The most positive thing abot being back -- and it's a big one -- no more smoking in establishments.
A teine Eesti -- different Estonia -- indeed. Lungs happy, computer happy. (Computers now almost outnumber people in cafes, like in any other country. Pretty soon they will probably be able to vote in referendum.)
I remember sitting in Cafe Peterson last year. People would come in just to smoke. They would perfunctorily finish their soup or pie, but it was clear this was just a prelude to the main event. Then they would just sit there and smoke one cigarette after another. Then they would put their overcoats on and leave.
I never could understand how they could perpetrate such an outrage on others with the most placid expressions, instead of putting their overcoats on, going outside and then lighting up.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Monday, November 26, 2007
Conclusions
In six months, we traced a big oval around the country. We passed through 20 states. What is the outcome of our time in the States?
Speaking for myself (even when I use "we" or the passive), it is easy to arrive at the Easy Rider conclusion: that “we blew it”. In that movie, the trip became more important than the destination. In our case, sometimes, especially late in the trip, a restlessness set in when we were in one place for a couple days. That's a clear sign that that you have got to used to being on the road, and like the routine too much.
Then again, we didn’t do acid in a New Orleans graveyard with prostitutes, as Fonda and Hopper did, and we made it back in one piece. So they blew it and then some. Still, like Fonda and Hopper, we didn’t stay on the commune (the lake house) but kept on going west, with fairly vague plans about what we were looking for. If it was an “experiment” there wasn’t much scientific method to it.
Empirically. We observed America was a friendly, naturally bountiful place, as I knew it would be, with none of the hysteria and jingoism and cretinism the mass media reports on every day. It was a rich trip in impressions and culture -- living culture.
For my wife, nature was what impressed her most. I do hope some of the rest rubs off on my wife. I’m not going to pretend that it was very cosmopolitan or sophisticated or stuffy, but it was never advertised as such. America is never advertised as such.
Still, I took to her my left coast haunts and places that are at least hip and wordly. We made the wind blow in the prairie as we passed (how's that for road trip messianism) but did make some stops there, too.
I do think it was important for Morgan to be in the States, which outweighs much of the negatives (such as taking my wife out of her native country for so long). I still subscribe to the theory that 2-year-olds soak up vast amounts of data into their subconscious. Whether they have a concrete single memory is besides the point. I think he got dyed red white and blue on the level of his mitochondria, if not his DNA; and I kind of like that. Those colours don't clash yet with blue, black and white, anyway.
A nomadic existence is not all bad, not for a kid not yet of school (and friend) age. I’m sure Someone was watching out for us, but apart from a miscalculation at the wheel or someone else's wheel there were not that many risks Morgan could have been exposed to.
(Though we are aware that even in suburban Washington state a 12-year-old was snatched by a stranger on 4th of July.)
When I think of who lived in the parts of the US we visited this summer, certainly most of the historical peoples in the NW were biseasonal migrators. And a lot of the world’s people were homeless in the sense of not having a fixed address, for a very long time.
Come to think of it, unless you are very dedicated and devoted and have the right vision, it is hard to live in one place without slowly (and possibly imperceptibly) going crazy. (Perhaps I set the craziness bar too low, but I tend to run for the hills at the first sign of trouble.)
This is important not just because of my own personal fear of a hell that resembles a suburban rec room basement – but because I suspect kids need sane and creative adults around them more than anything else. More than a fixed address. Wherever he was, on this trip, even though he did not have a technical "home”, Morgan was surrounded by loving people who welcomed him in their household.
He had to endure a bit of “sibling” rivalry with Sammy, the three-year-old at our host family. But he suffered no especial lasting trauma, and the experience of being in a house with so many kids – who all tended toward the hyperactive, or maybe were just benignly neglected enough to realize their true kid birthright to be young savages – was ultimately toughening, I think, and will make Morgan more resilient.
