Our last evening in Võsu

Quite a few foreigners in Võsu, which is interesting given that there's no hotel anymore, just some pensions, hostels and homestays. There's older German couples, a fair number of Brits. Two Romanian cyclists looking for the road to Rakvere passed me on a back lane.

Our five days is up tomorrow. I'm now even more of a Lääne-Viru County patriot. This is great country. The bridge in the centre of Võsu is being repaired - we're on the Rakvere side and I've half a mind just to drive there and never return to Tallinn.

Once again, we have not had a sauna, though, and that is one thing our Tallinn apartment is good for.

I'm not on vacation -- holiday resumes in late August. I wondered whether I would have to go back to Tallinn to work, but I was able to get by in Võsu with the WiFi at the public library and a tavern, the O Kõrts. No surprise there.

We ate there tonight, at the O Kõrts. Both of our entrees were good but average. I got "grilled chicken over salad" for Morgan, which was under salads for just 65 EEK and it came with pineapple, raspberry vinaigrette and a sprig of fresh thyme. The pile of food was taller than either my salmon or TTT's schnitzel.

In short: I had several hours of downtime each day, took long swims, played with the kids in the sand, and don't remember a single moment of irritation. I can't remember the last five-day stretch I could say that about. It's enough to make blogging seem hard, my writing slack. But I'm not even going to edit my previous post from yesterday for misspellings, non sequiturs and vague platitudes.

No, check that, I did have one consumer complaint -- I bought a pint of gooseberries for 15 EEK in the marketplace -- Võsu has 500 people but a cute little daily market -- but they were practically all sour! The fuckers. Trying to make a quick buck while the weather is nice, eh? I wonder if there's some place I can complain to. I know what, I'll take the bad blood back to Tallinn with me.

We're in Võsu, a little town on a cove in northern Estonia. I was thinking why it is so idyllic here, apart from the beatiful weather, and I think it may be this -- it has that feel of bygone days, and not Soviet days, except that time is the present. All the establishments and little mom and pop stores are operating.

Võsu also boasts what must be the cleanest public toilets in the universe.

The kilometre of beach parellel to Main Street is a family-oriented and pleasant. I think it gets a little busier at the week-end.

There's only two buses a day. Even the minibus taxi only goes as far as Vihasoo, 10 km away. Things have been cut back since just two years ago.

The water in the lagoon is about air temperature -- 21, 22 degree C.

I've been indulging my unfulfilled drip-castle plans from childhood. It's all Gothic architecture for me, while TTT built more of a French Foreign Legion structure.

Didn't use the car for a few days, then tonight drove to the family compound of a friend and colleague, Kristjan from Staatusraport, a few villages over -- some fresh-caught whitefish on the grill...the compound looks like a Swedish fishing village meets aristocracy out of Chekhov. And very Estonian, of course. Just a first impression. Oli ilus päev.

A new career`?

I was working on my laptop outside at a cafe when I was approached by a casting agent who said she was looking for someone to play a "narkar" (drug addict) in a film. I'm not vain enough yet to bore you with a iSight image of what I looked like, but suffice it to say I was unshaven, underdressed and wearing a Mendocino County Farmers Market cap (don't ask, it's the one cap I have and I had to leave the flat in a hurry this morning). I'm also a little gaunt -- weighed 66.5 kilos a few days ago after my hiking trip, down from the usual 69 or 70.

As she delivered her pitch, she told me not to take it the wrong way. I didn't. I was already thinking about niche actors like Giamatti and Steve Buscemi. Could this be something like Jack Nicholson in Ironweed?

I said, "I totally understand. It's the cap, right?" But she hadn't heard of the California coastal county or the county's largest cash crop, which is not sold on the farmers market.

The casting agent asked for my mobile phone number, height and took a couple digital snaps. I stood up and acted "candid". A spoon clattered to the ground. "Oops, there goes the spoon I was going to cook up with," I said, trying to get into character. She didn't get that one, either.

I was under deadline so I nodded (to her) and continued working, and she sat at another cafe table smoking and making occasional calls. She didn't say anything like, "Quentin, I found him," but nor did she approach anyone else.

I went home and shaved.

This is not my first brush with celebrity.

In 2004, I was stopped on 8th Av in NY while walking past a fairly swanky salon and asked if I would be a "hair model" (since it involved me getting a haircut, I figured it wouldn't be a very long-term gig). Had to decline that time. But opportunity knocks twice?

Could be a career move -- playing down and out characters. We'll find out in a couple weeks.

Squeaky wheel gets oiled...

I posted not long ago that there is no organic meat in Estonia and now Ecopantry, an organic store in the Pelgulinna district, is suddenly brimming over with the stuff, raised in Märjamaa.

