How I am becoming an Estonian (Part 5)

Now before I begin this, the most current update (and last part - for now), I want to just point out that it's easy to judge someone like me doing something like what I'm doing here right now - writing this blog. After all, I've judged people for doing the same thing in the past. It's human instinct. We fear what we don't understand. In writing this blog, I've fought my own demon in this regard as I'm not one to wear my heart on my sleeve and am generally fairly private and reserved. If you want to leak some gossip about someone, I'm not the person to tell it to. Oh, I'll love the gossip, but it'll hit a brick wall and won’t go any further past me. I like to know what other people don't know, even if they know I know. It drives people nuts. Anyway, I'm digressing. If you've read this far, bully to you. All I ask is that you don't judge me as a wannabe. I'm not. The purpose of what you are reading here is to articulate my thoughts about something in my life that has never been obvious to me until recently, even though it's always been there. The fact you are reading any of this is that you are a spectator to it. I could have written it down in a book never to be seen by anyone, but that would have been the tree in the forest that fell that no one saw or heard - a waste. My insight is not unique, but it is individual. I'm hoping you have related to it and may have gotten something from it, and if not, maybe you know someone who might.

You’re in the last room of this house now, ready to walk out the back door into a warm sunny afternoon with a breeze blowing across the grass. Lie down and look up at the sky. Listen to wind through the trees, listen to the bugs in the ground, listen to yourself and just be.
It wasn't long after arriving back in Wollongong from a failed attempt at a relationship in Oxford, England that I decided I'd just had enough of Australian women. That's not an indictment on them in general; to say they are just not worth it - they are...I'm sure. For me though, it was the end of that road. An Australian woman equalled a subservient life of mortgage payments and being stuck in Wollongong or Sydney for the rest of my life. After the trip to England, I knew I couldn't settle for an ordinary life.
The idea of flirting with Estonian women online had been playing on my mind since the end of my first marriage. I didn't know what to expect from it. I wasn't afraid of it as after all, they were several thousand kilometres away so the likely hood of broken hearts didn't worry me. The stigma that is attached with it didn't faze me either. People who find other people online are generally labelled as "mail-order"; people who can't cut it in the "real" world of romance where they live. This is regardless of people in Australia doing it every day in their own hometown, mostly to just get laid with the vague promise of something more developing from it later.
Regardless of what I thought people might think, I began searching around for some sites that had a decent smattering of Estonian women on it. There weren’t as many as I thought there might be, and the ones that did exist had pseudo Estonian women on them i.e. Russian or Ukrainian women posing as Estonian women.
I settled on a site called FriendFinder. It seemed to have the most genuine Estonian women, so I payed a month’s membership fee and joined. Going through the list of Estonian women was interesting, particularly as you were cross-referenced and statistically matched with individual people. Interestingly enough, I didn’t seem to match with too many. The main issue being that Estonian women didn't seem to want to know anyone outside of Estonia. It seemed like it might be a bit of a closed shop. But not to be too disheartened, I sent "nudges" to several women with little response.
Time went by. Although my interest was pointed at Estonian women, the only interest I seemed to be generating was from Malaysian women. Strange I thought. Why were Estonian women so hard to crack? I'd all but given up before a message came from an Estonian girl. I can’t remember what it was about but I can only remember thinking 'finally I'm away'. But that was short lived. That girl and I continued to exchange messages for a while, but she was the only one. She was a nice girl but very stand-offish. We got to know a bit about one another but when it came to asking for an email address to help expand this fledgling relationship, she went cold. We continued to communicate, but she was making it clear she was only interested in guys closer to home.
I still looked at other Estonian women hungry to learn more about whom they were and what they were about, but I was getting no response. That was until one day when I received a short message from a woman I had seen before. I can’t remember if I had nudged her, or her me, but I remember seeing her profile before and being interested, but having read her profile feared being too low-brow for her. She was pretty and smart but had this radical mullet hairdo that honestly left me wondering if she'd be my type, and I hers. But she had messaged so that was something!
What started out as an exchange of some short messages about our likes and dislikes over the next few days lead to an exchange of email addresses which turned into letters, pages long on subjects ranging from one thing to another. The flood-gates had opened! Leen had arrived. Nothing was off topic or taboo. Everything was fresh and our appetites to discover more and more about each other overcame us to the point of not doing much else during the day except write to each other. This went on for a few weeks until I recorded a short message on my mobile phone, uploaded it and sent it via email. Leen saw it and wanted more so I rushed out and bought a camera for my computer. The next logical step was bought to us via - ironically - an Estonian invention, Skype.
When our screens lit up and I couldn’t hear anything but quiet on the other end, and see nothing, I realised Leen was too shy to even show herself. And I was worried I was too low brow! But that was short lived. Our letter writing ceased and turned into hours of talk looking at each other. It was unusual not to talk for at least three hours a day. As for that other woman who wouldn’t exchange email addresses...what other woman?
After about two months, something had to give. I knew by now I had fallen for this woman and had to meet her in the flesh. I made a bold decision: I was going to Estonia. I didn’t take much for me to convince myself. I justified to myself that it was well over-due for me to return and if I went and it wasn’t going to happen with Leen, that would be cool. I had friends there all the same and I would be in a place that I dearly wanted to be in. But I wanted it to happen. It was meant to happen. Things happen for a reason and this was as big a “thing” as you could get. A kind of destiny seemed to be laying itself out in front of me.
I boarded the plane and headed north. I actually arrived in Tallinn ahead of Leen who was returning from the U.S. after attending a friend’s wedding there. She was a day behind. While I waited, I camped out in my Canadian friends (the one I lived within Coogee during the Olympics) apartment right in the centre of Tallinn and waited. It was nice to be back in Tallinn. The weather was cool but clear and I felt the remnants of my old life were falling off just like the last leaves on the trees outside. I felt alive again.
The next day was L-day – Leen Day. I got up and prepared myself to meet her at the airport around lunch. It was a funny morning followed by a long walk out to the airport. I arrived early, and her plane arrived late so I had to wander around Tallinn airport aimlessly until she arrived.

