the same name, I’d have to credit Baltlantis, an Estonian-themed website, with the term “Baltish.” What does it mean? It seems to be a general term for the Baltic flavor, the humor of all things unique to the triumvirate of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. To the unanointed, I would have to describe it as the love child of German precision and the Soviet mentality.

An oxymoron if ever I’ve heard one, it makes sense. The new mall in Tartu, known as Tasku, or Pocket in English, is a perfect, shining example of Baltish: aiming far but not putting very much thought into how to get there. Not that I don’t like the place—it’s a very pretty, welcome addition to Tartu—it’s just that I think Bush put more thought into the Hurricane Katrina clean-up effort than Tartu’s learning-impaired city planners and architects put into this place.

The new traffic scheme around Tasku is worse than before. Redoing the intersection in front of Tasku was a perfect opportunity to get rid of the double Soviet-style traffic lights and allow pedestrians to cross at the corner, like in a modern city, instead of the middle of the block. No, that part stayed the same, and in fact they put more stop lights there. Within one hundred meters on Turu Street, you have to go through four lights. And then in the first fifty meters immediately when you have crossed the intersection you go through another three, before you even get to a road to turn on.

The mall would obviously bring more traffic to the area, so what did they do? Make the street that goes to the parking garages one-way. When you leave Tasku, you can only go right. But what if you live to the left, like me, and so want to turn left? And there are no signs telling you that the traffic scheme has changed from a two-way street. You have to look at the new signs hidden behind tree branches. But once you’re inside, you can look forward to a garage that is so cramped (and two-way traffic throughout) that cars wait in line just to be able to turn to the next level, even though there are no cars in front of them. There’s just no room. There is, however, an unmarked underground garage that I happened to discover. The door to the elevator was locked, and a painter of all people told me where to go. When we let the information desk know about the door, the woman arrogantly replied, "But you're not supposed to use that door." When I asked her where the sign was that should tell me this esoteric information, she looked at me as if I were from another country.

Oddly enough, there's a door in the second-floor garage that does have a sign. The sign says that if you use that door, you will be fined 5000 EEK, or $500.

Inside is pretty cool, but there are some odd opening week errors and oddities. Payment in cash only, even though prices are sky-high (a T-shirt costs over six hundred kroons, or forty euros, or sixty dollars), the five-cinema movie theater complex, called Cinamon (sic!) as in cine-mon, was reserved for a private party on opening night, and so on. That last one is pure Baltish. The spiral staircase is pretty cool too, except that if you’re going down, you have to walk on the inside, where the steps are, quite literally, about five centimeters wide, and there's no rail. But otherwise the place is very nice, flashy, and I have to admit—tasteful.

While it’s frustrating that not all the shops and eateries will be ready within even the first two months of operation, it’s slightly amusing that toward the back end of the mall you have one two three four five shoe shops right in a clump. And I have never seen such a complicated pricing system for something as simple as a movie ticket. At least you don’t have the same ten shops as in every other shopping venue in Estonia, such as R-Kiosk, K-Arvutisalong, EMT, +/-. Instead, you have Camel, Gant, Apple—American shops that are exponentially more expensive than in America.

But get the chai in the bookstore café and look across the intersection at the other downtown mall from the second-floor window. If you’d been here ten years ago like me, you’d remember that this same view would have revealed a shabby midnight microwave fast-food joint named Toidutorn, or Food Tower, as seen from the old bus station.

And where’s the new bus station? Just go past the chickens and take the elevator.

City of Votes

2008-08-29T09:46:00.004+03:00

Over here in the Baltics you don’t get much exposure to the speeches of the American candidates for president, unless you glue yourself to CNN. So this morning when I watched the official acceptance speech for Barrack Obama, on CNN, it was really the first time I’ve heard our biggest celebrity orate.

I do follow the news, and I’m fairly familiar with the campaign so far. I have to say I would support Paris Hilton for prez, except that she’s not thirty-five yet.

And for the joke of this entry, can we really have a president whose name we cannot say in an airport or on a plane? O-bomb-a? Ha!

Obama’s speech contained the same old numerological shape-shifting that every other candidate has used (Giuliani was especially fond of number manipulation). For example, he connected McCain’s twenty-six years in office to the price of petroleum having tripled in the same time. That’s ludicrous. And he patted his friends on the back exactly the same as any good ol’ boy would do.

