Monday, February 14, 2011

Bruce's First Impressions of Estonia















Barbara dining at a pizza/pasta bar, with the opera house in the background (left); St. John's Church on Freedom Square with Chinese New Year celebration and ice sculptures (right)

Tere (hi!) from Bruce. Barbara's been here in Estonia for over a month, but I joined her less than two weeks ago. I've been enjoying our apartment, on the fifth floor of an older building that's been nicely modernized inside (as you may have noticed from earlier photos on this blog). While my body catches up with the eight-hour time difference from the Twin Cities, Barbara and I have been exploring, eating out, and going to a dance performance, art opening, and the well-designed art museum on the edge of town--plus the (surprising!) celebration of Chinese New Year with an opera troupe from Peking!

I often find myself making comparisons between Estonia now and Lithuania (where we had another Fulbright in 1997-98, thirteen years ago). The differences are many, in spite of my unconscious expectations that Estonia might just be a variation on our Lithuanian experience. For examples, though both countries won their independence from the Soviet Union in the early 1990's, Lithuania was (understandably) much closer to their experience under Soviet rule than is Estonia today, and Estonia has had much more time to turn its politics and economy towards western Europe than had Lithuania.

Perhaps for this reason, Estonia seems noticeably better off than Lithuania, and adopted the Euro as its currency as of January 1 of this year (I do admit I like the old national currencies in Europe, which often reflected history and tradition and were simply more beautiful than the Euros which have replaced them). In Lithuania, the capital where we were living simply could not afford to turn on the heat in public schools and other buildings as winter approached (including our old apartment), and everyone kept piling on additional layers of clothing to make do even when indoors well into November. What a relief the day they were able to turn on the heat! Here, while it's often cold outside (we're as far north as Hudson's Bay), indoors we're comfortably warm. We have lots of running hot water in our apartment (rather than turning on the small hot water heater hanging over the bathtub as we did in Lithuania when we wanted a bath).

The electronics revolution has swept through Estonia now too (and perhaps it has in Lithuania, which we'll eventually be visiting). Skype was invented here, and virtually every public venue, including coffeeshops and cafes, seems to have wi-fi ("wee-fee" as they say here). Laptops are quite visible, while none of my students in Lithuania could afford a computer in 1997. People here, especially younger people, often dress like other Europeans--by which I mean they dress in "fashion-casual," lots of dark colors, rarely dressing "up" in the way we often saw people in Lithuania doing. This may have reflected a cultural difference, or our sense that Lithuanians (often educated but poor) more often dressed up to reflect the dignity they felt, while Estonians feel more confident and secure in dressing "down."

These are rather sweeping generalizations, risky because I'm experiencing Estonia almost twenty years before they gained independence, while my memories of Lithuania are stuck half a generation ago. And I do sense similarities between the two countries as well: a strong sense of pride in their national history and culture, for example. They also speak languages I despair of learning, though for different reasons: Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language (like Finnish and Hungarian, and not part of the Indo-European language family), full of vowels and double vowels (especially a's, o's and u's) (for example, I'm going to look at books later, which in Estonian is "raamatud"), while Lithuanian is a relatively archaic or less-changed Indo-European language which knowing English (or a bit of German, French and Spanish as I do) does not help one understand. Fortunately (for me), Estonians now often speak some English as their second or third language, so I can get by (in Lithuania, English was usually, at best, a fourth language, after Lithuanian, Russian, and Polish).

All of which helps explain why yesterday afternoon we were sharing a meal at a sushi cafe around the corner from our apartment with a local colleague of Barbara's and her two little girls, and could have a lively conversation. The girls, both pale blonds, would softly yodel their vowels to each other, but also could make pretty good sense of our questions, and their mom speaks English quite well. (The "blond thing" is another similarity with Lithuania--lots of blond people, including lots of tallish women.)

Sushi, you ask? Another difference between Estonia and Lithuania. At least when we were in Vilnius (Lithuania), there were almost no "foreign" cafes--one Chinese cafe by the train station run by Chinese folks washed up on the far shores of communist solidarity, one Indian cafe which had just opened, some attempts to make pizza, and that was about it. Here in Tallinn there are far more eating options, partly reflecting the open borders that Lithuanians just did not really have available back then. And the sushi was pretty good (no Japanese chefs in sight, but still good)--the difference was that all the fish seemed to be salmon, from Norway, rather than the tuna and other fish sushi chefs prize. But we're not complaining, and our bodies are now saturated with omega-3's.

Enough for now. Paikest! ("Sunshine to you!") Bruce


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