I’m very excited to have Jane and Tim on the blog because honestly besides the geographical location I did not know much about Estonia, but now I want to visit this country!
Disclaimer: The content below may be culturally or politically shocking to some. Each of these posts is as uncensored as possible to preserve the authenticity of the cultures of each of the interviewees.
(None of the Images are Mine)
My name is Jane and I’m from a small North-Eastern European country called Estonia. I work as an environmental specialist but have been on maternity leave since January 2019. When my daughters (2 years and 3 months old) give me a moment to relax, I love to curl up with a good book in my hands or a movie. I am not very particular about the genre, but I need my entertainment, be it books or movies, to drag me in.
Hi, I’m Tim––husband to one, and father to two (amazing!) daughters. I get to write full time for a living (which doesn’t always mean I’m writing). I live in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Before that we lived in St Petersburg, Russia. I’m originally from England (we all are, though only our oldest child spent her first couple of years actually living there). We left the UK in 2008 and moved to Estonia in 2012. I love writing (naturally) but also exploring the outdoors (harder at the moment). I enjoy cooking (and eating what we’ve cooked), reading and films (plus a complete load of other things too).
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What do you feel is unique to your country? Landmarks? Celebrations?
Jane: Estonia is a small country by the Baltic Sea and one of the things we are known for is our capital Tallinn, specifically its Old Town.
Estonia has been an independent country for about 30 years now and I feel that the way we gained our independence from USSR is what makes us unique. We didn’t shoot at each other, we sang ourselves free and held hands (See: Singing Revolution and Baltic Chain). Although I personally didn’t attend as I wasn’t born for a couple more years.
One of the most unique celebrations in the world is our Laulupidu, a song festival we have every five years and where thousands of Estonians come together to sing for a few days. The last one was held in 2019 and it had 32 000 singers plus three or four times that many viewers in the same place.
One of the things that are unique to our language is that we have no sex and no future forms in our language. Meaning “she” and “he” are translated as the same word and while English has several forms of future, Estonian doesn’t have a single one. We also have all four umlaut letters õ, ä, ö,and ü. Foreigners have a very tricky time learning to pronounce and differentiate all of them. Most videos of people attempting them are pretty fun to watch as people simply butcher the letters.
Tim: Estonia is a very interesting, yet little known, place. It’s a beautiful country, that is for sure. The capital, Tallinn, which has one-third of the country’s population, has an amazing Old Town and many beaches (who would have thought?). In fact, I would say the Old Town (Vanalinn in Estonian) is the best in Europe (which, let’s be honest, does the old-style rather well). One celebration that is especially Estonian is their Song Festival, which happens only once every 5 years. Over 100,000 singers and dancers gather in Tallinn on the world’s biggest stage and sing Estonian classic songs over a 2-3 day festival. It’s quite a sight. We’ve witnessed two since we lived here––we were inside for the first one and outside selling books at the second! I had just released my novel The Song Birds, which starts at that very song festival and which tells the 100-year history of Estonia in a dramatic thriller. Want to know more about this country? Read my novel and you’ll learn something you didn’t.
Tell me about your country’s environment. What are some of your favorite places?
Jane: We have no mountains or huge rivers, but we do have one of the biggest lakes (Lake Peipus) in Europe (half is ours, half belongs to Russia). Climate-wise Estonia is in the transition zone between maritime and continental climate meaning we can have pretty hot summers and really cold winters.
A lot of Estonians love the sea and feel the need to connect with it once in a while, but then there’s the other bunch. The bunch where I feel more comfortable. The people who feel best in the forests of Estonia, especially the South Estonian pine forests where one forages for mushrooms every summer and autumn. I have attached a picture of chanterelles and cowberries in one such forest. I have heard that it’s illegal to collect mushrooms in a lot of places but it is not so here.
One kind of unique thing about Estonia is our bogs. While they’re not all that rare in the world, our bogs are a rarity in the sense that they have stayed pretty much the same in the changing world. I was taught that the people in the Netherlands, for example, drained their bogs in order to mine peat. We have drained some of our bogs as well, but there are quite a few that have stayed the same. I captured the following image in Endla in October 2019.
