the road ahead

There's a funny sort of consensus being reached among Estonians these days, and that is that when it comes to the termination of the current ruling coalition, the question is not if, but when, and perhaps also, how.

It's hard to put ones figure on when this malaise set in. It could have been lurking even prior to parliamentary elections in March 2007. The removal of the Bronze Soldier and the ensuing rioting {and gray sanctions and cyber warfare} brought about some sort of solidarity with the government. But now, a year plus later, that solidarity is starting to wear off, and the widely advertised fact that the Estonian economy grew by 0.4 percent in the first quarter has people spooked.

Prime Minister Andrus Ansip's liberal Reform Party still enjoys the most support of the public. But at the same time the coalition of conservatives and social democrats is looking more pre-election than post. Finance Minister Ivari Padar (SDE) is staking out next year's anticipated budget shortfall as an issue where the sotsid can look like the pragmatists. Meantime, Mart Laar continues to brandish his foreign policy credentials, making some perhaps regret he was not made foreign minister last year.

The transit sector is, as you can imagine, the most sour on the government. Former PM Tiit Vähi has in several articles called for Ansip to step down. Interestingly, when asked who should lead a new, more technocratic government, he rattled off the names of Laar, Padar, and Juhan Parts.

However, the thing is that, with the economy slowing and several outstanding issues -- Russian relations among them -- yet to be solved, nobody wants to take over right now. They'd probably prefer to let it marinate for as long as possible, maybe until there are signs of improvement for which they can take credit.

I still think, though, that the current government could accomplish something before its number is up. Regional reform, for example, is an issue that requires bravery and a willingness to act. There is talk of reducing Estonia's 15 counties to four regions, and its 227 municipalities to between 60 and 80 parishes. While such reform would take years to accomplish, it might make some sense to push the issue. What does the current government have to lose?

* the photo was taken outside of Kunda last weekend.

inno ja irja

For those of you interested in the very permeable boundary between journalism and blogging, you are in for a treat. The famous and infamous -- which as Steve Martin once said, means "more than famous" -- bloggers Inno and Irja are now writing in English.

The Inno ja Irjasphere is wide ranging. Sometimes they are discussing what they had for dinner, other times it's their interpretation of history, and still other times they are providing insight to the media system in Estonia. A recent piece dealt with some of the Reform Party's dirty laundry.

I was actually subjected to some discussion on their blog, where visitors were asked to rank my wife's former associates and colleagues according to "sexiness." The septuagenarian naturalist Fred Jüssi beat me hands down. And I understand why. What's not sexy about recording birds in the woods?

Anyway, go there, read, write, frolic.

estonian air

Estonian Air. That about sums it up, doesn't it? Can all your expectations and all your disappointments in a country be gleaned from an airline? Perhaps.

The branding of Estonian Air, its color scheme, its outrageously blond flight attendants, the cool northern air that wrestles with your clothing all lead you to believe you are flying Finnair junior. And in some ways, you are. The food is semi-decent. The staff is accommodating, yet slightly clinical. The flight to our destination was smooth and on time.

But it was that troubled flight back that changed my impressions. The flight was scheduled for 4 pm, but then it was moved to around 7 pm, then 9 pm, and finally, we were told, it would be arriving at half past midnight. We were not alone, I might add. A group of statuesque blond females were similarly inquiring at the information booth about their flight to Oslo.

Could it be that when air carriers from northern Europe had to pick up travelers from southern Europe, they did it at a nice, relaxed southern European pace? We got vouchers for lunch and dinner, but all the chorizo sandwiches in Spain could not take away the pain of a delayed flight.

When they did arrive, I was just glad that the plane made it and still had two wings. There seemed to be an enormous grouping of Russophone males ahead of us, who I later learned belonged to Estonia's hockey team. We were seated in the back with them, although an Estophone member of the team let us know that we could have seats up front, if we wanted. we were too tired to move seats, so we stayed with the hockey guys.

Russophones have this funny idea that everyone, or at least everyone on an Estonian Air flight, is capable of speaking their language. Several times, conversations were started with me to which I just looked to Epp to translate. Russian is not like Spanish or French. There are fewer familiar-sounding words to work with. When Epp was a little girl, one of her best friends was of Ukrainian background. So Epp actually was exposed to Ukrainian before Russian, and her early Russian language teachers in school had to correct her "Ukrainian accent".

I have no idea how terrible my Russian accent is. But I tried out my few words. "Skaska," I said, pointing to my book. "Mujina", I said pointing at the very loud gentleman seated in front of us. There seemed to be some Estonian language comprehension on their part. When a young mother began yelling "tasa!" (shut up) at them, they got the point.