But 'that moment' arrived and it was a nervous moment. I knew she was just on the other side of the wall collecting her bag. I held back and a few meters away from the door out of arrivals so we wouldn’t come face to face immediately. I wanted to see her for a second before she saw me. Not like those people who arrange dates in cafes and give vague descriptions of themselves so the other can’t identify them, enabling that person to make a getaway if they don’t like what they see. No. I wanted a second to collect myself once I saw her which worked. Leen came out of the arrival doors and looked in the opposite direction before looking my way. She saw me and smiled. She started walking towards me. As we came together we said nothing and hugged like we do now when we haven’t seen each other for a few hours. I kissed her on the head and we held on for a few second before Leen pulled away and said, “I have to find a bank machine for some cash”. This was the first moment of the rest of my life and it was perfect.

What started out as messages three months before turned into living with Leen in Tallinn for a month. I hung out with her dog Aki while she finished her masters degree as well as meet all of Leens friends. Some had scepticism written all over their faces about our relationship, others were accommodating and excited for Leen. Either way, I was meeting modern Estonians. The real deal.

Leen took me to places in and around Tallinn I hadn’t seen on my first visit. Galleries, museums, cafes, dodgy pubs, Russian bake-houses. I drowned in the culture of the situation. All this was just a side-serve however to being with Leen. She turned out to be what I was after more than I understood. I had fallen madly in love with this outgoing, passionate and eccentric woman and was panicking about returning to Australia without her.

We knew we had to be together no matter what, and so began the hatching of all our plans to come together when time and money would allow. While on that first visit, I arranged for us to meet halfway in Hong Kong on New Years Eve, three months away. There we would stay at my friends unit and have at least a few days together.

Hong Kong was followed by my return visit to Estonia with a side trip to Vienna. This 3rd trip back to Tallinn would also be significant for me in terms of defining my future identity both to myself, my family and others around me. I was granted Estonian citizenship. There were no teary ceremonies and singing of the national anthem like in Australia. Instead Leen and I went to an office in a dusty corner of Tallinn and showed the necessary documents to a young lady who went off for a few minutes to speak with a superior, returned and told us to come back Thursday to pick up the passport. The significance of this moment was completely understated by the rapidness of the bureaucracy. How ironic.
I could only stay for two weeks this time, but by then the decision was made; Leen was coming to Australia to live.

On a cloudy cool day, Leen arrived in Sydney. Bundling her into the car, I took her for a quick whirl around Sydney’s sights, then hit the road back to Wollongong to begin our life together.
Leen found work in Sydney and things seemed to be going well. Friends weren’t very forthcoming to begin with but we knew things would get better.
Enter the global financial crisis (GFC). As time was ticking by, the realisation that Leens visa would expire eventually began to dawn on us. I was happy to pack up what life I had and move to Estonia, but the GFC took care of that. If Leen couldn’t return to a job in Estonia with a master’s degree, what hope would I have of getting work in a country I was a citizen of but couldn’t speak the language, and a country that already had a spiralling unemployment rate in double figures.
In a desperate scramble to secure her future in Australia, an appointment was made with Australian Immigration Department in an attempt to convince them our relationship was de facto. Although we considered ourselves a live-together couple for over a year, immigration didn’t. It was getting dire as Leen looked like she’d have to return to Estonia which was going down the pipes with the rest of Europe in an even bigger way.