Tim: Estonia has some distinct seasons––a pleasant summer (mid-20s celsius) and long, dark (if there is no snow that is) cold winters. Today the temperature is -18 celsius. While the snow this winter is spectacular (see my Instagram feed for recent updates), I have to say that I love the long summers here most, where it can still be light way after 11 pm at night––a mesmerizing feeling. You almost forget about the winter entirely.
While I love Tallinn, I also love getting away into the proper countryside. This is harder for us to do at the moment (even without COVID restrictions) as we sold our car a year or two ago (we weren’t using it much) but that limits us from making a trip away on weekends. My favorite location in Estonia is Laulasmaa, a little town/area about 45 minutes’ drive south/west of Tallinn. It’s on the coast (but Estonia has lots of coastlines and islands). Sometimes we can be the only people on the entire beach which is sandy, the forest edging the entire coastline. Stunning. There are even BBQ points with firewood provided (free!) and you can just turn up and cook––you can even camp there, which we did once overnight for my wife’s birthday. Brilliant memories. I know this wouldn’t work in most other places in the world, but it does here. As for islands, we’ve only been to the second largest one, Hiumaa, which is just gorgeous and so sparsely populated it’s unbelievable.
Tell me about your country’s food. What are some of your favorite dishes?
Jane: As Estonia has been under the rule of a lot of different countries since the crusades in the 1200s, our dishes are a mish-mash of this and that. We have influences from Russian, Scandinavian, German, Latvian, and Lithuanian cuisines, but if one had to pick just Estonian dishes … well, some of these things include pork in almost all forms, but we have to cook it well, no medium done meat for us. And most meals include a slice or two of black rye bread. Desserts specific to Estonia include kissell, kama, and curd snacks. My favorite curd snack is this one:
Tim: To be honest, I’m not sure we eat a lot of Estonian food. It’s a more simple, homely style––soups, potatoes. They make interesting breads (like black rye bread) which makes great garlic bread. However, last summer we all went 100% plant-based for health reasons (my always-aching back has completely changed to now having no constant pain since giving up dairy. The change has been so dramatic for me I, of all people (who loved cheese and meat), will now never go back). And Estonia seems to have so many brilliant PB options (note I say plant-based, not Vegan––sorry to offend, but we are not vegan). There is a new favorite shop of ours right in the center of Old Town that does both this divine PB chocolate (you have to taste it to believe!) but also these amazing PB sausages, ‘bacon’ and kolbaca (Russian-style meatless thick sausages). They all taste like the real thing.
Tell me about any different speech patterns in your country. Slang? Idioms? Words for things such as “biscuits” instead of “cookies”?
Jane: Although Estonia is a small country we have a lot of different words that people from different areas may not understand at first. For example, North-Estonians say that “lumi pakib”, but South-Estonians say that “lumi hakkab kokku”. Both mean that the snow is the right temperature for snow fights and building snowmen.
Or “see” and “too”, both meaning “this”, but North-Estonians understand the second one to mean only “bring”. 🙂
Most Estonians are proficient users of the letter õ, but people native to our biggest island Saaremaa have difficulties with it and tend to replace it with the letter ö. Also, there’s a whole different language – wõro kiil – in one of the South-Estonian counties which a lot of people have trouble understanding as they have different words for some common things and the written language is slightly different. Or a bunch of gibberish, as my husband likes to say. PS! I don’t agree with him as I understand wõro kiil.
Tim: When we moved here, I had been studying Russian for not quite 4 years and could hold a conversation comfortably (I still can). That was no minor achievement for someone who was terrible at languages at school! Russian is a hard language, of course… but nothing compared to Estonian!
Eight years in, my Russian is still better than my Estonian! What was funny was how useful my Russian was when moving here. I opened a bank account, set up our internet services, etc all in Russian!
English is widely spoken here as well, so the need to practice and speak Estonian (which is how to learn a language, by using it all the time) means outside of a café context, my Estonian is basic. Plus, since moving here, I’ve become a full-time author, so don’t mix with any Estonians during the day, anyway.