Now we're back. As far as being back in Estonia, in the same too-small apartment, in what many consider a wrong season – grey November -- no, it is not that great. Not for me. A telling episode of life in Estonia in the Estonian “experiment” is my trying to track down a should-be-basic plumbing seal today. Even with my wife on the other end of the line sending me digital photographs of our undersink anatomy, I couldn’t get it.
Many things in Estonia resemble a hunt for a obscure part, always available at a higher price than it should be.
Or you can go to strip mall heaven, which resembles the main drag outside many US towns, but that too takes time.
Things are scattered, nothing seems standard, even though my written Estonian is perfect in some respects, I have a language barrier when trying to get something practical done. Not that I will give up on the plumbing seal.
Fact is, when we get the leak under the sink fixed, we still need a bigger place, one in the countryside perhaps. This apartment is impractical in one very specific way – there is no privacy. It is a chain of three walk-thru rooms.
The country risk factor (I'm talking financial terminology now) still worries me. I would like to keep the apartment, and buy another property as well. But two properties in Estonia, and no assets in the States but an old Subaru?
Estonia could quickly disappear if Germany and Russia will it. Not that much has changed since 1939. It is naïve to think otherwise. It won’t happen as a result of silly ideological beliefs this time. But it could happen because of the economy.
For better or for worse, Alaska didn’t happen. The rubber band snapped back, as it did for me in 2003. We decided this time it was too far. This was partly a lack of research – I headn’t realized the equivalent of a conteinent still lay betwen us and Anchorage after we got to the West Coast -- but also the subjective feeling that it was too far and we would be on the road too long.
Alaska is a smart idea if not approached naively. I have no special need for visuals of mountains and bears – they can be had in other places, so it is not that. But as a last great place, a part of the US that is overlooked, it is tempting to lay down some sort of foundation.
It’s all too to easy to belittle the idea of Alaska because of misguided 1970s idealism. After all, there is a major motion picture right now in the cinemas directed by Sean Penn about a kid who decides to turn Thoreau. Except he did it not in Walden Pond, which was almost suburban even in Henry David’s tme, but in the Alaskan interior. The plot point? He starves to death. Talk about blowing it.
As an investment, of course, buying land near a certain cowtown in the middle of the country might have also seemed ridiculous in the 1960s. Among Easterners, Denver was only sexy to Jack Kerouac and his crowd back then, and even that’s a bit hazy why. Today of course the Front Range communities have boomed, enough to create their own subculture of suburban anomie – and school shootings. And a certain nihilist cartoon. People in Boulder are wealthy by and large, and it’s not just the descendants of the 1860s settlers who form the local elite.
Even if it gets to be a temperate place awfully fast, Alaska is destined not to grow that fast and become as overdevelopedYeah, Alaska would be a good investment, if economic growth continues in any way at all. Not to live in, yet, but as a fallback for the future. Morgan & Co. will thank us for sure.
The effects of global warming are made less obvious by extremes if you live in the centre of a continent. There are still bitter cold spells there, which muddles things in your memory. But down by the sea, where temps don’t vary much from one day to the next, things are consistently warmer. It’s quite obvious and on nearly muggy moisture-choked days like this, I am keenly aware of what I could call the buildup – in temperature, in water levels. Everything is getting saturated.
Speaking for myself (even when I use "we" or the passive), it is easy to arrive at the Easy Rider conclusion: that “we blew it”. In that movie, the trip became more important than the destination. In our case, sometimes, especially late in the trip, a restlessness set in when we were in one place for a couple days. That's a clear sign that that you have got to used to being on the road, and like the routine too much.
Then again, we didn’t do acid in a New Orleans graveyard with prostitutes, as Fonda and Hopper did, and we made it back in one piece. So they blew it and then some. Still, like Fonda and Hopper, we didn’t stay on the commune (the lake house) but kept on going west, with fairly vague plans about what we were looking for. If it was an “experiment” there wasn’t much scientific method to it.
Empirically. We observed America was a friendly, naturally bountiful place, as I knew it would be, with none of the hysteria and jingoism and cretinism the mass media reports on every day. It was a rich trip in impressions and culture -- living culture.
