TALLINN -- August is down time here; people are on vacation, and I'm working on several projects. It's been raining buckets for almost a week now. People are inflating little rubber dinghies and rowing around in the street here in Tallinn (no, really).

You can check out the weather here (with a nice cam shot of Old Town in the background) at this site.

I will return when events warrant. Or I finish my ark.

posted by Scott at 12:40 AM

TALLINN -- Hmm, now this is interesting:

St. Petersburg police are on high alert and preparing for what they say is a possible terrorist attack on the northern city involving up to 200 Chechen separatist militants, the Izvestia newspaper reports.

The separatists may enter the city individually, or use stolen police cars, a source in the St. Petersburg police was quoted as saying. Police are looking at scenarios where suicide bombers may try to attack hospitals and maternity wards, or open fire on people in crowded streets.

TALLINN -- A story from this week's Estonian papers:

A 31-year old Estonian went to the Tallinn city zoo on Wednesday afternoon, equipped with a ticket and a half-liter bottle of vodka.

The grounds at the zoo, located on the west side of town, cover more than 87 hectares, so the man -- only identified in the papers by his first name, Janek -- decided to take a nap behind some bushes.

Well, Janek slept in the bushes until about 1:30 in the morning, and security that covers the zoo grounds didn't spot him. Well, Janek wakes up near the polar bear cage, and says to himself, "that bear looks hungry." So Janek finds a cookie in his pocket, and offers it to the bear.

The bear grabs his hand, and Janek smashes the bear with his Lauavinn vodka bottle, at which point the bear bites his hand off at the wrist.

According to Tallinn Zoo manager Mati Kaal, who has worked more than 30 years at the zoo, said it was the 11th time he had heard of such accidents, although "this is the first hand. In other cases it's been the whole arm".

posted by Scott at 5:17 PM

TALLINN -- From the Baltic News Service:

TALLINN - The Bertelsmann Transition Index (BTI), published by Germany's Bertelsmann Foundation to evaluate the success of reform in transition countries, shows Estonia as the most successful transition country in the world.

Estonia was followed by Lithuania, Chile, Botswana, Mali, Slovakia, Uruguay, Costa Rica, South Korea and Slovenia, in that order.

These countries have achieved the most success in transition to a market economy and democracy, Deutsche Welle reported.

Among other things, the index looks at criteria such as effective use of resources, consistency of reform and capability for consensus with other political forces.

Bertelsmann Foundation surveyed 116 so-called transition countries all over the world in the years 1998-2003.

TALLINN -- I've been wondering for awhile whether or not it was true -- many Estonians that I have talked to about the subject have been convinced that it was fact, although I've wondered if it was just a case of poor-mouthing the communist icon.

Now an article in the European Journal of Neurology suggests that -- yes, indeed -- Vladimir Ilyich died of the venereal disease.

posted by Scott at 2:30 AM

TALLINN -- Thirty-five years ago, men first walked on the moon.

It was an amazing mission for many reasons, beyond its historic nature. It could have easily ended in disaster.

NASA had problems communicating with the spacecraft "Eagle" as it attempted its landing. The computer in the "LEM", which had less processing power in 1969 than I now have in my mobile phone, got overloaded and almost froze up on decent. "Eagle" missed its landing site by miles, and almost ran out of fuel before it touched down (see this fascinating interview with Mission Control Director Gene Kranz for his perspective).

Almost the entire planet came to a standstill to watch Neil Armstrong and Irwin "Buzz" Aldrin make footprints and plant a flag.

Except, that is, behind the Iron Curtain. And for one news anchor in Soviet Estonia, the moon landing brought her career to an end.

I thought I was going to get to interview this woman last week and write an article on her experience, but she's now living a quiet, retired life, and deferred at the 11th hour. But it's too interest a story not to share in some aspect.

The Soviet media was ordered to play down the moon landing, and much of the population didn't get to follow it except through brief stories in Pravda and the other offical communist publications. There was no live television coverage.

But, since Tallinn is about 40 miles from Helsinki, Finland, the Estonian capital was one of the few places in the Soviet Union that could watch the coverage of the Apollo 11 mission, if they chose to tune in to the broadcast illegally.

At Estonian Television, the news anchors were ordered not to discuss the mission by the communist censors. But since this woman had been following it on Finnish TV, she couldn't contain her excitement.

When she ended the news broadcast the evening after the landing, she signed off by saying, "I would like to wish good luck to the Americans walking on the moon tonight."

She never worked in television again.