Someone referred to John McCain as “father time” a few days ago. That’s funny and damaging at the same time. But as for his voting record, I can’t say I disagree with him any more than John Kerry or Obama or Clinton. They all voted for war in Iraq. And for his substance? He’s not as good a speaker as Obama, hands down, but he gives the same miraculous message of change and a coming Camelot that every other candidate has always given and always will. So what really sets Obama and McCain apart?

Political party. In recent years political definitions have changed polarity once again. Now it’s time for the Democrats to be associated with fiscal responsibility. Clinton did a pretty good job with our money, and Bush flushed it away within the first year. Terrorism aside, he still blew it. And the Republicans are now associated with fighting wars, as opposed to Roosevelt and dubya dubya two.

But for some reason the GOP’s wars are always unpopular. Vietnam? Iraq?

I believe that anyone would be better than Bush. If you don’t believe in global warming, then believe in trash and smog. We need to clean up our act, but on a global scale. A new subway system in Chicago isn’t going to change anything. If you don’t believe in the United Nations, then believe in dialogue. Not signing treaty after treaty is going to bite us in the ass. If you don’t believe in personal liberties, then believe in respect for your neighbor, because if you don’t, no one else will.

The GOP is the symbol of polarization, isolation, unilateral “teamwork” and coercion.

I will vote for the democratic ticket because that is our best chance for real, positive change. Not the name of the candidate.

City of Etiquette

2008-08-24T13:13:00.004+03:00

The peoples of different cultures have different ways of interacting with each other. The French like to greet people with a kiss on each cheek, Americans quite often hug, and Estonians prefer the more universal handshake. Estonians are culturally a fairly cool people. They often feel uncomfortable with the intimacy of a kiss on the cheek or a hug.

And that’s fine. I’ve got used to it myself, and I am taken aback when an American friend hugs me hello. The way I see it, now that I’ve been “institutionalized,” I reserve my hugs solely for my wife and kids. My inner Yankee still produces the same quota of hugs and kisses though, so I think sometimes I must be smothering my family, as they are my only outlet.

But there’s always a line to be drawn, and it will always be crossed by someone. Our line here is through a map of social etiquette. As you move from the verbally ebullient small talk of North America and Scandinavia toward the Estonian border, you will notice that an encounter with an acquaintance on the street will change from one of quick hellos and how-are-you’s to a simple nod, and once the border is crossed, you will come to feel lucky if your acquaintance even acknowledges your existence.

This sounds harsh, and people who haven’t experienced this Estonian hospitality will think it’s just my imagination, but everyone I’ve talked to has seen this as well. Everyone has stories of people whom, as recently as the day before, they’ve met at a party, had drinks with, or they’ve been naked in a sauna together, and the next day they cross the road to avoid having to say hello. Eye contact? Fuggeddaboudit. And yes, I do realize the joke I’ve set up here.

Once you get used to being snubbed like this, you may even start to have fun with it. Make it as hard as possible for the person to “not see you.” Sometimes even people I work with don’t notice my wave on the street, and once we’re back in the office, I’ll say, “Hey, I saw you today. Didn’t you notice me?” And my inner Yankee smiles as their inner body temperature rises.

Why is it so hard for Estonians to admit that other people exist? If we have plans to do something, and you’re going to be late or just can’t come at the last minute, a simple telephone call would be nice. Funny how you can pay for parking via a cell phone, but if you have to phone a friend to cancel, your battery is suddenly empty, or the network is congested. The common philosophy seems to be that of the proverbial ostrich with its head in the ground. If you don’t see the danger, it’s not there.

There’s even a story a friend told me about buying a car. They were ready to sign, and the salesman was ready to get his commission, but he never called back. This is pretty typical really. If someone says they’ll call back, it actually means piss off, I don’t care how much you want to pay me, I’m just too lazy and inconsiderate.

And just yesterday we were supposed to have potential buyers come look at our flat. They’d scheduled a time with the realtor a week in advance and repeatedly stated how excited they were to see our place, and so we cleaned and cleaned for two days to make the place as cozy as can be. The viewers never showed up, never called.

What causes this? Low self-esteem? Maybe. Shyness? Possibly. Laziness? You got me. But the common denominator would definitely be poor social skills. It doesn’t matter what country you’re in, what culture you call your own, or what your excuse is. Not doing what you say you will do is considered lying everywhere across the globe.