Besides lamb, usually a more ecoconscious choice, there is organic beef, too, which is even pretty rare in the US. Some of the beef is "antrekoot" (ribeye, basically) or is marbled, making it plum for the grill. And it's cheap. What's going on?

I bought a kilo of ground lamb (not mutton) and a half kilo of very lean topside of beef and it came to about $10 for that three pounds. There are some excellent cuts left. There is a nice rack of lamb that I would have picked up but I'm out of cash for the month.

One thing should be noted. Apart from the nice green and yellow labels (and the fact that I would trust small farmers and visibly fresh product more than anything in a supermarket case), I'm not sure what the "organic" standards are. These small organic retailers often carry some smoked meats on a shelf which are not organic or sometimes are nitrite-cured. And when I was at the Ökosahver store on Mulla 6b to pick up my order, the clerk said she "thought" that the packages of ground meat in the Otepää Meat Packing Plant case were also organic, which I'm almost positive they're not; its just an alternative, smaller plant.

In Estonia, which stopped slaughtering old stringy dairy cattle in favour of Anguses and other beef cattle a while back, everything is now "lihaveis" (literally "meat cattle"). Sometimes plain old veiseliha (beef) can be hard to find -- everywhere you look, it's lihaveise liha -- meat cattle meat. The tautology is a bit absurd, a kind of premiumization of the language. Though I guess beef had such a bad name for a while, compared to pork, that it's still important to stress to people that it is the new, good stuff.

I hope things don't reach the point where anything sort of cottage or small-scale becomes "mahe" ("organic") if it really isn't organic.

**

Piece in the NYT about cattle country. Absaroka, an area of northern Wyoming and pieces of other states which made a half-baked and -hearted bid for U.S. statehood in the 1930s. The US has its would-be breakaway republics with a tradition of independent-mindedness, too, so what if they tend to vote Republican as a protest against Eastern elitist big government.

The interesting thing to me is why is the Times writing about this now. The only peg for the piece is an obscure feature produced by the Federal Writers' Project way back when? There are some themes that are in everyone's subsonscious. And the development of and battle over natural resources in WY is only hotting up now.

Good escapist summer reading. Indeed it's number four on the most-read list of articles and for me, mere mention of Absaroka brought back a flood of memories, mainly connected with the Beartooth-Absaroka Range.

Home life

I'm pretty happy with our rental apartment. It's not quite the worst, most faceless condo in the world, though it does have a certain numbered anonymity. I can see how it can be a draw for some people.

Villu Reiljan lives in the building, when he is in Tallinn. I think he is one of Estonia's most corrupt politicians? Unsubstantiated, of course. I just know foreign Estonians have never forgotten his "forest brothers = bandits" remark. Let's just say a different-paradigm sort of guy.

Anyway, I think I was crazy to live in a basement apartment for so long. There is so much more light and air here, and some pretty nice views of Tallinn, which is a very green town (go up to the Radisson's Skybar on a July evening to really see the verdure).

The rental market is meanwhile said to be completely oversaturated. At least I have the consolation that, even though we may not be able to find a tenant for the old place any time soon, we are paying exactly market rate (113 kroons per sq m per month) for the new quite well-positioned flat. We didn't get screwed! Amazing. We even knocked 5% off the price and 30% off the broker's fee.

Oddly, getting hooked up to the Internet was a bit of a drag. You can probably set up a company in a couple of hours in Estonia, but our ISP Elion said it would take weeks to register a change of address to move their cable modem down the street. ANd then, although I pay them regularly as clockwork -- every two months -- I find out yesterday that again they have disconnected us for non-payment. As great as they are, I wish the world were not run by computers.

Moments like this remind me that the name of the company is not "e-Lion", but something made up by well-paid corporate identity consultants in London using a randomizer.

Starman, another provider, said that, since the previous tenant was a Starman customer and had disappeared with their modem, we would have to drive out to their office in Mustamäe and wave our lease in their face.

And KÕU, Eesti Energia's solution, where you get a mobile gizmo that isn't linked to any fixed address, has got bad marks from some people out in the countryside.

Finally we went with Starman, drove out to Mustamäe, always a nice lease-waving or paper-pushing destination once a year or so, and they dispatched a technician the very next day. But these guys really want to sell you their own 900-kroon wireless router, to the point where they will fib to you a bit, saying other routers are incompatible.

I think one of the choicest devices we have in our personal-spare-computer parts reliquary, an Ericsson HN294d used by Elion, actually is incompatible. It has a DSL line cable input whereas the Starman cable modem has a coaxial input and Ethernet output. I've been a wireless nomad so long that I am finding out what these jacks are for the first time.