On the lighter side, here's some links that you might want to check out on the anniversary:

• The actual footage on TV was so grainy, it was hard for many people to make out Armstrong during the big moment. NASA digitized the footage and cleaned it up. A Quicktime version is here.
• Was the moon landing faked? Here's one perspective. Be sure to watch the video.
• What did Armstrong "really" say when he stepped on the surface?

TALLINN -- Shopping for groceries in the Baltics is always an interesting learning process, even for basic items.

For example, milk and milk products come in even more varieties than you get in the States. Milk, or "piim" in Estonian, comes with much more milkfat than American varieties. If you want skim, in Estonia that means about the best you are going to do is 1.5%. Three percent milkfat is standard fare.

There are also the "koor" family of products that you have to deal with. There's "hapukoor," which is like a thick sour cream without the sour, and "vahukoor," which is also kind of a thick, clotted cream but more runny. Beat it, add some sugar and you have some passable whipped cream.

There are seemingly another dozen products in the family; various types of cream that go from sour to incredibly sour -- which isn't surprising that are popular to Estonians considering the conditions here not too long ago. Pasteurization is still a dicey process for your basic milk; if I buy a carton, I have to finish it in about three or four days before it turns into a clotted "koor." You won't find two-liter containers here; only 1-liter.

Even more interesting, I think is the packaging of standard milk. Below is a photo of "piim" that you'll find at every store:



In the back of the refrigerator, you see the standard milk carton that Westerners are familiar with. Those containers in the front, however, are also milk, but just in a triangular plastic "pouch".

With a lack of reliable cardboard available during the Soviet era, that's how milk was packaged for many years. They're basically "use it or lose it" however; once you snip the side, you have to pour, because the little pouches aren't built to stand upright.

Independence in the early '90s brought reliable cardboard, and the little triangles disappeared from the shelves. But like vinyl albums, there turned out to be a nostalgia market for them, and an enterprising company has reintroduced the triangle to the shelves.

Also interesting is the alternative packaging for goods imported from the West. My favorite is probably "Mr. Clean," who graces the cleaning goods section with his bald head and gold earring, except in this part of the world, he's known as "Mr. Proper."

Occasionally you'll come across an item like this one below. I think if you tried to sell it this way in America you'd get a class-action suit slapped on you quicker than it would take to cook the rice:



posted by Scott at 6:02 AM

TALLINN -- Paranoid as I am when I fly these days, especially internationally, I'm on alert for strange behavior along the way. I always wear a belt. And I like to tuck a can of Coke away, figuring that in a pinch, I can stick it in a sock for close encounters.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit first linked to this story by Annie Jacobsen, "Terror in the Skies, Again?", about her recent flight from Detroit to Los Angeles. I think it's probably the most disturbing story I've read in months:

Suddenly, seven of the men stood up -- in unison -- and walked to the front and back lavatories. One by one, they went into the two lavatories, each spending about four minutes inside. Right in front of us, two men stood up against the emergency exit door, waiting for the lavatory to become available. The men spoke in Arabic among themselves and to the man in the yellow shirt sitting nearby. One of the men took his camera into the lavatory. Another took his cell phone. Again, no one approached the men. Not one of the flight attendants asked them to sit down. I watched as the man in the yellow shirt, still in his seat, reached inside his shirt and pulled out a small red book. He read a few pages, then put the book back inside his shirt. He pulled the book out again, read a page or two more, and put it back. He continued to do this several more times.

I looked around to see if any other passengers were watching. I immediately spotted a distraught couple seated two rows back. The woman was crying into the man's shoulder. He was holding her hand. I heard him say to her, You've got to calm down. Behind them sat the once pleasant-smiling, goatee-wearing man.

• A man was arrested at the Minneapolis airport with a suicide note and anti-American material.
• David Horowitz had an interesting flight from Germany to Detroit last month, the same airport Jacobsen's plane took off from.
  
• The three-month "truce" offer to Europe -- made in April purportedly by Osama bin Laden -- expired on Thursday.
• And, the U.S. navy seems to have an almost unprecedented number of ships at sea this month. More than 90 percent are underway or deployed.

TALLINN -- Harry Truman Cat's plan for Estonian domination has reached new heights.

Truman made his first television appearance yesterday on the 7 p.m. news on Estonian channel TV-3. He was the second story -- no joke.

It was time for him to get the annual rabies and distemper shots. Truman, being of aristocratic bearing, didn't take it too well. The first shot surprised him, and he didn't have time to react until the needle was already out. The second shot was more complex. After several minutes of spitting, clawing, a fur flying, the vets tried to pin him down, wearing some big, thick gloves that you would probably use under normal circumstances to handle spilled plutonium.