To be fair, it’s not the whole country. There are many very nice, polite people in Estonia, just like anywhere else. And just like anywhere else, there are some real dickheads, too. Try holding the door for someone. Five more people will try to squeeze in, and I seem to be the only one who utters a clear, audible thank-you on the rare occasion someone holds the door for me and my baby carriage. I even have to push and shove to get out of the elevator sometimes because people are pushing and shoving to get on.

I’ve had conversations with Estonians about this epidemic of social retardation. They commonly say, “Why should I be nice to them? They’re not going to be nice to me.” And the children’s merry-go-round spins on.

City of Chocolate

2008-08-22T10:09:00.009+03:00

I walk around town a lot, so I notice a lot of things people who don’t walk, wouldn’t. And there are a lot of things that deserve mention in this blog, in my opinion, but that don’t deserve their own entry. So here’s a box of chocolates for you. When you walk around Tartu, you never know what you’re gonna’ get.

Let’s start our walk on Riia Street, going downhill towards the river. Nice tree-lined hill with a bike lane etched into the sidewalk. When you cross the street though in front of the Hansakeskus shopping center, the bike lane goes down a small flight of steps. I think. There are four conflicting signs for where bikes are supposed to go.

We continue toward Town Hall Square, passing by a playground in a park, and we can see the cops driving down the sidewalk, in case any cars happen to be speeding through the park.

Almost at the Square now, and at the casino next to the promenade there is a truck that apparently was unloading some heavy, if not confidential, ware. It just couldn’t get close enough to the door, and the steps unfortunately weren’t built large enough.

Proceeding down Rüütli Street we see a pair of restaurants owned by the same guy. One is named Crepp. What he means is “crêpe,” but he wanted to make it Estonian-style, but he didn’t quite succeed. Estonian is a phonetic language, so all the crazy English and French spellings are simply wiped clean. Knight becomes nait, and crêpe becomes krepp. But here it’s with a c for some reason.

The owner has a great penchant for names as we can see. He also had a failed restaurant, his second of three eateries, which he called Kaks (which means Two). His latest is simply called Meat Restaurant. It’s pretty good too, though when I ate there they were out of meat. So his three restaurants, pronounced in English, are crap, cocks and meat.

Walking back toward Toomemägi Park, past the Wilde Café and Bar. Three owners in as many years and the place is getting progressively worse. We were almost hit by falling bricks and mortar.

Now we’re passing through a district known as Karlova. Beautiful wooden buildings and houses, painted like a rainbow. It’s pretty quirky, as are its residents and their fences.

City of Free Stuff

2008-08-17T09:55:00.006+03:00

Last week Tartu’s Town Hall Square was forcefully occupied by an army of chairs and a multistory screen in order to celebrate the Tartu Romance Film Festival, better known as tARTuFF. Essentially, now that there is actually darkness during the Estonian night again two months after the solstice, hundreds of people would gather to watch a film in public. For free.

This happened in a country where you even have to pay for ketchup at fast food joints, where tinkling costs two kroons if you aren’t at home or in a restaurant. What’s more is that the hulking two-floor tent set up behind the audience also served coffee. For free.

Had I known, I wouldn’t have waited till Saturday to check it out. That happened by accident. Some people in Tartu may have noticed the unbelievable swarms of what appear to be yellow jackets (a type of bee that can sting multiple times). It’s seriously not very amusing. You cannot even walk outside, much less sit, without being harassed. I killed one that had crawled up my back, under the shirt.

So we decided to try the tent, hoping to find a refuge without having to go inside. It was very tastefully done, with a stage in the middle, a DJ corner surprisingly in the corner, and a bar fully equipped to make coffee. I didn’t realize where I was even upon seeing that there were no prices on the menu. After my second espresso, I quickly asked the waitress for the bill. She just smiled and said it was free. In Tartu.

Still, the bees managed to find their way in. But hey, the coffee was free!

Now why in the world was the place almost completely empty during the day? (I didn’t go at night.) The paying cafés were full of people and bees, but the free tent, which turned out to be nicer than most of the cafés, was empty.