Until we get a router working, we're stuck with one IP address and stick-pencil-lead-in-hole to reset the modem if we repatch to another computer. At least Starman's price is next to nothing.

**

Hope Steve Jobs is doing OK, and of course not just because I still hold AAPL. How come so many people get pancreatic cancer, incidentally? It seems to be a disease that hits luminaries and unique individuals -- Emily Couric from my hometown (a rare decent politician with a bright national political career ahead of her); my godfather Oscar Trelles; Lauri Pääslane, who was a roguish but big-hearted Estonian in the Defence League and who probably deserves minor folk hero status; Swayze; Dith Pran. I'm sure it's actuarially completely explicable, but I cannot think of a single person at this moment who has died youngish of a disease other than pancreatic cancer. It's supposed to be the most painless way to go, of all the cancers, fortunately.

ROADTRIP: Võru County - Poku County

Our company threw its annual summer picnic down in Misso vald, the extreme corner of southeastern Estonia, over the week-end. We've had a tradition of meeting in the south. This time was special as one of the partners had bought a farm down there so it was very much "in the family". Typically farmsteads -- quite a few are still available -- have some old buildings and foundations and maybe 10-20 acres. They need a lot of work, but the rudiments are there and the price can be cheap. Thanks to KÕU, Eesti Energia's relatively new universal Internet service, and other handy things, such as an electric water pump, life can be quite comfortable there in the summer.

For most, the party started on Friday. They made the four-hour drive after work and still managed to have a full-length fest. Or maybe they strategically positioned themselves in Tartu the day before. I always arrive later at these affairs and often have a brief, "is there any beer left" moment. Especially if we go with two small children, we're bound to be the last ones anywhere.

In this case, not to worry: the main event was Saturday. We got on the road at 8am and only made one stop. When we arrived, most of the people were off having a tour of a local dairy followed by a hike to the Kisejärv swimming spot. Two late-rising Finns who were friends of someone were drinking coffee in the farmyard and recovering from Friday night hangovers. We chatted. They said the smoke sauna, dating from 1890, had been excellent the night before. (Supposedly Finns know from saunas, almost as well as Estonians do).

Sadly we would not get to try the smoke sauna. After it had been heated that evening, the smoke, which was obviously supposed to clear the chamber, started increasing at a certain point. Heating smoke saunas is bit of a delicate art and better not left to laymen, as a passing Võru County native reminded us after the fact.

Meeste saun (the men's time slot) thus ended up being spent outside the sauna watching the DIY fire extinguishing efforts. Iconic photographs were taken of Bas, the Dutch boyfriend of the farm-owner's sister, bare-chested, throwing bucket after bucket of water through the doorway. Good way to demonstrate commitment. There was levity and the fire could not spread to anything else, but watching a historic structure's roof beams smoulder made for anxious moments. During naiste saun the local fire brigade was called and roared to the scene and made sure the fire would not break out again. And they had the good sense not to demolish the structure, it wasn't too badly damaged, I don't think.

After they had left, Svjata Vatra took the stage. I would say they are a world-class band -- a Ukrainian Estonian roots music folk group consisting of a trombonist, accordion player, vocals and various percussion. With regard to the trombone, imagine someone playing a part meant to be picked on a dobro -- but on a brass instrument. That gives you some idea of the guy's virtuosity.

This made me think: who needs three-day rock festivals in our increasingly DIY, atomized world. Buy a farm, invite friends to play.

Culinary epiphany -- don't grimace -- kamararulaad, a sliced head cheese made from pork rind. Very tender, melt in your mouth, with pieces of carrots that had been lovingly cooked in bouillon. They were made by the local cafeteria in the nearby town of Vastseliina; supposedly they can be ordered. These were nothing like the cartilage-filled pig's ear roulades you can find in some places. I can understand pork fat in this context of the Vastseliina head cheese, whereas I still don't get the heavy emphasis on grilling itself - chunks of consumer-bucket pork, some of them with more fat than meat.

A typical Estonian grillside scene: big burly men talk about how they much like the marbled meat or even the pure pekk or chunks of fat (as if no one could have guessed) and gallantly help some of the more finicky and high-maintenance people with the near-impossible task of finding a piece of lean meat. Usually there is chicken or something but not on this occasion. (I was recently accused of being sexist by a random bypasser in another blog, so I'm going to have to be careful with what observations I make. Maybe the "smart women who know how to walk in heels" entry in the right column on this blog can be taken the wrong way, too. Geez.)

Anyway, on the smorgasbord, the rulaad was sliced and laid out next to the sõir, sõir being a local kind of "fortified cheese" made by pressing curds with butter and eggs and caraway seeds.

There was also great marinated fish -- would that be called rõiba?