I have picked up some fascinating insights into the languages, and my favorite word ever is one from Russian, which if you are interested, you can ask me about in the comments. Estonian and Russian are nothing like each other, either.
Describe briefly a regular day in your country.
Jane: I don’t think it’s anything special … Most people go to school or work at 8 or 9 AM, work till 5 pm, go to the grocery store, collect the kids from kindergarten, spend some time at home and then it’s bedtime. Estonians are one of the least religious people in the world so I dare say most people don’t spend time praying to any deity.
Tim: Wow, how do I know what a regular day is? For me, I’ll wake around 6:45 am (even when going to bed past midnight as I did last night) and say goodbye to my wife, who leaves for school about then (she’s a teacher at the European School, the same school our daughters attend and where I also teach a writing class as an after-school activity twice a week). I’ll then wave the girls off at about 7:45. Children are very independent in Estonia. Once they start school (aged 7) they are expected to walk themselves to and home from school.
I might then work through a couple of cups of tea while playing a game of Fortnite with a friend and his son (before they head to school at around 8:30). Once showered, I’ll go to my study and stand at my desk and do whatever is next on my list.
On writing days, this all simplifies… I will simply get up around the same time (usually in bed a lot earlier the night before, perhaps around 10ish), be at my computer by about 7:30, work through to 9ish then eat breakfast. I’ll pause for lunch at 1, and hope to have around 8,000 words written. I’ll eat lunch, nap for 20 minutes (I’m a huge fan of napping and have done so since my late teens when working in central London) then restart my afternoon around 2 pm, hoping to add another 2-5000 words. This way, I’ll finish the first draft in 7-10 days, which is my constant goal now (I don’t write a little every day for this reason).
But what is an average day? Seasons affect things so much… daylight in the summer can be from 3 am until 11 pm (with it not really being ‘dark’ much between 11 pm and 3 am anyway) while in winter, it might only get light around 10 am and then be dark already by 4 pm.
How does your country compare to others, especially the States since my audience is primarily American? Environmentally? Politically? Culturally?
Jane: Environmentally we have four seasons, each approximately 3 months long. Or so we like to think, but in the last couple of years, it’s no wonder when the weather is the same in June and in December. In other words, we have a saying that we have 3 months of winter and 9 months of bad skiing weather.
Politically … I am the last person one should ask about it. But let’s say we have more than one political party and currently both our president and prime minister are women. Our president has a mainly “be beautiful” role to play and the prime minister is the one who steers the country.
Culturally I would say we have that in common with the States that we are a mish-mash of this and that, but we hold our heritage in great esteem. I may be mistaken here, but it has always seemed to me like Americans don’t care much for Native Americans and like to put more emphasis on their European ancestry however long ago that was.
Tim: I’m no expert on either American politics or Estonian politics, but a mere observer. I would say the European system of politics is vastly different from the American system, with both showing enormous challenges in recent years. My birth nation with its Brexit politics is a case in point (and a deep sadness in me for what happened).
Estonia, from what I have picked up, is battling the same nationalistic rhetoric which produced the Brexit vote and, arguably (and please, I’m just observing from afar) the Trump victory. Immigration is a hot ticket in Estonia (they are terrified of too many Russians moving here) even while their numbers of refugees were ridiculously low. I’ve heard of other Europeans here being targeted by Estonians because they are dating an Estonian (usually an Estonian girl, a foreign guy).
I know that two women now run the country politically here; I think making Estonia one of the first for that.
Culturally (as I tried to portray in my Estonia-based novel The Song Birds) there is a lot of fear, with a closure to outsiders which I find hard and sad.
Briefly describe three of your country’s historical events that you feel are important.
Jane: Well, I already briefly mentioned the Singing Revolution, so there’s that. But other than that …
I would say one of the most important things happened in 1816/1819 when Alexander I, the Emperor of Russia (Estonia was a part of it back then) declared the serfs from Estonia were free people. Serfs in other parts of Russia at the time remained serfs for a few more decades.
