EVS in Estonia

I really wanted to write this article for a long time already to show you what we are doing several times a week. We do guided tours for cruise ships, and take them around the old town.

The cruises have a really big impact on Tallinn’s city. Usually our tourist groups are from 20 to 40 people maximum but as the demand is enourmous (2600 tourists in one boat like the Costa Mediterranea which you can see in the video), most of the time, we take bigger groups and sometimes our company is even obliged to refuse some people. We regularly have some groups of 46 tourists, and it is not easy to guide them for four hours or more.

Amélie does visits in french, for me it is more in spanish or in english. But spanish groups have become my speciality for a lot of estonian guides speak english better than spanish.

We all have the same route and sometimes it creates traffic jams in the little medieval town of Tallinn. One hour later, the old town is completely deserted, but visitors usually ask if “It is always overcrowded like this?”

In reality, Estonia is not really a country of mass tourism, as one could imagine watching the video. On the contrary, the country is full of natural landscapes, forests, rural areas and small peacefull villages, but unfortunately most of the tourists have no time to see this aspect of the country. All of the estonian tourism is for the moment concentrated in its capital, Tallinn and especially in the old town.

It is not secret, we have come back to Estonia to enjoy another summer, but the idea is to work this time ! When we were volunteers, things seemed more or less easy and planned. Now, we are seeing another part about living in Estonia.

We have thought at first that we might have enough work as guides for one travel company which we had already been in contact with in France. Soon after we came, we discovered that they only needed us a few times a month. Not only could we but we needed to find more work as well. So we did ! We printed out a few CV’s, took our courage in both hands and knocked on doors, trying to convince secretaries (in estonian) to see a director of some sort and finally made good contacts. They are just starting to pay now and we hope we will continue to receive offers from the companies we have met with. We have to thank once again our friends which have done their best to find us contacts (the son of the cousin of the sister who used to work there), they have given us hope when we were a little lost. Now, our schedules are filling up a bit : apart from our regular tours with cruises, we receive random offers like transfers from the airport to the hotel, and we also found more unformal visits like the funky bike tour we had done last summer. Amelie works on Saturdays at the museum of Rebala Heritage Reserve and we will try bringing tourists there on a half day tour from Tallinn.

Let’s hope our projects work, at least we are discovering how it is to be freelance guides, and we have learned a lot about Estonia’s history particularly about Tallinn’s old town. We tried our first visit with a group of volunteers in both spanish and english. For us, it was good practice and they said they liked it as well.

Home sweet home, how good it feels to have a place to call yours ! After having stayed for a couple of weeks in our ex-appartment, thanks to Margit, who really helped us get settled here in Estonia for the second time, we now have a place to stay… And it is not so bad actually ! Now that we’ve bought a few things such as silverware, sheets, and a few other things which were missing (internet for instance), our two-room flat is becoming more and more home.

Sorry for having waited so long to write new articles, but between looking for jobs, visiting appartments, negociating prices, fighting with banks so that they would make up their minds on where they had put a little more than a 1000 euros (they finally found a solution the day we brought sleeping bags with us), we have been quite busy and not close enough to a proper internet connexion.
Ahaa ! I hear already people snearing and saying “but I thought Estonia had wireless internet everywhere?”, the answer is Yes, but though we do like to give news of our adventures, freezing ourselves to death to the point of almost loosing our fingers just to write an article was a little too much for us. It has been quite nice weather recently, for those who want to know, but though the days are getting longer as we are approching June, the temperatures can sometimes be surprisingly chilly.

Our little nest, is located in the old town of Tallinn, just on a tranquil street bordered by the medieval city wall. What a change ! We used to see four kilometers of fields in Jõelähtme, now our living room window offers a magnificent view… on a wall ! 16 meters high, 3 meters thick it’s sometimes a hastle, for it not only cuts the light, but also telephone network, but finally it’s charming to think we are “protected” by these walls and are very lucky to live in this historical part of town.
We hardly have neighbours, except for the ones above us, which are very silent and that we still haven’t seen. Otherwise, we have a souvenir shop and hairdresser to one side and a miniature looking church, with a cute crooked steeple, belonging to a Ukrainian catholic group. Anyway, with 80 cm thick walls we can’t hear a sound from the street !!!

All this to say, and we could go on for hours, that we love our new appartment.