**

On Sunday we made a detour to visit Pokumaa, which is between Võru and Põlva County but does not have administrative status. It is a theme park, except Estonian style, very tastefully done. It is a celebration of the life and characters of Estonian illustrator and children's book author (and jack of all trades) Edgar Valter who lived in these parts. It is like an open air museum set in deep woods. The central figures are the pokus, or sedges, walking clumps of grass who as the first book unfolds are in search of a moist home in the forest. I am so used to thinking of these guys as shy, child-like creatures with stress-pencil hair that seeing a interpretive trail sign identifying the common poku as Carex sp. (the sedge) threw me -- thought it was a put-on.

Pokumaa needs a lot of funding to become a reality, but you can see what they are going for, and it is good: a quintessential Estonian forest (loaded with berries this time of year), winding trails, education, and always a sense of discovery -- coming around a bend and seeing some sort of hut you can stick your head into, or an implement to play with. Nothing plastic. No walking cartoon characters.

It rained, the map they passed out showed the future Pokumaa rather than the existing one, and there was nothing in the visitor's centre that would be too exciting for a 2-year-old, so it was a bit frustrating. I think it would have been a great stop without the rain. And I hope our 125 kroon family ticket will be used well.

They also need a signpost from the main Võru-Tartu road. And better directions on the webpage. We knew it was 9 km from one village and 2.5 from another and straddled the county line. This almost requires trigonometry to find.

Rental available

Our old apartment is available as a furnished rental. Here's the (now-fixed) link to the ad with pics.

Nothing very glamorous, but some points for quaintness, perhaps something for someone who needs a hideaway near the centre of Tallinn. Location is the main thing -- a quiet street a four-minute walk from Freedom Square.

Utilities and other payments are 1000-2200 kroons per month, depending on the season.

The building's plumbing got fixed in the spring. We also replaced a basement wall then and sealed it properly and added some more ventilation. It's never really had moisture problems, though.

There's a nice Tulikivi wood-burning stove, which heats the place adequately in winter. Washer/dryer, TV, fridge, parking spot behind gate.

We are also open to haggling.

Arriving back in Estonia, I took charge of Morgan while my wife and Lorna went to take possession of our new place.

I had signed the lease the morning I left for Sweden. We caved. It's a rental, and one of convenience and expeditiousness. It's in one of the newer pastel stone buildings built in an otherwise old wooden neighbourhood. Most of the people are short-term, with quite a few foreigners. I think two Finnish guys were interested in the same apartment, so it is nice to know we got the nod. We were moving some things yesterday and an entourage of agents brushed by with some Africans in tow. Not that it is the kind of building that will lend itself to international relations and socializing with one's neighbours, though maybe we will hear different languages through the walls.

So we still have our small mortgaged apartment just a couple hundred yards away, and now we have this place for a year. Less atmosphere, to be sure, but better air and more room. I don't think the walls are so thin. Furnished, with a sauna.

In a kitchen drawer we found a waffle maker. That is a bit of a rarity here, not part of the standard equipment. So that was cool. Of course I'll have to see if it works. Though the apartment has nice track lighting and embedded/inset lights on the kitchen shelves (as its one cost-plus feature), many of them had burned out.

There were a couple weights in the closet, too -- dumbbells etc. There were some weights in the closet of a similar place I rented back in 2004 on Gonsiori, also with a lot of bachelor foreigners leasing. I think the point is that you work in the City all day. Then you come back home to your burglarized apartment, and at least you can work out, because they're too heavy to steal.

I think some furniture, like a second writing desk, was included for us on a similar principle -- too heavy to move elsewhere.

I don't really know if crime rates are any higher on this side of Liivalaia, but the neighbourhood is less gentriifed. Fine with me, as that's one thing I'm not paranoid about (as opposed to radon in the other, basement apartment).

But there are two signs in the lobby warning to leave doors closed -- I think the wording is "to reduce thefts" (not "prevent thefts"). And posted on the lobby bulletin board is the complete contact list of the local police prefecture. Everyone you would ever need to talk to there.

Last night I came home at midnight and in the deep shadows of the unlit front entrance was a little dude dressed in black examining the door handle. I think he was just cold, and said as much, but obviously a little suspicious. I kind of stood behind him and observed what he was doing. He said he was looking for Andrus on the third floor. Somehow I don't think we will get introduced to Andrus at a housewarming party.

***

Some cranky impressions of Stockholm, for what it's worth.

1. I've never been able to really find the pulsing Bohemian heart of Stockholm's Bohemian district Södermalm. I fully appreciate the character of Östermalm -- Upper Öst Side, basically -- but I don't get Södermalm yet. Maybe it's over at the extreme west end where I have not been but where you can reportedly sit on an old couch right on the sidewalk and drink coffee (whoo-hoo) or maybe once you've been in Amsterdam, nothing seems properly Bohemian anymore.