At one point there was a heated bilingual conversation between the flight attendant and my beer-supplier where she scolded him in Estonian and he answered back in Russian that the airline should refund our tickets for making us wait eight hours. For Estonians, such bilingual conversations are a part of life. It has happened to me too that I have had conversations where I spoke only in Estonian and the other person only in English.

Some guy violently sneezed three times. I decided that 'terviseks' would be the best thing to say, since I doubt he felt like being blessed by God in English or in German. "Pivo", I then said, pointing at the beer they had smuggled on board. "Do you want some," the guy next to me said in English. He assumed I was Spanish and started querying my Spanish vocabulary ("How do you say beautiful in Spanish?") until I let it known that I was from New York and my abikassa was from eesti. Another guy turned to me and gave me the thumbs up, a sign of his approval. Our conversations then proceeded in English.

I had a terrible flight back from the US last time and the associated bumpiness of flying over the Alps was making me tense. I drank two cups of beer. Then he brought out the whiskey. At that moment, I was really glad they sat us next to the Estonian hockey team. I downed a full cup of that stuff, while an Estonian father looked curiously at me from the seat ahead, as if I had broken one of the rules of fatherhood. Maybe our daughters would now grow up to drink whiskey with hockey players. And they could only say, "I learned it from watching you, issi!"

Anyway, the whiskey was great, and it allowed me to sleep all the way to Tallinn. It also allowed me to rid myself of any harsh feelings towards Estonian Air. The flight attendants were nice, and I got some free sandwiches and whiskey out of my dilemma.

While I was in Spain, I suffered from one might interpret as the common questions about Estonia's European identity. ICDS' Maria Mälksoo published a very insightful and readable article on this in February. Even though Estonians look like Europeans and call the Evangelical Lutheran church theirs, they still don't feel themselves to be as European as the French or the Spanish. "Where are the supermercados staffed by Turkish immigrants?" they ponder. "How come nobody knows who we are?" they opine. And, my absolute favorite, "How come our politicians are corrupt?"

Europe, after all, feels safe, right? Europe doesn't continuously fight over the past! Europe doesn't have recessions! Spend some time in Spain and try to figure out the inheritance of the Spanish Civil War, though, and I believe, you may begin to think you're back in Estonia. There are similar characters -- partisans, nationalists, communists, fascists. There are similar icky feelings that people would prefer you not dredge up. And there are similar instances of blatantly self-serving interpretations of history. It seems that Europe is actually quite complicated. And Estonia is definitely part of that Europe.

villa lituania

Here in Barcelona, we wandered one day into the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Ironically, I had to come all the way to Spain to experience an exhibition known as the Villa Lituania, which combines pigeon races, Soviet artyfacts, and angst over the non-return of Lithuania's swanky pre-war embassy in Rome, still occupied by the diplomats of the Russian Federation.

A funny thing happened that I thought I had left the exhibition and entered one on Spanish post-war culture. Here were old movies of dark-haired women singing songs in some deeply Indo-European language. Was it Spanish? No. More like Portuguese, but, not quite. Hmm. Perhaps it was this mysterious Catalan they keep taking about, even though most people here say "gra>th<ias" instead of "si us plau". Then it dawned on me. They weren't Catalan. They were Lithuanian.

It must be a Catholic thing.

the top of europe

During last year's "events" I found it somewhat amusing that major news outlets, like The New York Times, sent their Moscow correspondents to cover the situation in Tallinn.

To me, this seemed like an ass-backward approach to reporting on Estonia, let alone even conceptualizing Estonia. Wouldn't it make sense to send someone from Stockholm, considering most of Estonia's financial sector is seamlessly integrated with Scandinavia? Or even to send a journalist from Berlin, seeing that the kroon has been, for 16 years now, pegged to first the mark and then the euro? How about Brussels? EU member. NATO member. Anyone? Anyone?

There's a real conceptual problem out there, mostly born by an older, lazier, less-globalized cadre of thinkers, who still think in terms of Cold War-era school maps covered in expanding seas of nauseous red.

Estonia is "post-Soviet", sure. But the thing is that there are degrees of post-Soviet. And when 'post-Soviet' is defined by countries like Belarus and Uzbekistan, then a country where the parliamentary parties are boringly divided between the liberals, conservatives, populists, social democrats, greens, and agrarians, looks rather unfamiliar to those standing in Moscow, but rather similar to those standing in Berlin or Stockholm.

In the post-Cold War era, northern Europe was divided by those seas of red. But today, the great Nordic community project that peaked in the early 1970s has been replaced by the great European community. I myself felt astonished this past week when, after having my bag scanned at the Tallinna Lennujaam, I walked right into the rest of the airport without having to produce my passport. Schengen has a significant psychological impact on pan-European consciousness. The 1960s post-war 'nation state' suddenly seems about as kitschy as an old 45 record. It's cute, but, what do you do with it?

