93 Royal Years

HAPPY belated BIRTHDAY to my grandmother Her Majesty Marian Spears (born 25 August 1914), pictured here holding my youngest niece Her Royal Highness Ava Hillyer (born 17 November 2006).

PALJU (hilinenud) ÕNNE minu vanaemale Tema majesteet Marian Spears (sündinud 25. august 1914.a), piltis minu kõige noorem õetutari Tema kõrgeausus Ava Hillyeriga (sündinud 17 november 2006).

LONDON!

Well, yes, London is just two-and-a-half hours from Tallinn. But getting there from Tapa seems just as arduous as leaving from Chicago.

First, there is the trip from Tapa to Tallinn. Okay; it's about the same as taking the el from the Loop to O'Hare. But the check-in time of your flight has to jive with the train schedule. If it does, then the stop at Ülemiste is not far from the airport. No, passage is not as smooth as it is from the O'Hare el station, but it is still within walking distance. Never mind that it could be pouring down rain or that there might be a foot of snow on the ground. Once you jump across the gap between the train and the platform and then get down the 30-40 steps at Ülemiste, the rest of the way to the airport is pretty much flat. If your plane leaves in the middle of the afternoon and in the early evening, though, you need a Plan B to get to the airport.

Secondly, in European airports there's these paternalistic "gate" open and "gate" close times. So "What time does your plane leave?" is inconsequential, because you have got to be checked in before the "gate," that is, your airlines' check-in counter, closes. For example, our easyJet flight left at 11.55, but the check-in counter for the flight reportedly closed at 11.15. So I added the customary "be at the airport two hours early" to that time, and we were there before the damn counter even opened!

Once you have gone through security, checked your email on one of the four computer terminals at the real gates, and squirted some cologne from the duty-free shop on your neck, the easyJet flight to London is relatively nice. Due to construction to expand the airport, we took a bus to the plane and got to board from both the front and rear doors! The Airbus A319 planes that easyJet flies are really very nice and, despite the two rows of three seats on either side of the aisle, very spacious.

So, yes, after an hour or so train ride from Tapa and a two-and-a-half hour flight from Tallinn, shaving four hours off the flight from Chicago, I'm in London. More or less. Truthfully, more "less" than "more." Actually, I'm in Stansted, and I've got another 90 minutes by bus to get to London. Okay; it's about the same as taking the Underground from Heathrow. But the Underground goes through neighborhoods; our National Express coach took the M11, through the middle of nowhere. Stansted is in the middle of nowhere. While the easyJet ticket to Stansted was cheaper than the Estonian Air ticket to Gatwick, how much did the time we spent getting to and from Stansted cost us?

The only good thing about our 6.55 flight back to Tallinn (the "gate" closed at 6.15, the National Express bus left at 4.40, we were up at 3.30) was that, once we got to Stansted, we saw that there were a wholeheckavalot of people who had earlier flights to catch than we did.

Vilnius: A City of Churches

I had the unexpected pleasure of being in Vilnius on Assumption Day (banks and government offices were closed) and walking into the cathedral during Mass said by, I think, His Eminence Audrys Cardinal Backis, the archbishop of Vilnius. More to come on this surprisingly religious Baltic capital.

Vilnius: More of a City than Tallinn

Of the three biggest children in the Baltic family, Tallinn is the oldest who has gotten everything from his parents growing up. Riga and Vilnius are his little siblings who have not gotten as much. It happens.

While Uncle Helsinki and Aunt Stockholm (both of whom work at the local mobile phone factory) have always sent gifts to Tallinn for his birthday and at Christmas time, Uncle Warsaw (who is still working on his parents' farm) has not been as generous to little Vilnius. Yet, somehow, off on his own, Vilnius has grown up to become more of a genuine cosmopolitan city than Tallinn.

For every souvenir shop in Tallinn's Old Town, there's a business in Vilnius's Old Town. For every skinny, hungover British bloke; every 70-year-old cruise ship passenger; and every well-dressed Finn with really cool eyeglasses, sitting outside underneath an A. Le Coq umbrella in Tallinn, there's a Vilnius resident doing the same in his own Old Town under a Svyturys umbrella. For every costumed Hansa character hocking bags of roasted almonds coated in brown sugar and every six-foot-three, hooded medieval executioner stuffing leaflets about the exhibition of torture instruments at the House of Tourism in your face, there's a twentysomething guy with a rectangluar "pork chop" or "hip bone" bag on his shoulder and a five-foot-tall old woman with big hands gripping a bouquet of flowers from her garden shuffling into a Baroque-style church in Vilnius.

We talk about having had everything fed to him/her on a silver spoon, of having grown up too fast, and of advancing to "c" before you have really fully figured out "a" and "b". My students hate to read an article on Tuesday and then re-read it on Thursday when we meet again. I don't know if it is because they didn't understand it the first time and don't want to be bothered with deciphering new words and phrases or if they thought it was too boring the first time and want to move on to the next inevitably boring exercise. Vilnius, on the other hand, has plodded through, reading the text three and four times, extracting a few new vocabulary words, digesting the major points of the article, and then articulating an informed response.