Here's a bad screenshot I took of the little bugger from his television appearance, about five minutes after that ordeal. He was still a bit miffed:

Anyway, Truman's TV face time was due to the fact that he was given one of the new European Union cat passports that are being issued in Estonia now:

The passport contains his shot record, and allows him to travel into any country in the European Union just like a native. It's much preferable to the paperwork I had to collect to get him out of the States, which involved three different forms in triplicate from the Department of Feline Transport.

As for me, I got a little face time on TV, but the reporter who did the story, a young woman by the name of Ester Vaitmaa, found out who I was and introduced herself to me as a graduate of "the other" media school, meaning Tartu. So I was just IDed in the piece as an "American media professor." No name or university affiliation. Heh.

So, anyway, my damn cat has an EU passport now. So he gets to go through the fast citizen line in customs, and I have to take the slow "alien" line. He gets his biography on television, and I'm just "a professor."

There ain't no justice.

LONDON, Jul 13, BNS - Russia sees the existence of countries that do not observe universally recognized democratic norms and human rights as a threat in Europe, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov Tuesday said in a speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

"Countries that distance themselves from democratic norms and human liberties will as a rule become sources of danger to their neighbors, because they tend to provoke military and political tension," Interfax reported Ivanov as saying in his speech. "It is therefore why I, minister of defense, am forced to speak about the situation in Latvia, Estonia and some other countries in the alliance."

The defense minister said the ball was now on the side of Russia's European partners, who in Ivanov's opinion should teach to some new member countries principles of elementary democracy and military political openness in order to prove to Russia their loyalty to the principles of stability and cooperation in European security. ...

The minister also declared that Moscow was worried by the deployment of NATO servicemen and military hardware in the new member countries.

"Estonia cannot remain Russia's whipping boy forever. What we have been hearing recently about the situation being bad in our country for the Russian-speaking population is not true. It is propaganda. It is insulting for Estonia to see these accusations spread at the international level, they are unfounded."

TALLINN -- Norwegian blogger Bjørn Stærk has returned to Oslo from his northern European vacation, with some photos of the Estonian song festival, as well as some observations after seeing life in Tallinn.


posted by Scott at 11:13 PM

TALLINN -- Welcome to all you visitors from National Review and Wonkette. Since many of you are new here, a little introduction on my part.

I'm an American media professor teaching at an international university (in English) in Tallinn, Estonia. I've been here for about three years. Estonia's pretty unknown to most Americans as far as Europe goes. When I told my dear mother that I had accepted a job here, she paused and said, "Is that in Missouri?" -- yes, but only if you take away eight time zones.

But even a significant amount of "Old Europeans," I've discovered on my travels, don't really know much about Estonia, even though as of this year it's a member of NATO and the European Union. It's just somewhere "out east."



This is where we are, tucked to the West of Russia and a short ferry ride south of Helsinki, Finland, and north of the other Baltic States of Latvia and Lithuania. Although Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are lumped together by geography and by historical experience (having been occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union from 1940-1991), they really are very different countries.

So this blog focuses on the life and politics of Estonia through the eyes of an American ex-pat, and to a lesser extent, its neighbors.

Tallinn, the capitol, has become one of the hottest tourist locations in Europe in the last few years. The city was founded in the 12th century with a series of ringed fortifications around it, and has one of the few old towns that escaped destruction in World War II. Here's a picture that gives you an idea what it looks like:



The old town now caters to visitors with galleries and shops (there is even a working blacksmith that specializes in metalwork) that play on its medieval character. (More pictures of Estonia can be found here).

But Estonia, after shedding off Soviet rule in the "Singing Revolution", isn't living totally in the past. It's become one of the leading areas in Europe in terms of Internet connectivity and computer technologies. Estonians wrote the code for the popular peer-to-peer program, Kazaa, and the new hot free Internet service, Skype. The Estonian government has made Internet connectivity "a human right," and has poured millions into wiring the countryside and providing free Internet kiosks for its citizens.

Although it's a small country with just over a million people, Estonia's trying to make itself more visible on the world stage. It has military deployments currently underway in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.

With a flat tax system and zero percent taxes on reinvested profits for business, its economy has been growing at a sustained pace since the early '90s. It's also become one of a hot export location for fashion models.

Anyone here under 30 speaks English, and costs are way below many of the other popular tourist stops in Europe.

If you're thinking about a European vacation, now you know. Welcome!

posted by Scott at 9:41 PM