Estonian Day Dreams

My brief love affair with an unique country

Sometimes I immediately like a place, or don’t. As a travel writer I’m supposed to have informed reasons for my judgements, but the reality is sometimes I simply fall in love (or hate) at first sight, and that happened with Estonia, an infatuation that grew and grew over my week there.

I liked Estonia from my first minutes in the country, despite it starting off so badly, because getting to Tallinn was far harder than it should have been, the result of a missed connection and an airline that provided absolutely no support. My plan of arriving, by a relaxing ferry from Helsinki was replaced, at considerable out-of-pocket expense, by a last-second flight from Copenhagen, surrounded by a boisterous group of French friends, all in matching bucket hats, on a bacchanalian excursion they were pre-gaming, one festive shout of “Putain!” and “Cul sec!” at a time.

Once off the airplane, everything began to change. At the information booth, I asked the affable woman if I could directly walk from the terminal into town, without the bus, and after a back-and-forth in which she expressed some confusion, not because of language issues but because of my American abruptness, she finally said, “It seems you certainly want to do that, so of course you should do that.”

I did that, and while there wasn’t any single thing along the four miles I could point to that warmed my heart, my heart warmed. I like uncomplicated low-stress cities, and that is what Tallinn is, but as I found out once I settled in, with a lot of physical beauty, and cultural richness.

It certainly helped I was seeing Tallinn at its best, a few days from Jaanipäev, when the summer light stretches over eighteen hours, almost never extinguishing, the horizon glowing like a nightlight even at two a.m. The days are long, the atmosphere enchanting, and you feel as if you’re wrapped in a soft blanket of crepuscular light.

That first night, stupefied from a day of sleepless travel, I sat at an outdoor cafe, eating a plate of pelmeni, drinking mugs of pilsner, wrapped in that light and a blanket, on the edge of “old town”, watching the youth of Estonia, recently paroled into recess from ten months of schooling. A continuous two month recess that, given the absence of night, becomes a single long play date — of rambunctious scampering about for the pre-teens, graduating to a focus on courting for the teens, the boys all with the same atrocious broccoli haircut, trying to impress the girls, all with faces painted to play grown-up.

The cafe I chose was Russian, built around nostalgia for the 1980 Olympics, which Tallinn played a minor role in, as the venue for the sailing events, and that first night, I began to glimpse the storm beneath Estonia’s calm. The 1980 Olympics is the most PR-friendly marketing for their Russian past. A soft blanket of nostalgia to try and mute the brutal reality of invasions, rule, and totalitarian authoritarianism.

And present, because modern Estonia is still close to twenty-five percent ethnic Russian, and that sits uneasily with what it means to be a citizen of Estonia, a country forged by that exact desire, to finally be free of an oppressor, to celebrate Estonianism, a distinct, genuine, and rich culture with a thousand-year lineage, but one pockmarked by centuries of outside rule, by the Swedes, Germans, Russians.