Mushroom Picking - 12.00 to 14.00

This is another part of the forest at Lasna, in northern Estonia, just off the Tallinn-St. Petersburg highway. This is where mushrooms grow, but it has been a dry summer. So the mushrooms are, literally, few and far between.

Berry Picking - 8.00 to 11.30

This is the forest at Lasna, in northern Estonia, just off the Tallinn-St. Petersburg highway, about 30 minutes from Tapa.

These are berries - blackberries, maybe blueberries - growing all over the ground in this particular area of the forest.

This is me pulling the damn little berries from the short little plants that are over the ground in this particular area in the forest at Lasna.

These are the two camera-shy girls who showed me how to pick the damn little berries from the short little plants that are all over the ground in this particular area of the forest at Lasna.

This is one of the two camera-shy girls who showed me a poisonous berry, which grows on a fir-like plant rather than a leaf-like plant, all over the ground in this particular area of the forest at Lasna.

With Brooke Burns in paradise!

I fell in love with Brooke's legs and her smile when she hosted the American prime time game show Dog Eat Dog in 2002 and 2003. Now she is here on Estonian television in North Shore, or as the Estonians have named it, Paradiis Havail (Hawaiian Paradise, I think). It's good to have Brooke back in my living room, even if her character's life is a little messed up.

Helsinki: Newsprint on my fingers

I hadn't had any "hard" newsprint on my fingers for a long while - no Reader, no Friday Sun-Times, no Sunday Tribune.

Yesterday morning, though, in Helsinki with a 10 euro note burning a hole in my pocket, I walked into to the city's train station and purchased: The Guardian (27.07.07), 40 pages, plus the weekend "g2" section, another 16 pages, each 32x47cm, a little smaller than the Tribune and the Helsinki Times (27.07-02.08.07), 24 pages, each 29x40cm, a little longer than the Sun-Times. I also picked up a free copy of Six Degrees, "Finland's English Magazine", 44 pages.

Like a kid unwrapping a present on Christmas morning - wide-eyed, grinning, and oblivious to everyone around me - I looked through half of the Helsinki Times as Tallink's M/S Star chugged away from Helsinki's Länsiterminaali. "Prime Minister's media policy under attack", "Number of vehicles grows even though car registrations are declining", "Sweden beats Finland in honesty test", and "Income disparities increase prostitution". I was outside on deck nine, overlooking the Star's stern, in the morning sun and cool sea breeze. I would have had a cup of coffee with me, too, but in order to get this prime seat, adequately sheltered from the wind even when the ship is at full throttle in the middle of the Gulf of Finland, I couldn't waste any time in the growing lines of Finns at bars and cafeterias.

Then yesterday afternoon, on an express train from Tallinn to Tapa that felt more like a horse and carriage ride over 100 kilometers of cobblestones, I looked through Six Degrees with the same grin and wide eyes. "Will Finland Take Racism Seriously?" "Television Is Dead?" and "Working It Out without Finnish". By the time I got to the "Out&See" section, my fingers were grey from the newsprint! By the way, according to "Traditions May Change but Sausages Remain", the Finns' favorite food is meatballs. And I guess mahi-mahi doesn't sound so bad compared to sauteed reindeer (poronkäristys), a Finnish speciality fried in oil and spiced with salt and pepper.

This morning, Sunday morning, at about 6.30, with faint smudges of newsprint on my fingers, I delved into The Guardian out on my balcony with a cup of Jacobs instant Espresso (imported from Berlin by yours truly). "Boy shot dead after bike chase is 10th young London victim in six months", "Widow of July 7 ringleader tells of miscarriage on day of bombings", and "Extra cash found for low-paid NHS staff".

I left Tallinn on Friday at 14.00 and got back on Saturday at 12.30. For $142, or about one-fifth of my monthly salary before taxes, I got the round-trip ticket on the Star (which is a big ship doing the Tallinn-Helsinki run in a civil two hours instead of the arduous three or four like the other big ships) and one night at the Sokos Presidentti Hotel in the heart of downtown. I went to Kiasma, Helsinki's museum of contemporary art (free after 17.00 on Fridays), to the men's and housewares departments at Sokos Department Store, to S-Market, a grocery store (it seems the S-Group owns all things Sokos in Finland), and to the Academic bookstore, which I bet has more books in English (and Finnish and Swedish, for that matter) than most Waldenbooks in American malls.

So who is the Asian-Finnish woman in red? Wait....

Jäneda: Suck Out the Marrow of Life

I went to the woods [but not dressed in a medieval tunic] because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life....
Walden, Henry David Thoreau (seconded by Kevin Hogan, only I came to Estonia, which is almost like a big woods, because forests cover over one-half of the country).