For most people, the tragedies of WWI ended with WWI, but Estonians had a couple more years of war ahead of them as we no longer wished to be a part of Russia and we had our War of Independence in 1918-1920. We fought ourselves free only to become part of Russia again in 1939 …
Tim: I did the most research for any of my novels for The Song Birds because, living here (and with the historical backdrop needing to be accurate), I had to get everything spot on. So I have some insight on this question which, a few years ago, I might have been clueless!
Estonia has been occupied for the vast majority of its history. That plays in the minds of even young people today. Not long after moving here in 2012, Putin made comments about Estonia and Tallinn, which implied that Moscow could have troops in Tallinn within 12 hours if they wanted. I must add here, Trump’s comments at the time did not help the Estonian people when he went against the NATO statement that if one NATO country gets invaded, they all did––suggested Estonia was too small to qualify. We heard of educated, mid-class Estonians actually planning what they would do if Russia invaded! It’s hard to believe, but these fears are so real for them.
First gaining their independence (1918) and then their independence (1991) were both huge things for the country. Both dates are celebrated annually, the country in effect with two independence days.
Estonia is also proud of joining NATO and the EU in the same year––and it was two Estonian programmers who invented Skype.
What are some stereotypes about your country that irk you? What media portrays your country badly be it a movie, a book, or a TV show?
Jane: One of the things that irk me most is the fact that for some reason most Estonians tend to meet in movies, books is a young female with a Russian name and someone who works for the sex industry. For instance, I was watching True Blood and they introduced a young woman, a prostitute in fact, and said that she was from Estonia. In fact, a lot of young Estonians today do not speak Russian, or if they do, they are not fluent in it.
Tim: I’m not sure that many Estonians make it as characters on the big screen. They filmed Tenet in Tallinn (I was even in the movie––search through my Instagram feed for a screenshot I was sent of my Hollywood Blockbuster debut). We often perceive Estonians as shy, not smiling, and avoiding strangers… which is most true!
I don’t know what more to answer here––if you’ve had an impression of Estonia and you want to ask me about it, comment below and I will answer you.
One funny stat (that perhaps I should dispel somewhat) is that, statistically, per capita, Estonia has the most supermodels in the world of any other country. That doesn’t mean walking down the street I’m surrounded by supermodels. There are many beautiful Estonians, however.
What media portrays your country well be it a movie, a book, or a TV show?
Jane: Granted, I have not seen every movie or TV show, or read every book, but I have mostly encountered false or negative facts about Estonians. Even the one thing I remember, was a bit false, although positive. The book is Neanderthal Marries Human by Penny Reid and mentions Haapsalu shawls. It’s a type of fine shawl that has to fit through a ring if made correctly.
Tim: Again, for the reason above, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this done––well or badly. I really need some of my books turned into films to get Estonia on the cinematic map!
Who are your top three favorite fictional characters native to your country in books, movies, or shows?
Jane: As I mentioned before there are not that many native Estonians I’ve encountered in fiction, therefore I have to stick to Estonian literature and cinema. And then there’s the other problem… most books I have read and movies I have watched are not of Estonian origin. But I thought long and hard about it and decided to go with the following:
– Poku from Pokuraamat by Edgar Valter
– Gabriel from Viimne Reliikvia
– Lotte from Leiutajateküla Lotte
Tim: Hard question! Can I say my own characters? I guess not…
As we watch little television here, we aren’t as educated in this area as I was in Russia, wherein lessons, I watched some classic Russian movies and can say I enjoyed some of their noted actors and films (and even learned one of the famous songs too).
Are you interested in participating in this project? Check out the tips archive to see which countries have been filled and if you’re from a different country, shoot me an email at howellvictoriagrace(a)gmail(dot)com. I’m especially looking for Cuba, Senegal, Belarus, Zimbabwe, and Laos.
Estonia sounds so beautiful! I love the Song Festival!
The Song Festival sounds so beautiful!
I am ashamed to say I didn’t know much about Estonia either, so I was soaking all this up! What a beautiful country! I would LOVE to visit it one day.
Thank you all so much for sharing. This was such a fascinating read!
It sounds like the perfect place for a fantasy book to be set!