It's pleasant, though. I visited one of its more famous havens. Hermans Tradgard Cafe, overlooking the water on the Nybro/Old Town side. You enter a townhouse and go down steps to get to the terraces with the great view.

It's about $20 for the all you can eat vegetarian buffet, a bit of a splurge, if not by Scandinavian standards. But if you make it your big afternoon meal, as I did, and go back three times, linger over tea, make sure no one takes your plate, then eat some more, it's worth it.

I give it a 3 out of 5, one-half star of which is for the view. Solid, wholesome, but nothing that even a Whole Foods buffet in the US supermarket chain doesn't do.

The fact that it's a vegetarian restaurant isn't really that important, and you might not even be aware there's no meat if they didn't tout that fact. It's full-fat, filing, well-prepared fare.

But I think I'm getting bored with the genre. It's predictable.

For example, if I see dark green string beans glistening in a bowl, I already know it's going to have a sesame oil and tamari dressing, and probably ginger.

That salad of little spermatozoid grains -- which some may know as quinoa -- is bound to have corn and maybe some crunchy bits of root vegetables.

Could someone do something really rad for once, like put quinoa in a sour cream sauce or add some unexpected spice?

The main hot entree in the buffet? Lasagne of course. It had everything in it -- eggplant, zukes, spinach. It was mushy, with the bechamel fusing with the noodle, but tasty.

The pasta salads at Hermans: the antipasti in it weren't any tangier than the pasta. There was a surprising lack of sockersaltad -- sweet-salty -- which some say is the essence of Swedish cuisine.

Constructive advice: I think one easy thing they could do that won't hurt food cost is ramp up the bread selection. Every 30 minutes, for example, trot out some deep-fried Indian bread or papadums or something.

Harsh criticism? Maybe but I've had too much dirt-cheap veggie food (free, in the case of Berkeley and almost so at the Hare Krsna place in Riga) in my life to let it go.

***

2. The "budget" nature of my trip started coming apart right away, before I even made it to Lapland. Norwegian cancelled the flight and I changed to an earlier one. I needed to round up some supplies in Stockholm anyway, and I decided not to change my train ticket and spent an extra day in the capital -- mainly hemorrhaging petty cash.

The hotel was the most economical part, as it usually is in Scandoland. Stayed in a "StayAt“ franchise that is built into a tower in a shopping mall, and the experience – the mall part of it, anyway – almost made me rethink my views on wanting more immigrants in Estonia. Maybe it was the culture shock of being in a place three times the size of Ülemiste mall at 5pm, all filled with T-bana (subway) commuters and Somalians and Arabs in varying degrees of consumerist lapse from their sartorial traditions. Everybody looked well-fed, yet furtive and thoroughly lost, in the rootless sense. Some sort of dystopian feeling I couldn’t quite place came over me.

Impressive food court, though. There are plenty of shopping mall food courts in small-town America called Flavours of the World, I’m sure, but this one, which was not named that, came pretty close to comprehensive.

The hotel itself was Nordic-nice and restful, came with a kitchenette, all for under what you would pay in the centre. You could live there, and I guess people do in some of the apatments, and maybe they never leave the mall complex. There’s nowhere else to go nearby and everything you need is there.

Sweden is, simply, the land of doubled prices. In the Swedish-chef dialect of the southeast, Dubbelprisorsrik. It didn’t strike me as severely in Helsinki. So I savoured everything – but most of all, the $6.50 15-minute subway trip to the centre. $6.50 and manned entry, unlike, say, London’s trains.

Don't hold me to this, as I didn't really have the initiative to research it, but something is a little screwy with the system. It would seem logical for there to be either a one-hour option or a zone-based fare option, right? But if you read the official subway site, it sounds like you need to keep in mind the zones even if you are riding on the hour ticket.

And in line with the dubbelprisorsrik concept, when you pay the fare you are handed two coupons. They come in twos. You cannot travel on just one. I don't know what would happen if you separate them into halves by tearing along the perforation. Something bad.

Maybe after the summer transport strikes, they will rehaul the system. The art in the subway is, however, excellent.

I'm amazed -- the front page news today is that the Bush administration has decided to bail out two ordinary blue-collar Americans with billions of dollars. The two are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (no relation to Bernie). These are the hard-workin' folks who make it possible for the rest of us to have good homes.

Of course it comes too late for Norma Rae, and one could rightly ask, what about the rest of us...but still, writers like Barbara Ehrenreich are going to have start repudiating everything they have said about this administration...

**

SUMMER READING SHOCKER: Naomi Klein

The Canadian journalist's Shock Doctrine is the "one non-fiction book you should read this year" ("this year" being 2007 I think).