In the end it would all come down to me sucking up a stubborn belief and moving on with life. My decision to marry Leen was an easy one. Although I had had some apprehension about it before when we had explored our views on it (after all, I was only just divorced from my first marriage), the decision to do it again came naturally. She had to stay with me because I wanted her to, she wanted to stay with me because she wanted to, and we had to do everything possible to make it happen. So in May of 2009, Leen and I seeled our love for one another amongst only my family and friends. Unfortunately none of Leens people could be there.
From there we have returned to Estonia as man and wife once. What were sceptical faces were now ones of genuine happiness moving to un-easiness given the fact that all but two of Leens friends now have foreign husbands and have moved abroad. A statistic reflected in the population as well.
As time is passing with our life in Australia, our desire to be amongst Australian-Estonians and vice-versa has grown with the acceptance into what to me, used to be a closed and sealed crowd. With this inclusion have come some realisations about the false misgivings i gave these people and about my family as well. The community isn’t so closed after all. They aren’t ‘Estonian or nothing’ like I feared. They are an adaption of what our culture is here, more so than what it is there. It has come as a pleasant surprise. This discovery has coincided with an interesting time in my life as well – one where I find myself wanting to give something without the need for something back. I seem to have a humanitarian side after all.
I can’t give you a definitive reason why I choose to see myself as two halves rather than one whole. It’s probably more from circumstance than desire. I’ve always tended to be one to let life guide me rather than steer a defined course. Maybe that’s set to change as I’m half way through life almost. Perhaps that’s why I’m taking this new course of becoming more Estonian as I’ve found the stop where life can drop me off and “I’ll leg it from here, thanks”. It’s not an easy question to answer and one I may never answer. All I know is that in the not to distant future, i will live in Estonia with my Estonian wife, with my Estonian children and live an Estonian life and visit a very special place that is close to my heart and an eternal part of me, Australia.
So here I’ll stop this senseless rambling until another chapter is written, or until I read over all of this and correct half of it or add to it!

How I am becoming an Estonian (Part 4)

All good things must come to an end. The Olympics finished and just like the flame being extinguished at the end of what seems like a two week long party, so did this celebration of being part of what I never had before.

The Canadian split to finish his studies in Estonia, and the farm-boy also split for Estonia before heading off to the U.S. to make his fortune and leave us all for dead. They are great friends who go beyond what normal friends might – for instance: the farm boy flying from Chicago to Seattle (a 6 hour flight) just to say hi to me while I was on vacation in the U.S. Who does that these days?

It was at the time of the Olympics finishing that a girlfriend would move in with me, who would later turn out to be my first wife. She would also be the first person I would travel to Estonia with. It wasn’t planned as such that she should come along - she just decided she would. I don’t think she was confident of me returning to her should I be left to run the gauntlet of Estonian women that potentially waited far away, out of her sight. It was a smart move on her part and one I could thank her for as I wouldn’t be where I am (and happier) today.

My first trip to Estonia was eye-opening and brought a lot of things home to me – if you’ll excuse the pun. After a nostalgic stop-off in Bangkok where I hadn’t been since I had left as a boy, then onto Helsinki for the a few days, things were pleasant. Estonia lay just over the water and the anticipation to get there was only heightened by the cleanliness and ‘WOW’ factor of being in my first European city, Helsinki. Surely Tallinn was going to be just like this.

The only thing more surprising than how short the flight was to Tallinn from Helsinki was the view coming into Tallinn which left me a little underwhelmed. I didn’t get to see Vanalinn (Old Town) or much of anything. Instead all I saw were peat fields, the apartment blocks of Lasnamäe and a flat Baltic Sea. No surf - bugger. I had visions of kissing the ground once I touched down, but refrained when it came to the crunch. It was just a tarmac after all, and I’ve never liked walking from a plane to the terminal, such was the case with Tallinn Airport.

My farm-boy was waiting at the lennujamma (airport) for us. This was the first time I’d seen him since he’d left Sydney, and he had graciously offered to be our host and tour guide while we were in Estonia. How good could it get? He picked us up in an old Mercedes Benz he’d bought off someone just to drive us around in for the minor sum of 10,000 kr ($1,000 AUD). How cheap I thought. A Merc for a grand. What a great country!