For my wife, nature was what impressed her most. I do hope some of the rest rubs off on my wife. I’m not going to pretend that it was very cosmopolitan or sophisticated or stuffy, but it was never advertised as such. America is never advertised as such.
Still, I took to her my left coast haunts and places that are at least hip and wordly. We made the wind blow in the prairie as we passed (how's that for road trip messianism) but did make some stops there, too.
I do think it was important for Morgan to be in the States, which outweighs much of the negatives (such as taking my wife out of her native country for so long). I still subscribe to the theory that 2-year-olds soak up vast amounts of data into their subconscious. Whether they have a concrete single memory is besides the point. I think he got dyed red white and blue on the level of his mitochondria, if not his DNA; and I kind of like that. Those colours don't clash yet with blue, black and white, anyway.
A nomadic existence is not all bad, not for a kid not yet of school (and friend) age. I’m sure Someone was watching out for us, but apart from a miscalculation at the wheel or someone else's wheel there were not that many risks Morgan could have been exposed to.
(Though we are aware that even in suburban Washington state a 12-year-old was snatched by a stranger on 4th of July.)
When I think of who lived in the parts of the US we visited this summer, certainly most of the historical peoples in the NW were biseasonal migrators. And a lot of the world’s people were homeless in the sense of not having a fixed address, for a very long time.
Come to think of it, unless you are very dedicated and devoted and have the right vision, it is hard to live in one place without slowly (and possibly imperceptibly) going crazy. (Perhaps I set the craziness bar too low, but I tend to run for the hills at the first sign of trouble.)
This is important not just because of my own personal fear of a hell that resembles a suburban rec room basement – but because I suspect kids need sane and creative adults around them more than anything else. More than a fixed address. Wherever he was, on this trip, even though he did not have a technical "home”, Morgan was surrounded by loving people who welcomed him in their household.
He had to endure a bit of “sibling” rivalry with Sammy, the three-year-old at our host family. But he suffered no especial lasting trauma, and the experience of being in a house with so many kids – who all tended toward the hyperactive, or maybe were just benignly neglected enough to realize their true kid birthright to be young savages – was ultimately toughening, I think, and will make Morgan more resilient.
Now we're back. As far as being back in Estonia, in the same too-small apartment, in what many consider a wrong season – grey November -- no, it is not that great. Not for me. A telling episode of life in Estonia in the Estonian “experiment” is my trying to track down a should-be-basic plumbing seal today. Even with my wife on the other end of the line sending me digital photographs of our undersink anatomy, I couldn’t get it.
Many things in Estonia resemble a hunt for a obscure part, always available at a higher price than it should be.
Or you can go to strip mall heaven, which resembles the main drag outside many US towns, but that too takes time.
Things are scattered, nothing seems standard, even though my written Estonian is perfect in some respects, I have a language barrier when trying to get something practical done. Not that I will give up on the plumbing seal.
Fact is, when we get the leak under the sink fixed, we still need a bigger place, one in the countryside perhaps. This apartment is impractical in one very specific way – there is no privacy. It is a chain of three walk-thru rooms.
The country risk factor (I'm talking financial terminology now) still worries me. I would like to keep the apartment, and buy another property as well. But two properties in Estonia, and no assets in the States but an old Subaru?
Estonia could quickly disappear if Germany and Russia will it. Not that much has changed since 1939. It is naïve to think otherwise. It won’t happen as a result of silly ideological beliefs this time. But it could happen because of the economy.
For better or for worse, Alaska didn’t happen. The rubber band snapped back, as it did for me in 2003. We decided this time it was too far. This was partly a lack of research – I headn’t realized the equivalent of a conteinent still lay betwen us and Anchorage after we got to the West Coast -- but also the subjective feeling that it was too far and we would be on the road too long.
Alaska is a smart idea if not approached naively. I have no special need for visuals of mountains and bears – they can be had in other places, so it is not that. But as a last great place, a part of the US that is overlooked, it is tempting to lay down some sort of foundation.