The blurbs are from critics ranging across the spectrum (though the FT and The Economist are absent from the roll-call). Having a weak spot for social democracy and exposés of big government greed and cynicism, I bought it. Dry reading for a hiking trip and 460 pages not including notes is pushing it weight-wise. But if you're out in the wilderness living on reindeer meat and granola, you might as well also have a dogeared manifesto or at least a political book in your pocket.

She started writing it about the war against Iraq, which (please tell me it is safe to say this by now) most people across the spectrum acknowledge has mainly been about corporatism, about government and diplmoacy selling out to unscrupulous contractors -- all at the expense of an ancient and venerable culture as well as ordinary Iraqis. (And now they say things are "stabilizing". Typical.)

The book morphed into a much broader assault on neoconservatism's twin neoliberalism, and as such can be considered quite leftist to some tastes, or at least Keynesian.

No, Milton Friedman doesn't make out so well in Klein's reading. I will say that Milty does come off marginally better than Dr. Mengele. Klein cleverly (and with real linkage) conflates economic shock with psychotherapy shock, so there is a mad scientist/lab theme running through the book.

Her central thesis is that the glib pairing of "free markets" and "democracy" has no basis in reality; that shock therapy is hostile to the majority; that laissez-faire only leads to market volatility and enriches the few, and that shock therapy is usually deeply pre-planned, even if the actual shock isn't.

So, basically, no need for conspiracy theories about 9/11 or explosives in the Indian Ocean tectonic plates. For every possible disaster, your local private sector-controlled government may well already have a plan to exploit it and make profits -- and disasters are only increasing in frequency.

All this is fine. Much of it we already know. Anybody who has read any Latin American writers knows the real rage and sorrow over American meddling and know that September 11 is identified with 1973, not 2001. I'll even let Klein's softness on Chavez slide and I certainly have no gripe with Bolivia's Evo Morales. The Katrina chapters and the tsunami chapters, about how fishing communities were prevented from resettling after the wave, made me ball my fists in rage.

Except.

What about Estonia? Just about every positive news article about Estonia in the last 15 years has mentioned former PM Mart Laar in conjunction with Milton Friedman in some way.

Mart Laar, the affable historian and heritage activist, who can lecture infectiously -- I once audited a course at Tartu and he had half the class wanting to be the first to write the hitherto unwritten biography of Jannsen. Mart Laar is no Augusto Pinochet, is he? He's not an American plant manipulated by the University of Chicago ideologues?

I was eager to know what Klein made of this.

Guess how many times Estonia appears in this book or in the index. Zero.

Just as it was with oil shale in that other book I recently read, which also had "shock" in its title -- the Last Oil Shock. Zero mentions. Invisible country.

Klein does devote a number of chapters to post-communist countries, mainly to punch holes into Fukuyama's famous pronouncement. This is, after all, a book about right and left and the give-and-take between Friedman and Keynes that has been going on for the last fifty years. And it has not ended just because communism collapsed. I agree with her here, too.

In these post-communist chapters, she presents some shifts of emphasis that were surprising to me. For example, it is a bit of a mind-bend for me to see the leaders of the Chinese communist government as the free market radicals (and evil for that reason) and the protestors at Tiananmen Square being the true commun(al)ists. I'm so used to seeing all opponents of communism as automatically the free market/democracy folks.

Similarly, Solidarity in Poland -- Klein emphasizes their original cooperatist philosophy. All right, they were a a blue-collar union.

This may all be quite valid. Though I don't know. When you talk to many former Estonian dissidents (and not necessarily just the neolibs), what you hear is that socialism couldn't have a human face, as people found out very well in 1968. They don't want to hear that S-word, basically.

Klein also has a chapter on Russia, which basically writes itself: the outrageousness is just as absurd as with Iraq. Yeltsin is parallelled to Pinochet. I don't know about that.

Her view squares with my view of the oligarchs, the beneficiaries of uncontrolled privatization. She makes much of Yeltsin's confrontation with the parliament in 1993 -- and it was a shocking thing for a democrat to behold; what if, say, Bush fire-bombed the Capitol Building with Pelosi inside -- but I'm not sure Russia was exactly the case of a popularly elected people's parliament being stormed. Weren't there hardline communist demagogues holed up there? Sure, the Russian people were shafted on the face of it, but was this really a representative body of the people? Hmm.

And what about Estonia?

Could it be that Estonia is the exception proves the rule? Or is it an inconvenient truth that Klein doesn't want to acknowledge because it weakens her thesis. Is she just a naif and ignoramus, as the Economist believes. Did she really never hear, in her interviews with Eastern European pols, about the tiger that roared in the 1990s?