The drive from the airport to our accommodation in Kopli was my first real look at what Estonia really was. It was moving to say the least. I had just come from Helsinki which was clean, planned and had a sense of identity, to Tallinn which showed the obvious scars of a twisted and tortured past from occupation. The latest fashion in architectural design was set against the crumbling lime-stone walls of deserted factories. Well dressed women in high heels shuffled through muddy streets. High end European cars wrestled with barely idling Russian Ladas and Moskvitch on roads no better than an outback Australian town. I felt like my expectations of a glorious country which had clawed its way out of oppression into a blindingly bright future were shot down in flames. In one car ride I could tell this was a real country with real issues and a long road ahead.

What once used to be the hippest suburb in Tallinn to live in was now a recovering slum. My first cold morning in Kopli was one I'll never forget. As we needed some supplies and it was still early morning, only one shop would be open - the bottle shop. On walking into the shop that was situated beside some tram tracks, I was confronted by a man with two of the blackest eyes I have ever seen. He was rambling in some language waving a can of spray paint in my face. It turned out he was trying to sell it to me. Once his attention was diverted away from me, next came the realisation there was an entire wall of the shop covered in Vodka. Everything else for sale seemed secondary. Then last but not least was the lady without teeth who walked in, opened a fridge door, pulled out a large bottle of beer, paid for it and had the top popped of it, then gulped it down like it was a 30C day outside. Priceless. 

Aside from my first eventful day, that trip itself set no precedent for what it meant to be Estonian, other than my own interpretations. We didn’t attend anything of cultural significance of meet the real people so to speak. We were left to our own devices to wander Tallinn’s many shopping precincts and stumble across touristy places of interest.

Though while I was in Estonia, I found myself answering questions I really hadn’t asked myself before; why I liked murky days; certain types of trees; cool air – things like that. The place just ‘clicked’ like that for me. Of course there were things I found I just couldn’t understand like why people were always looking at the ground while they walked or if they did have their head up, why they would look at you as they walked towards you on the pavement and just collide with you. This was a common occurrence particularly where there was only you and the other person...and no one else. I realised eventually they are trained to put their heads down as they bury their faces into the top of their coats while they walk in freezing temperatures, and that they were walking into me as I was walking on the wrong side of the pavement (remember it’s a left-hand-drive country).

After two weeks of touring the country side and hanging in Tallinn, I was back in Australia. As my chance to explore my roots had come and gone (according to my first wife), mediocrity would set for the next six years as I bunked down to begin my Australian dream of buying a home, getting married, going to Bali on my holidays and ‘kickin’ it with like-minded people pretending how rich I really wasn’t. All’s well that ends well as within a year of marriage, I had received my divorce papers.

From that first trip in 2001, it was six years before I would go back to Estonia, this time on my own, and meet the woman who would set my future apart from the rest of my life, my beautiful wife Leen. She would be the one to take my vague idea of what it might be like to really be Estonian and give me the injection of reality I craved.

How I am becoming an Estonian (Part 3)

As I slipped into adult hood, my sense of wanting to see the world was beginning to grow. It had been ten years since I had last left Australia’s shores and I was growing restless.

During my years as an apprentice mechanic, I lived in Coogee in Sydney, and then moved to Manly Beach with my first serious girlfriend. She was a worldly person, but had no intensions of seeing the world. It couldn't last.

During my time with her, we attended an Estonian social event held at the old Estonian hall in Thirlmere where my vanaema lives. It was at this function I ran into Dean who I used to knock around with as a kid, but hadn’t seen in years. We had a great night and started seeing more of each other, in fact too much. What started out as Dean spending a fun weekend in Manly with my girlfriend and I turned into a welcome well over-stayed. Dean was living with his mother at the time, and appeared to relish the opportunity to get away every weekend.

After Dean finally found a place to live back in Wollongong, his appearances thinned out. By this stage however, my relationship was on the rocks. After three years of living together, my girlfriend and I decided to go our separate ways. Well, she stayed in the flat and I split for Bondi. In retrospect, this would set a trend for my relationships in the future...

Bondi didn’t last long. After three months, I had a job in a surf shop back in Wollongong. I was heading south again. From here, my own true "awakening" towards Estonia would begin in earnest. In 1997, aged 24, I moved in with Dean.