It’s all too to easy to belittle the idea of Alaska because of misguided 1970s idealism. After all, there is a major motion picture right now in the cinemas directed by Sean Penn about a kid who decides to turn Thoreau. Except he did it not in Walden Pond, which was almost suburban even in Henry David’s tme, but in the Alaskan interior. The plot point? He starves to death. Talk about blowing it.
As an investment, of course, buying land near a certain cowtown in the middle of the country might have also seemed ridiculous in the 1960s. Among Easterners, Denver was only sexy to Jack Kerouac and his crowd back then, and even that’s a bit hazy why. Today of course the Front Range communities have boomed, enough to create their own subculture of suburban anomie – and school shootings. And a certain nihilist cartoon. People in Boulder are wealthy by and large, and it’s not just the descendants of the 1860s settlers who form the local elite.
Even if it gets to be a temperate place awfully fast, Alaska is destined not to grow that fast and become as overdevelopedYeah, Alaska would be a good investment, if economic growth continues in any way at all. Not to live in, yet, but as a fallback for the future. Morgan & Co. will thank us for sure.
The effects of global warming are made less obvious by extremes if you live in the centre of a continent. There are still bitter cold spells there, which muddles things in your memory. But down by the sea, where temps don’t vary much from one day to the next, things are consistently warmer. It’s quite obvious and on nearly muggy moisture-choked days like this, I am keenly aware of what I could call the buildup – in temperature, in water levels. Everything is getting saturated.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Perchance
In Japan, capsule hotels and manga cafes offer facilities where you can sleep for a few hours, anytime, day or night. Some major airports now have them too, apparently. Besides the tagline "bigger than a coffin" -- and let me tell you, a truly tired person would not even blink at this -- I wonder: why this has not caught on elsewhere out of the sheer convenience and necessity, in places outside New Orleans and western Romania?
I often need a couple hours, but can't get it in a practical and genteel way.
In Stockholm, the need was dire when we were waiting all day for the boat. But there was to my knowledge nowhere to sleep, unless we went behind the train station and asked for an hourly room, which seems sort of shady, especially for a family. Once, before we had Morgan, were forced by circumstance to sleep a couple hours in a parked Subaru in Riverside Park on the Hudson, also to catch a plane the next day. That was not right. It wasn't dangerous, but the company in the other parked cars was seedy. Ever since that time, I've made reservations in bigger cities.
But what do you do when it's past checkout and not checkin?
Here in Tallinn, home is too noisy to sleep during the day, and there is only one room with a door that can be closed.
The couch at our office is available for naps, supposedly, but it never really works, probably because sonically it's long silences punctuated by stiletto+heel power-walks over wooden floorboards. (OK, here are actually no power-walkers at our work, but there can be sudden bursts of energy and as always, everything sounds worse once the melatonin starts flowing.) In any case, as soon as doze off, a piece of work will come in and I will have to get up and evaluate it, whereas if I was at home I could simply ignore all communications for a few hours ("running errands"), and possibly no one would know. There is also the fact that I am mostly a cyberemployee and going to the office just to sleep would look bad.
As for sleeping in public spaces not usually intended for sleeping -- apparently this is illegal in many places, though the reason why this is so, and why anyone minds so terribly, escapes me. I once witnessed Danish police going around the Copenhagen train station shaking tired travellers with tickets for further travel to wake them up as soon as they dropped off. It seemed like an awful waste of resources. If you did that, you would end up hating your job, and people would hate you.
Of course there are situations where it is just plain rude. Sleeping in a public library, especially the person has brought a sleeping bag, and is unwashed. Or stroking out on the couch on a busy Sunday morning at the Mudhouse cafe in Charlottesville, VA, as I witnessed a non-paying customer doing a couple weeks ago. I would have been happy to make a citizen's arrest so that I could sit down with my coffee, and that's saying a lot.