On the other hand, when you think about it, did shock therapy really benefit Estonia? I.e., was it specifically the ultraliberal policies that led to economic growth?

When we hear, today, about post offices closing in the countryside and the widening gap, in Estonia's case between the urban professionals and the "depressive small towns", perhaps we're just part of the curve.

Or maybe we need Laar as PM a third time and then the changes can really start to be cemented. Maybe there's too much waffling, oscillating between strict neoliberalism and corrupt centrist coalitions, and we lose something in the shuffle each time.

Or maybe Estonia deserves mention in Klein's final chapter or in an unwritten epilogue, as a positive example of where government seemed like it was too sink or swim, but people made the right sacrifices, and enough NGOs and cooperatives have arisen to constitute a critical mass, and banded together in true democratic initiatives to take the reins back, besides having a kick-ass participatory e-democracy.

Sarek

July 5: the Parek sameviste (summer village) area, at tree line, is covered with lakes. Every last bit of water is still considered drinkable, even 16 km down the hill around Kvikkjokk where the last road ends. The weather looks ominous but it became clearer and clearer and only rained a total of 30 minutes all week.

A goahti, or permanent sod hut, in the Parek sameviste. This one is gutted, but the ones that were kept up looked pretty much like Bilbo Baggins's home as imagined in the film LOTR.

View of the Baardde massif, also taken near Parek.

This fell on the long approach was reminiscent of the gentler contours of Finnish Lapland. Probably thinking of Saana fell.

July 6: Tjievrra, a peak on the Baardde massif, appeared to be a giant Holstein grazing beyond the ridge as I slabbed across the slope.

July 6: The route turned to thick brush along the Njoatsovagge for about 3 km as I hoped to reach the head of the valley to open rolling moors. The trail is straight ahead. Actually not that unpleasant on a sunny day with trousers and gaiters. GPS came in handy here. I had picked up a cheap used receiver in Stockholm. It also was cheaper to geocache my laptop and extra stuff than pay for left luggage at a train station.

It had been a snowy winter. This actually made crossing the streams easier, as snow bridges persisted in many places. But here, about 40 km from the road, I simply couldn't find a 100% safe ford. It may not look like much, but everyone warned me about the number one cause of disappearances in Sarek. I guess things look different to me now than they did just five years ago. (And though it may not appear so, I do travel less now that I have two little 'uns at home.) At least the stream had a name on the map; I can say I was foiled by the mighty...Skajdasjaahkaa. I retraced to Kvikkjokk.

July 9: A second, three-day trip on the other side of the village of Kvikkjokk. Here the primal chasm of the Vallevagge cleaves the grassland of the Darregaisi into two. I had thoughts of crossing over to the left side after climbing Vallespiken, the main peak, but soon saw this was impossible. Past Vallespiken (1396m) the way turns to a long ridge walk over loose rock to the second peak (1442m).


Boatman Kenth, who ferried me across a channel to the start of a second tour. It's the same starting point as for a fairly popular local day-hike, but it's not really on his main route, which is serving the Royal Trail thru-hikers. He has to look over and see you. My fears were confirmed: he was not there to pick me up two and a half days later (I was actually standing in the wrong spot). And there's not much there, just an old silver mine museum, not ordinarily staffed.

The weather had also turned now, I should mention. Luckily there was a boat moored: Kenth's colleague Björn was spending his free day on this, uninhabited "priest's side" of the channel. I saw them a number of times when I was in the village, they were a study in contrasts. Kenth was more of a good old boy, lounging on the dock and chatting with hikers, while Björn (who I would liken to Father Mulcahy from MASH or Jüri Aarma, was like a cleric, always seeming to be on some mysterious errand on his bicycle.

Björn invited me into a cabin for coffee and biscuits. We had a highly concentrated and serendipitous conversation that touched on geology (the stone that makes up the Caledonian bedrock is also found on the moon, apparently), Saadjärv, Estonia, and languages.

I was just getting into what must have been the one copy of the English-language pamphlet on the history of Kvikkjokk when Kenth called and said he was in his boat and on his way. Bjorn saw me out, picking up a handmade sickle as he did, to make some hay in the delta, and asking me what it was called in Estonian.

A rainy day in Kvikkjokk: you study rocks in an old cabin on the far side of the channel, then do a spot of manual labour. It must be kind of grand.

Sápmitown

I'm sitting in the Grand Hotel Lappland in Jiellivarre (Gällivare) across the street from the station waiting for a train. I didn't expect to get online in this community. Something about the town of 8,000 says functionalism -- "big hospital, small-town commerce...and no WiFi", as opposed to smaller Jokkmokk with an ethno-artsy Sami coffeeshop or two. But a confident smile and clipboard (proverbially) got me the Internet code at the hotel, which reminds me a little of an North American Eesti Maja on the inside, plus a few mosquitoes.