Advertising. Like I said, I found it by accident—I had no idea what it even was. Saturday was also the first day of a festival called the Emajõe Festival. For those of you who don’t know, Emajõe means Emajõgi, the name of the river that goes through Tartu (and hence the address of this blog). One thing about Tartu this summer, there has not been a lack of life in the city. At all. I would even venture to say that there are possibly too many festivals…none are really advertised. I remember the Võru Folk Festival, which had people there, but I hadn’t seen a single ad for it. What I did see, throughout the city of Võru and during the festival, was a ton of ads for the Viru Folk Festival, not even in the same part of the country. Odd, eh?

There are so many festivals they’re even starting to overlap, as with tARTuFF and the Emajõe Festival. And Tartu ain’t huge. I’d be worried about one festival losing its crowd to another, or worse yet, what happens when an immovable movie screen meets an unstoppable parade?

(This photo is from a week or two ago…an international choir festival, and at the main concert, there were more singers than spectators. No advertising.)

But really I’m not that worried about something awful happening in the city. You’re just never bored here in the summer, and it’s all fine for kids too. One of the reasons I love Tartu.

City of Genocide

2008-08-15T09:56:00.007+03:00

War is always a dirty thing, and in the end there are no winners. Rhetoric can abound for decades before and after a war, stretching or even creating new truths, to serve someone’s purpose. But an accusation of genocide is different from your average “you fired first” allegation.

Officially genocide is any attempt to destroy a part of or a whole group based on national, ethnic, racial or religious lines, and methods generally included in this definition are murder, physical or psychological harm, inflicting conditions that would harm the people in question, preventing childbirth or transferring children from said group to another. This is according to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The most well-known act of genocide in the world is undoubtedly the Nazi Holocaust from World War II. Its perpetrators have mostly been apprehended and tried in international courts of law.

But how long does it take for genocide to turn into history, no longer punishable by law? Does time really heal that wound? The plight of the Native Americans could very easily be considered genocide, for example. While these people are not restricted to their North American reservations, they have quite clearly been wronged. But this process against them ended nearly a hundred years ago. No one has been held accountable. And slavery? There is an apologist movement, but I cannot be held accountable for what my ancestors did to someone else’s. My great-grandparents weren’t even a glint in anyone’s eye yet. Still, I would be the first to apologize because it would be the right thing to do.

Yet Russia has a unique historical situation at the moment. Russia has a sizeable portion of its population who participated in Stalinist repressions, that were started to be carried out even before the Holocaust, and continued for decades, and these people have not even been charged with a crime. Literally a hundred million people forced to starve in their own homes, deported to Siberia, sent into combat with no weapons and held in forced labor camps. Hundreds of ethnic groups in more than a dozen countries exterminated. Policies of Russification that ended only in the early 1990s. This was methodical and planned, and it is even less disputed than if Man really walked on the Moon.

There are Russian allegations of Georgian actions of genocide against the people in South Ossetia. These allegations should of course be taken seriously, if not with a grain of salt. Georgia also has a population of approximately a million who live in Russia proper. Beginning with the conflict a couple years ago, Georgians numbering at least hundreds, if not thousands, were rounded up by Putin’s henchmen and deported off back to Georgia, simply for their ethnicity. I would like to remind readers at this point that this last action qualifies as genocide according to the UN’s CPPCG, mentioned above.

Did Georgia commit genocide? According to the Russian evidence, yes. According to the Georgian evidence, no. I honestly don’t know because I wasn’t there. And neither were Putin, Bush, Saakashvili or you. But before blindly siding with who are, well, the invaders, either way you look at it, we should have third party inspectors make a decision of what likely happened.

It does seem unlikely, however, that a man educated in American universities and who served in multiple positions of human rights organizations and who is so familiar with Western media would risk committing any act that could be considered genocide. And his opponent? A man whose university thesis was titled, “The Principle of Most Favored Nation” and whose job as a KGB officer was specialized in combating political dissent in the USSR.

But to be fair, for the moment we must give Putin the benefit of the doubt. This one last chance to be honest, to demonstrate transparency and reliability. We should investigate his accusations, even though it means allowing Russian forces to remain longer unchecked in Georgia.

In the meantime, it would perhaps be prudent for Estonian President Ilves to not share the stage with someone against whom the charge of genocide has been made. At least not until it’s been cleared up. Then again, maybe that’s what Putin wants—for Georgia to stand alone.

And I’d like to let people know that I will go back to whining about broken glass and dog poop in the next entry.