An other funny thing when we are walking in the streets of Tallinn, is trying to understand the advertising pannels. We manage quite well this exercice, and we really love the humour and creativity of estonian campaigns. The estonians seem to be very good graphists. They even make publicity for strawberries ! The road signs are sometimes amazing, and make us laugh a lot. It is fun also to see the movies posters, translated in estonian, like “Shrek kolmas” or “oceani kolmteist”

Here is a small composition on the trams of Tallinn. There are a lot of them, different from one to another. They probably create regularly some new ones. We have our favorites, but all are very nice as they are colourfull and bring life to the capital city.

The tickets are also coloured, they cost 8,50 kroon by 10 ( a little more if you buy them directly to the driver). You have to obliterate them in old machines, which make some holes in them, depending of the line you take. For the moment, not all the trams have the automatic system working.

We just wanted to show you this : everytime we go to Loo, for our estonian course, we see these very long trains, probably filled with oil from Russia. We quit trying to count how many wagons they pulled, but it sure is impressive, especially as they go very slow… had you ever seen a train so long ?

Well, it was a good thing we weren’t in Tallinn that evening. We learned on Friday morning, when Margit and Merle brought us the paper about the events you might have heard about in the news, that are going on in Estonia at the moment. It all started with a statue, in comemoration for the russian soldiers who died in the second world war to get estonia out of the Nazi regime. For the russian people, living in Estonia, representing a big minority, this monument is very important and they believe Estonia should be gratefull to Russia. On the other hand, the estonians have a grudge about this event, for this “freedom” from the nazi regime marked also the beginning of the russian occupation which lasted 50 years !
They believe that Nazi germany was falling appart anyway and that Russia only used this as an excuse to invade them.

This monument has been the cause of many disturbances in the country in recent years and the president, when running for the elections promised to take care of this problem, not by destroing it as originaly planned, but dispacing it in a cemetary where it would be more appropriate and less visible as a remnant of the soviet occupation.

The Riot which took place when they actually started displacing the statue, occured because of the importance of russian speaking people in Estonia and it shows that Estonia still has not solved the problem of these state-less russians which do not belong to russia nor Estonia. They want to stay in Estonia but do not want to become citizens, for they still despize the estonian culture as when the USSR occupied it.
It is hard to tell the outcome of this crisis, but such violence has not occured in this country since the independance (1991) and the 9th of may is supposed to be the celebration for the russian victory on the Nazis. Everybody is fearing more violence…
But don’t worry for us, we’re safe in Joelahtme, where the local news is that storks have finally arrived and trees are budding.

If you’ve followed the news, you might know that last sunday (22nd) was the first turn of the elections in France.
We followed the news on internet and had voted ourselves through our parents, but it was fun to see how the estonian news reported the event. They showed all our candidates, and talked about the arrival of electronic voting machines which have been put in place for the first time in some cities.
Now, in France, the interesting thing is that they have been mentioning Estonia ! Why ? Because Estonia was the first country to use a voting system through the internet. Indeed, though the country is small, it is in the constitution that each citizen has the right to access to the world of information which is offered by internet…

So, for those who would like to know more about how the estonian elections went on (March 4th 2007), here is a short video about it…

Blue for : the sky, the lakes and the sea, as well as the loyalty

Black for : the past oppression, the colour of the native land

White for : the fight for liberty, the virtue, the quest of happiness

It appears as the flag of a students association from the Tartu’s University since 1881. Quickly linked with estonian nationalism, it is utilised as national flag since the independance announcement in 1918. At the end of the World War II, Estonia is occupied again and annexed, this time by USSR. Officially, it was choosen as national flag a few time after the independance re-establishment on the 20th of August 1991(only 16 years ago!) when the Soviet regime parcelled out.

(Click on the flag to hear the national anthem !)

Estonia is bordered in the north by the Gulf of Finland, in the east by Russia, in the south by Latvia and in the west by the Baltic Sea. Estonia owns 1 520 litle islands ; the two widest, Saaremaa and Hiiumaa, divide the Riga’s Gulf from the Baltic Sea.

It is a land of low plains and hills, scattered with numerous lakes and watercourses. The average altitude is about 50 meters, the peak of the country is only 318 meters high. The rocky coastline is about 3 794 km long. The marshes and the lakes cover about 25% of territory. The two most important lakes are Peïpous lake on the oriental border and Võrts-Järv in the southern center of the country, which both represent almost four fifth of the whole lake surface.

The climate is continental type, tempered with seaborne influences. The rainfalls are moderated with an average pluviometry which varies from 500 to 700 milimeters a year.