So the question is, therefore, whither the nordicbalticpostsoviet jabberwocky? A recent concept floated by the Baltic Development Forum has been to 'rebrand' the region. While older concepts, the sleek Scandinavians, the technical-savvy Nordics, the ballsy Baltics, will still float, a new conceptualization should ring that will allow even the blokes at the New York Times to know what's up.

One idea is that Estonia is part of the "top of Europe", or, in the words of Tina Turner, simply the best, better than all the rest. The best universities. The best technology. The best living standards. The best haircuts. Feel like dumping $2.6 billion on an Estonian technology company? Look no further. You've come to the top of Europe. I am not sure if this regional branding thing will work out in the end. Maybe it's just another European money pit. But I do feel that the BDF is onto something.

teeme ära

Today I took part in the Estonian garbage clean-up campaign called Teeme Ära which means something like "get it done". To be completely honest, I have no idea who organized the campaign, although I am fairly sure that the Tartu rapper Chalice had something to do with it (see advertisement above).

As an Estonian resident the campaign reached me via online media, radio, television, newspaper, and word of mouth. I had heard stories that the mysterious organizers behind Teeme Ära, including perhaps Chalice, had used high resolution satellite imaging to pinpoint every last empty bottle of Laua Viin in the forests of Eestimaa.

Maps were organized with larger dump sites. The Teeme Ära supply chain was activated, so that sometime around 9.45 am this morning we rolled into the village of Koosa northeast of Tartu to meet up with local organizers who would direct us to the trash and give us the correct bags to put it in. In our car were Ilona and Leena. Ilona is the same age as me and a mother of two. Leena's age could not be guessed, but seeing as she was introduced as being somebody's grandmother, in Estonia that would make her around 35 or older.

Maybe I was tired, but for whatever reason I just couldn't understand what Ilona was saying in Estonian. This happens sometimes. I understand the woman on the radio. I understand the contents of the article. I can read the ingredients on the cereal box. But some people I just can't follow. They speak too quickly or they slur their words. So Ilona, instead, practiced her English on me.

The road to Koosa is surrounded by a mix of leafy forests and farm lands. The tilled earth of the farms is black and pungent. For weeks now the days have been sun-kissed and today was no exception. When we reached our destination there were two guys there, neither of whom I could understand well, who haggled with Ilona about bags and directions.

It must have been a bad day for my language skills. I tried focusing on their lips, but all I heard were vowels tumbling out. Infrequent consonants, which might have acted as linguistic signposts to let me know that this word starts with 'k' or that one starts with 't', were given the once over. Instead, it seemed like 90 percent of what they were saying was either Õ or Ö.

We were sent, along with a caravan of other people bedecked in old, paint-marked clothing that said "I'm here to clean some shit up", to a place called Keressaare, where it turned out there was no garbage. Then, we turned around and went back to the gas station at Aovere, which was a few kilometers back. You see, the map had said there would be a gas station in Koosa, but it was closed. The map also said that there was a gas station in the neighboring village of Vara, but according to the clerk at the store I stopped in -- who I understood perfectly -- it wasn't there anymore.

On the way back, we started to get restless. It seems pathetic, but I could tell my passengers, Leena in particular, were dreaming about being directed to a huge, smelly, unhygienic mound of garbage. They didn't come all the way out to Koosa to eat a sandwich and visit a gas station. No, they came to "get it done." This, in a way, is a very Estonian thing. The British have the joy of sex. The Estonians have the joy of manual labor.

After yearning for heaps of bottles and dirty diapers our prayers were answered by a site halfway between Vara and Koosa at Sookalduse. Here Leena and Ilona were put to work clearing bottles and glass while I was called on to haul old tractor tires out of the marshy woods. At last, my hands were dirty. We were getting what we had come for. And then ... it was finished. That's it? I thought to myself, as I ate another pastry my wife had bought for me the night before.

Ilona instead directed our prügikonvoi to another site, this time in Peipseääre vald, which, with 981 residents, is mostly forest and field. The road in Peipsiääre vald was unpaved, and traffic by larger vehicles had left a hump in its middle littered with larger rocks that unpleasantly scraped the bottoms of our cars. One member of our caravan had their car breakdown because of this, but with a little mechanical prowess he was able to get it back on the road.

Teeme ära had been here too. Someone had already cleared this garbage site. In fact, you may be surprised to learn that we greeted the lack of garbage in Tartumaa with some sadness. We had come to haul car batteries and old couches, and all we had to show for it were some broken bottles and tractor tires. There simply was not enough garbage to sustain our enthusiasm. Discouraged, we drove back to Koosa.

