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!