The house I moved into was old and had one other room-mate in it. As Dean and I were the two Estonians in the house, it didn't take long before he and I got it into our heads that we wanted to fulfil our own kind of sabbatical and head to Estonia together. I wanted to go to see...whatever...it was I had to see. Dean wanted to go...to go...and then go to Norway to fulfil his dream of seeing Death metal in its purest form. Super.

We got pumped up about saving money to go and laid out our grand plans and paid our deposits on air tickets. Then I met my next serious girlfriend and Dean’s life had spiralled a bit out of control. I was unhappy in Wollongong, the household wasn’t getting on and a mutiny against Dean spelt the end of what had come to be a great harmony. The lure of bigger and better things back in Sydney was taking my mind off getting out the country.

Three years past, with no trip to Estonia. I was girlfriendless and living back in Coogee. By this time I was working for my isa as one of his backpacker hostel managers. The 2000 Sydney Olympics were in full swing and so was my sense of being Estonian. By now I had two Estonians mees (men) living with me in Coogee; one a Canadian by birth who suffers to this day from severe patriotism where Estonia is concerned...and rightly so...; the other a farm-boy from Põltsamaa in central Estonia. Both were filling me with what it meant to be Estonian. Dean was still around, but in an altered state by this time.

During the Olympics, boozy nights were spent at Kings Tavern in King Street in Sydney’s CBD with the Estonian Olympic team and its followers which lead to meeting countless countrymen and women. I even managed to meet a few celebrities and spill a beer all over the bronze medal winning wrestler. He was very unhappy about it, but nothing could dampen the pulse of the blue black and white coursing through my veins. It was a special time.

How I am becoming an Estonian (Part 2)

In 1986 after returning from Thailand and barely a teenager, my vanaisa died with only my vanaema and myself there to witness it. It was a horrible scene - seeing my first dead person, right there beside me as I watched TV.

When it happened, it was a blur. Yet as time went by, things came back to me clearly. I remember the running into a pitch black, un-lit street and dragging my foot along a gutter like a blind person to find the house three doors down where an ambulance driver lived; the knocking on the door in the middle of the night; the flat rejection to come help because I'd already rung for another ambulance; the turning around and having to face going back without help; standing there alone in the dark looking into the living room of the house with the lights on watching as my vanaema beat my vanaisa chest in vain to get his heart going again; not having the courage to go back in there; finally, FINALLY seeing an ambulance turn up, the paramedics turn him over on his side, scrape the sick from his mouth, put him on a trolley and into the ambulance never be seen again; seeing the ambulance driver from 3 doors down standing in the front yard having a laugh and a smoke with another person and what looked to be his ambulance.

Some things that have happened to me in life have washed over me easily. Other things like this have left something behind to be discovered later. Maybe this loathing I have today of the lack of apathy in the Australian psyche came from this event. It may have started the crack that would divide my serious Estonian side from the Australian "she'll be right mate" side of life.

After the usual sombre funeral, my vanaema moved back to the Eesti Kula. It wasn't foreign to her as she had lived there before when my vanaisa had run the place a few years earlier. What this meant for me was, instead of the occasional Estonian neighbour or friend dropping by, my vanaema would now be surrounded by all things Estonian. It would also spell the end of me spending weekends with my vanaema as I was growing older and my social activities were drawing my attention elsewhere.

Trying to fit in at school and get better at what interested me more than anything at the time - surfing (me right)- was all that occupied my mind. Girls were a distant second but seemed to be close enough to cause me enough trouble. It was around this time I can honestly say, I was as far removed from being Estonian as I could possibly be. I was swept up in conforming to the social norms of finishing school, getting a job and making a man of myself. What a wank/er.

Once school had finished in 1990, being chained to Mt. Keira couldn't have kept me from getting out of Wollongong and going straight to Sydney where my destiny lay; being an apprentice mechanic for the fattest bastard to ever run a garage. Still, it was a job and it kept me off the streets. It also meant living in Coogee for the first time and on my own...except for annoying backpackers that Isa would stuff into the unit with me to cover the rent.

That first year in Sydney would be the beginning of Estonia starting to slowly factor in my life again. On an afternoon in March of 1991, and under the insistence of my vanaema, Isa and I got in the car and headed into the city to Eesti Maja (Estonian House). There, Isa and I cast a vote in a referendum we weren’t sure we had a right to be in, one we really didn't know much about, and one we weren’t sure would make a difference. But we voted anyway.

On the basis of results from that referendum, the final nail was placed into the coffin of Russia’s occupation as Estonia’s independence was re-affirmed in the eyes of its people and the world. I along with Isa had taken a very blind step into a very bright future.