The lobby is full of freshly showered football players. The VIVA World Cup is being played up here under the midnight sun (which will set in a day or two). It's FIFA for "minority" and unrepresented nations.

I happen to be wearing a jersey with some Italian lettering on it so I think people think I am with the press, not just another smelly hiker waiting for a connection to Stockholm after a week of wilderness.

The Sapmi national team (2006 defending champions, winning against Monaco 21-1) just lost to an Italian minority team, 0-2. The last tournament, incidentally, was hosted by the region of "Occitania", which had me reaching for my map; unfortunately there is no non-recognition policy for territories annexed in the 13th century so it did not appear.

I won't be here for the press conference, but I'm picking up snatches of Finnic sounding language for the first time up here, which is cool. Major signs with place names around town are bilingual, though Sami isn't used in Gällivare, say, to order food at a cafe.

There is a grand total of only 70,000 Sami, but I figured they would be more visible, if only in the local economy. A quarter of them, going by census data, should be in the high fells this time of year herding their reindeer. When I was up there, I only saw a couple antlers and one live herd...and a lot of well-maintained goahtis and huts, but not a soul around. So no backcountry reindeer meat or fish for me; only at the trading posts. Supposedly it is that way -- the traditional livelihoods are in the hands of purchasers and resellers just as much as any other sector. Some big and well-to-do herders stay in the game, organized into "samebyer", sometimes using helicopters and high-tech gear. The rest work like five jobs, if they haven't moved to the cities.

But it's big country of course -- vast. You could hide cities here and they would never be seen again.

Sarek National Park really looks like Alaska, and the scale is about the same as any quadrant of the Chugach Range. Pics from the trip to come soon.

I have long have great affection for the people and the landscape up there. Of course it's always tempting to think of Estonians as originally part of the same First Nation stock (there are about 200 million indigenous people living worldwide according to a map in a publication from the Sapmi Parliament, so that's a good-sized force), long before the "Others" came -- the ones with the blood types A and B, the soil-tillers and granary builders...

It's a vision that is a little more romantic than Estonians' nationalist-romantic visions of the late 1800s. I think a critic in Eesti Ekspress put it well after a recent Finno-Ugric conference: Even though there were certainly great efforts to collect old runo songs and folklore (Jakob Hurt et al), the primary goal back then for the people we think of as Estonia's founding fathers and mothers was certainly not to claim status as any kind of "Indians" (especially given the racist backlash against the Sami in the 18th-19th centuries) but rather to be Europeans.

To be European is fine and well, and one should be proud of national mythologies, but to be indigenous (and embrace new technologies and be civilized) has perhaps a shade more weight for me.

Off to northern Sweden tomorrow. My pack weighed in at 18 kg, seems too light for a week, even with the extra rain gear, trash bags and duct tape (always good insurance in rainy areas). It's the rainiest part of Sweden, probably slightly less rainy than western Norway. And unlike the rest of highland-Lappland, mosquitoes/midges could be in the forecast.

And here's something interesting. It's also near the point in Sweden that is farthest from the nearest road (about 47 km) -- the so-called centre of inaccessibility.

I'm pretty sure it's likewise the most remote place in Europe -- Finland doesn't have such extensive wilderness and Norway doesn't have such large contiguous chunks and there are plenty of waterways connecting the fjords. I'm not sure about Iceland and Russia (did I just actually include Russia as Europe? let it pass) but 47 km is a long way -- that means 94 km separating one motorable road from the next one. Doesn't seem to be an instantly Googleable factoid, either.

Mr. Yuk pays a visit to the water park

Thirty-three people were taken to hospital as a precaution after being exposed to some sort of concentration of chlorine gas at the swimming pool in central Tallinn. Apparently about 4 gallons of a chlorine chemical and sulphuric acid were spilled in the basement. Good idea to store those in the same location in spillable form, by the way. What was appalling, if it is true, is that no one noticed the spill and staff allegedly did not initially follow up on complaints of odour.

The odd (no doubt innocent) resemblance of Kalev Spa's logo to a certain totalitarian security symbol, and now poison gas, will no doubt inspire some long-running, extremely tasteless jokes.

This place, being the premier swimming pool in central Tallinn, needs to shape up its act (and get a new logo). First it was sharp protrusions on a seam on a water slide that could lacerate. And the ongoing issues, such as locker rooms that stink of old sweat, even with the opposite-sex cleaning staff in dowdy clothing who haunt the place. I doubt that Kalev patrons simply smell worse than frequenters of other swimming pools. They need to pay more attention to their facilities and customer service and perhaps less to their margin and to access control.