In the parking lot, Ilona again haggled with those who were supposed to know things, while Leena, her thirst for garbage picking unquenched, proceeded to pick up small pieces of broken glass from the adjacent lawn.

By this point my head was hurting because I had mostly been immersed in a real Estonian language environment for several hours and my brain was getting tired of breaking down verbs and looking up meanings from my internal sõnaraamat. "Could you imagine speaking Estonian all the time?" I thought to myself. "Could you imagine if the word tõenäoliselt (probably) set you apart in the world?" It seemed the more words I learned, the less fluent -- in my own mind -- I became. The goal posts were forever moved. I would never be able to say the word pärast (after) the correct way.

I remembered how our friend David told us that when he first moved to Estonia and began working in Estonian, and often in Russian as well, that he felt like icing his head after a day at the office, the way football players ice their limbs after a brutal game. After several hours submerged in eesti keel my brain needed a little Bengay too.

We finally found a place to contribute to Teeme Ära several kilometers west of Koosa. There were already others there, gradually cleansing the roadside of bottles and cans and old bags of chips. We parked and joined them. Somebody had a radio on in their car that was playing swinging Estonian country music. In between the songs, the announcers gave updates on how many tons of garbage had been collected and how to sort the garbage you found.

I thought at first that it was a worthless job and that the place had already been picked clean. But then I noticed a bottle. Then another one. Then a can. Then a shoe. It seemed I couldn't walk ten feet without finding more garbage. I couldn't figure out where it all came from. Did people just launch their empty bottles of vodka from the car as they sped through here at night? Who dumped all those used Libero diapers near a creek? How did a pair of flip-flops wind up this deep in the woods? Were all of Estonia's forests like this? Did every pristine forest floor really conceal the discarded plastics and rubbers of our disposable civilization?

While the stretch of roadside we cleaned today is certainly looking better, I couldn't help but think that we could keep going on like that, from Koosa to Tartu and from Tartu to Viljandi and from Viljandi to Pärnu, picking up trash from the side of the road. It was a sobering thought.

island people

One of my chief concerns about moving to Tartu was its lack of sea. Tartu has water, a silty, slithering river known as the emajõgi, but there were no major geographic boundaries from which I could get my bearings.

As a child, I always lived by the sea. I always knew it was there, often minutes or less from our door. Even if I didn't go out of my way to see it everyday, I sensed it. I smelled its air. I could feel the dark humidity before a thunderstorm. It helped keep me, in some ways, sane.

It was my fear that by moving to Tartu, I would be somehow stuck in the Missouri of Estonia. My own internal bias was that all landlocked people eventually went mad. I didn't want to go mad and, as you can see, I haven't gone quite mad yet.

That is due to two reasons. First, Estonians themselves have an island mentality, even if one "coast" is a marshy border with Latvia. So no matter where you are in Estonia, you are still delineated by the Baltic and Peipsi. Second, Tartu itself is an island community that just happens to be surrounded by farms instead of sea. Going anywhere -- to Põlva or Otepää or Lake Peipsi -- takes some adjustment. When you are lost in Tartu, the outside world might as well not exist.

In Tartu, you forget that the rest of Estonia doesn't voluntarily wear 19th century university corporation fashion accessories to the supermarket. The rest of Estonia isn't brimming with people who call themselves "poets" by profession. In Tartu, thrill-seeking Americans gather together to ... drink beer and carve pumpkins.

The bevy of nighttime entertainment leaves you breathing room to roam from the cavernous püsirohukelder to the crowded Zavood, to the old-timey Vilde's. If you want Georgian, there's the Gruusia Saatkond. Italian? La Dolce Vita. Libraries? We've already lost count of those.

Why would one ever leave Tartu island when everything you need is right here?

a simpler estonia?

A recent trend in the Nordic countries is municipal reform. Denmark took the lead in 2007 by reducing Denmark's 13 counties to 5 regions.

Not to be outdone, Sweden also plans on reducing their counties system in favor of larger regions by 2015. As typical in the Nordic countries, Iceland has ignored the developments in Denmark while Finland hasn't even heard of them yet.

I find it a bit amusing that when the Estonians restored their state, they didn't restore their old county system. The current Estonian state has 15 counties, whereas the state in the 1920s and 1930s had 11 counties, one of which, Petserimaa, has since been stolen/annexed/ceded to Russia.

Does it really make sense to have a Lääne and Ida Virumaa county? How about just one "Virumaa", as it is still called by Estonians. Does Jõgevamaa serve any purpose? Shouldn't we just add some of the smaller bits to the larger ones and give the regions more power in implementing governmental reforms?

I'd like to think that Estonia was capable of pulling off such a reform if it so desired. But don't count on it. Estonian politicians would prefer to argue over the ostentatious võidusamba instead.