I never could sleep in public, but cinemas are an exception. You can't put your feet up, especially not in Europe, where they have monitors, but you will be left alone otherwise. One day, weary and unable to concentrate, I ducked into the multiplex downtown for an 11am showing of American Gangster. The length at 2:37 was ideal. I figured that if it was a cliched remake of Scarface I would snooze, and if it turned out to have something original to say I would see a good flick, and either way I'd be out only five bucks.
I often need a couple hours, but can't get it in a practical and genteel way.
In Stockholm, the need was dire when we were waiting all day for the boat. But there was to my knowledge nowhere to sleep, unless we went behind the train station and asked for an hourly room, which seems sort of shady, especially for a family. Once, before we had Morgan, were forced by circumstance to sleep a couple hours in a parked Subaru in Riverside Park on the Hudson, also to catch a plane the next day. That was not right. It wasn't dangerous, but the company in the other parked cars was seedy. Ever since that time, I've made reservations in bigger cities.
But what do you do when it's past checkout and not checkin?
Here in Tallinn, home is too noisy to sleep during the day, and there is only one room with a door that can be closed.
The couch at our office is available for naps, supposedly, but it never really works, probably because sonically it's long silences punctuated by stiletto+heel power-walks over wooden floorboards. (OK, here are actually no power-walkers at our work, but there can be sudden bursts of energy and as always, everything sounds worse once the melatonin starts flowing.) In any case, as soon as doze off, a piece of work will come in and I will have to get up and evaluate it, whereas if I was at home I could simply ignore all communications for a few hours ("running errands"), and possibly no one would know. There is also the fact that I am mostly a cyberemployee and going to the office just to sleep would look bad.
As for sleeping in public spaces not usually intended for sleeping -- apparently this is illegal in many places, though the reason why this is so, and why anyone minds so terribly, escapes me. I once witnessed Danish police going around the Copenhagen train station shaking tired travellers with tickets for further travel to wake them up as soon as they dropped off. It seemed like an awful waste of resources. If you did that, you would end up hating your job, and people would hate you.
Of course there are situations where it is just plain rude. Sleeping in a public library, especially the person has brought a sleeping bag, and is unwashed. Or stroking out on the couch on a busy Sunday morning at the Mudhouse cafe in Charlottesville, VA, as I witnessed a non-paying customer doing a couple weeks ago. I would have been happy to make a citizen's arrest so that I could sit down with my coffee, and that's saying a lot.
I never could sleep in public, but cinemas are an exception. You can't put your feet up, especially not in Europe, where they have monitors, but you will be left alone otherwise. One day, weary and unable to concentrate, I ducked into the multiplex downtown for an 11am showing of American Gangster. The length at 2:37 was ideal. I figured that if it was a cliched remake of Scarface I would snooze, and if it turned out to have something original to say I would see a good flick, and either way I'd be out only five bucks.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
The end, for now
We reached Tallinn across a stormy sea. Our cabin was roomy but throughout the night "sharp reports", most likely waves breaking but exactly the sound that trucks would make if they slammed into each other on the car deck, and another disturbance that sounded like pumps (or being inside a giant toilet being flushed) for an hour in the middle of the night..inevitably brought back thoughts of the sinking of the Estonia ferry. Turbulence was also unprecedented on our flight to Stockholm, but there I had complete faith in the rivets of the Boeing. You could sense the sinewy flexibility of the construction and the fact that it would take an order of magnitude of shock greater to destabilize the plane. Though I had complete faith in the Estonian seamen, I didn't get the sense of structural soundness with our ferry. The walls vibrated and shuddered -- my mobile phone measured 85 decibels -- and somewhere I could only imagine screws were working their way out of drywall, panels becoming dislodged...Usually being stuck in an aluminum fuselage of a planeis worse.
By way of a lodging review, clearly Tallink needs to work on noise control issues. I'm not quite sure how the 2am stop in the Aland Islands is economic good sense at this time of year. But the noise of the engines reversing is a health hazard. You used to be able to buy a deck passage for about $20. Now the only option is a buying a stateroom at ten times the price. You can get a bunk in a cabin, but this does not seem appealing. Add the stratospheric food and drink prices -- this would be high for Switzerland or Norway -- and this sort of commercial freighter noise is unforgivable.