In the spring, on behalf of Tapa Gümnaasium's director, I invited students and teachers from our four sister schools - Dobele Vidusskola in Latvia, Toijala Gümnaasium in Finland, and schools in Preetz, Germany and Loten, Norway - to participate in a summer English camp in Tapa. On July 16, two students from Toijala and their teacher and his wife and eight students from Dobele and two of their teachers joined six students from Tapa and me in Tallinn for the first day of a five-day camp.

Day One. We began a tour in English (to practice listening comprehension skills) of Tallinn's Old Town at Fat Margaret, or Paks Margareeta (first picture). We made our way, as all tours of Tallinn eventually make their way, to the town square, or Raekoja plats (second picture), passing the former KGB headquarters and The Three Sisters, Queen Elizabeth II's hotel when she visited Tallinn in October 2006. Since the Latvians had arrived in Tallinn at 4.30 on an overnight bus from Riga, they needed a little rest (third picture) after our lunch at Pizza Grande. Pizza Grande's thick crust pizza comes somewhat - mind you, just somewhat - close to Chicago's deep dish pizza. After a little snooze, we picked up the Finns from the port and took a bus to our "campsite" in Jäneda.

Day Two. For the obligatory icebreakers, we made name tags at breakfast, adding an adjective that described us for each of the letters in our names. For example, to my name Kevin, I added something like geeKy, intElligent, creatiVe, imaginatIve, and hoNest. Later, outside in the sunshine and the swarms of ravenous flies, we did a couple of improv routines that required more listening. Then, without talking, we got ourselves into a line, chronologically, based on the month and day of our birthdays. Finally, we began speaking in English and in public by introducing the person next to us, reading his/her name tag and perhaps some new adjectives: I'd like to introduce Kevin; he is geeKy, intElligent, creatiVe, etc. (fourth picture).

Then, sort of like Henry David Thoreau did in the mid 1800s, we marched into the woods for a 5.5km-long opportunity to reflect on, as Thoreau wrote in Walden, "the essential facts of life" (fifth picture). We ate wild strawberries and blueberries along the way. Oh, it was like the Day-after-Christmas Sale at Target. Where I saw only green leaves, looking like every other green leaf in the forest, the Estonians, Finns, and Latvians spotted edible and ripe berries. Every time we came to patches of berries, the group in front of me would race to the left and right of the path like shoppers after a $25 VCR.

Officially, we stopped four or five times along the way to write down (expressive writing skills) what we were missing now that we were in the woods, what we needed in the woods but had left behind, what was bothering us about the woods, and what was so great about being in the forest (sixth picture). Lunch and a refreshing lake for swimming awaited us at the end of our journey.

Day Three. We used the Palmse estate of the von der Pahlen Family for an orienteering exercise (team work and reading comprehsion skills). Each international team of four or five campers had a set of photographs of certains things on the estate grounds, like a specific gate or gazebo or a monument to land reform, pictures I had taken and had printed about a month earlier. Then they had to roam the grounds and find these things and do what was asked of them on the back of the photograph, instructions I had written, printed, and stuck on the photographs a few days before the camp started.

For example, I took a picture of the monument to land reform, which looks a lot like a tombstone. Although it was on a path on the estate, it was on the other side of the lake and in a wooded area. The instructions on the back of the photograph were: You need one "dead" body. How does everyone else at the "graveside" feel about the person's "death"? And then, of course, they had to take a picture of their scene (seventh picture). There was also a picture of a white bench, but there were many white benches on the estate. So they had to find the one that had the same trees and stone fence in the background as the one in the picture. The instructions were: Jump for joy! Jump, and take a picture with everyone's feet off the ground (eighth picture).

Day Four. Where better to perform scenes from Shakespeare's Hamlet, MacBeth, Twelfth Night, and The Taming of the Shrew (public speaking and reading comprehension skills) than in a real castle, as opposed to bits and pieces of one built out of plywood on a stage. At Rakvere Castle, as we draped the red tunic over our heads (ninth picture), we were transported back to the Middle Ages. We got a tour of the castle, including the piinakamber, or chamber of horrors. For lunch, we ate weiners, fried potatoes, and dark bread on very medieval-like plates and drank an interesting, sort of sour punch, perhaps an alcohol-free ale from medieval-like mugs. And then our four medieval acting troupes rehearsed for about 45 minutes before "doing Shakespeare", including Act I, Scene I from Hamlet (10th picture).

Day Five. Overnight, we jumped from the 13th century to 2008-2009, when some of the campers would be thinking about university. A Harvard University student and summer intern at the U.S. embassy in Tallinn spoke about studying in America - why to do it and how to do it. While high school grades are important to university admission counselors, she said, so are extracurricular activities at school and volunteer and vocational experiences in the community. We checked out of Jäneda at noon. Tapa's students gave the others a brief walking tour of Tapa before we all headed back to Tallinn to see everyone off.