The trip is almost over. I can see Tallinn and we have reached the calm of the fine natural harbor, or captain Vahur Ausmees has given the order to cut the engines back, and probably fire the reverse thrusters, causing plaster dust to rain down in our cabin, which we have fortunately now vacated after a few hours of sleep.
Winter has blanketed most of Europe. Though of course it is overcast and chilly, it is below freezing in Estonia, and the snow is crisp. Elsewhere in Europe,some ski areas in the Alps have already opened. A big change from last year. Sadly, this tends to be a new pattern -- a false winter in late October, then endless days of warmer weather -- high 30s and 40s for days on end., then finally a couple weeks of true winter in late January and February, and then after March
I guess this blog now changes its title to "longtme US resident returns to ancestral country again with family for indefinite experiment..."
By way of a lodging review, clearly Tallink needs to work on noise control issues. I'm not quite sure how the 2am stop in the Aland Islands is economic good sense at this time of year. But the noise of the engines reversing is a health hazard. You used to be able to buy a deck passage for about $20. Now the only option is a buying a stateroom at ten times the price. You can get a bunk in a cabin, but this does not seem appealing. Add the stratospheric food and drink prices -- this would be high for Switzerland or Norway -- and this sort of commercial freighter noise is unforgivable.
The trip is almost over. I can see Tallinn and we have reached the calm of the fine natural harbor, or captain Vahur Ausmees has given the order to cut the engines back, and probably fire the reverse thrusters, causing plaster dust to rain down in our cabin, which we have fortunately now vacated after a few hours of sleep.
Winter has blanketed most of Europe. Though of course it is overcast and chilly, it is below freezing in Estonia, and the snow is crisp. Elsewhere in Europe,some ski areas in the Alps have already opened. A big change from last year. Sadly, this tends to be a new pattern -- a false winter in late October, then endless days of warmer weather -- high 30s and 40s for days on end., then finally a couple weeks of true winter in late January and February, and then after March
I guess this blog now changes its title to "longtme US resident returns to ancestral country again with family for indefinite experiment..."
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Thursday, November 1, 2007
The young geographer
Morgan has been displaying some signs of cartographic prowess.
I am glad to see it is not just about assigning place names but also staking claims to indigenous territory -- really the name of the game in any era. The big one is that he has claimed the lake in my name: "Järv on issi oma." I guess it's because every day I go out in the canoe and I am his ticket to the lake when he wants to go out on the water. And you don't see many other boats this time of year. Fairly generous, in any case. I can live with it. Some rich people own islands somewhere, but I own all of the water. OK.
As said, he has also been assigning place names -- something I used to do, but not so much at the lake, so there's plenty of things still to name.
The rocks halfway between the "beach" and boat dock are Duckington. I think this one is a corruption of "dock", befroe he knew what a dock was, but it stuck.
The dark stand of pines in the middle of Rock island is "Sleepy Night Air". Straight out of Dr. Seuss's sleep book, but actually pretty appropriate. We were there just before sundown.
I am glad to see it is not just about assigning place names but also staking claims to indigenous territory -- really the name of the game in any era. The big one is that he has claimed the lake in my name: "Järv on issi oma." I guess it's because every day I go out in the canoe and I am his ticket to the lake when he wants to go out on the water. And you don't see many other boats this time of year. Fairly generous, in any case. I can live with it. Some rich people own islands somewhere, but I own all of the water. OK.
As said, he has also been assigning place names -- something I used to do, but not so much at the lake, so there's plenty of things still to name.
The rocks halfway between the "beach" and boat dock are Duckington. I think this one is a corruption of "dock", befroe he knew what a dock was, but it stuck.
The dark stand of pines in the middle of Rock island is "Sleepy Night Air". Straight out of Dr. Seuss's sleep book, but actually pretty appropriate. We were there just before sundown.
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