The Ketchup Curtain

“You vant ketchup?” Sergei asks, positively glowing in the light of Old Town’s newly-remodeled hipster McDonald’s. Actually, I do want ketchup but not enough to pay for it, so I take my fries without. It’s just too humiliating to pay for ketchup. Because there is nothing which says We don’t trust you, you dirty Eastern European more than McDonald’s selling ketchup. It’s like letting them spit in our faces every time we eat there. Nowhere in the developed world that I’m aware of does McDonald’s sell ketchup. In Helsinki, you can take as much as you want. And they don’t even hide it behind the counter.

I’ve often wondered what McDonald’s thinks I would do with free ketchup. Would I take two thousand packages, open each individually over a sheet-metal funnel in below-zero temperatures, and bleed them for their alcohol to make samogan? Or do they think I’d steal enough to fill a bowl, dilute it with water, and make ketchup soup, the dietary mainstay of American heroin addicts and poor college students too proud to donate blood plasma? What exactly does McDonald’s think? (I wrote them with that very question, but they didn’t reply.)

In 1992, I was invited by a visiting foreign Estonian to dine in Tartu’s Püssirohokelder restaurant. At the time, it still had its Soviet doorman who looked you over to decide whether he would deign to let you in and pay for the food that paid for his salary. We were allowed in, ate a meal that was probably the best you could get in Tartu in those days, suffered through the obligatory varietee show, and finally were presented the bill by the tuxedoed waiter. Jüri, the foreign Estonian, glanced over the check as one would do anywhere in the world, just to make sure it bears resemblance to what you ordered. Eyes halfway down the check, Jüri smiled broadly, laughed, and summoned the waiter. “Butter?” Jüri asked. “You’ve put butter on the check.”

“Yes,” harrumphed the waiter. “Butter.”

“You are charging me for butter?”

The waiter said he was and by the look on his face he saw nothing strange about it.

“Just to be clear,” Jüri confirmed, “you’re charging me for butter?”

“You had butter on your bread.”

“I also put salt and pepper on my food and had sugar with my coffee, but I don’t see those on the check.”

The waiter stared at his shoes. He’d indeed been bested by logic but had no answer for it other than that’s the way things had always been.

Jüri paid the bill, and we walked into the night air discussing how long it might take for things to change enough where restaurants wouldn’t be charging patrons for butter. As far as I know, nobody charges for butter anymore, but I don’t think either Jüri or I could have imagined that almost twenty years after independence, McDonald’s would still be charging for ketchup.

My wife Liina and I often have the discussion about when Estonia will stop being thought of as an Eastern European nation. It won’t likely happen in our lifetimes, but it someday surely will. Norway was once considered a festering backwater, and I can remember having Norwegian friends in the 1970s who had emigrated to Canada to seek better lives. Around the same time period, Finland had such a low standard of living that its citizens were pleased to live elsewhere in Europe. And now it’s Estonia’s turn to rise from the ashes and build a genuine economy which isn’t based on buying and selling real estate to each other. It may be harder to do without Norway’s oil, natural gas, and coal, or Finland’s timber-related industries, but I believe Estonia will do it. If I didn’t, I’d get the heck out of Dodge. There may be no shame in poverty, but it’s definitely not much fun.

I’m not so sure there’s much more Estonia can do as a nation to accelerate growth, which is, once the incentives and structure are put in place by government, largely an organic process. While we have the groundwork laid, what many Estonians lack is a worldview similar to that of their wealthy neighbors. Finland, Sweden, and Norway, arguably having been spared some of Estonia’s ugly history, simply see the world through a different prism. While I don’t know if Estonia will be among Europe’s five richest anytime soon, I don’t believe it will linger long among Europe’s poorest. Estonia’s fix will be a generational fix, and the fruits of a truly free society are already noticeable on public transportation. While the older generation often sits silent, heads locked forward and frowning, the younger generations leap about and talk as excitedly as a busload of Canadians on their way to a hockey match. They seem to be energetic little optimists, and it’s a joy to know they’ll one day occupy the seats of government.

Part of Estonia’s problem, of course, is Russia, and by this I don’t mean Russia’s schoolboyish need to torment Estonia. The problem is Russia’s reputation as a feudal society. “CIA Believes Russian Scientists Have Discovered the Technology of Fire,” read a satirical newspaper headline in the early 1990s. Funny, yes, but it’s also a fairly accurate portrayal of how the world views Russia: a bassackwards place full of peasants who shit where they eat, and corruption so endemic that even native Russians themselves can lose their way trying to figure out who to bribe.

Recently, Russian banker Vladimir Antonov—who wants to own Saab (and probably will own it one way or another)—lamented about that reputation in the New York Times: “It is obvious that European business has strong prejudices against investors from Russia. There is a fear of Russia itself, of the increase of the influence of Russian businesses in the international market place.” Antonov then called on Europe and the world to “trust Russian business.” Trust is probably too much to ask, but Antonov does have a point about how the world sees Russia.

President Medvedev has publicly recognized Russia’s image problem, and so maybe Russia will do something about it. What exactly is hard to say. It’s not like even a well-financed Welcome to Russia advertising campaign would do much good. But if Russia is able to improve its image a bit, then Estonia will surely benefit. Despite Estonia’s EU- and NATO membership, much of the world doesn’t differentiate between Estonia and Russia (does McDonald’s?), and Estonia will benefit from any improvement in Russia. Maybe Medvedev can make the world stop seeing Russians as only either oligarchs or serfs. Probably not, but even a small improvement would be good for all of us.

In the meantime, though, while we’re waiting for Russia to solve her problems, and while we’re trying to leave the future generations a decent structure they can use to build the Estonian Nokia, I think the folks at McDonald’s could end the humiliating practice of charging for ketchup in Estonia.

Tartu’s Püssirohokelder long ago stopped charging for butter. The cafeteria Amps gives away free bread (and butter) with its soup, and I haven’t noticed pensioners sneaking out the door with burlap bags full of dinner rolls.

I have often wanted to mount a dais at the Viru Gate with McDonald’s as a backdrop and utter a challenge to Jim Skinner, the Vice Chairman and CEO of McDonald’s: “Vice Chairman Skinner, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity . . . come here to this gate. Mr. Skinner, open this gate. Mr. Skinner, tear down this wall!” The Wall was dismantled years ago, and the Iron Curtain along with it. Let’s gather our virtual pitchforks, join together, and march on McDonald’s. Isn’t it about time someone tore down the Ketchup Curtain?


P.S. Why not write McDonald’s Jim Skinner and ask him to end this humiliating practice? Contact jim.skinner@us.mcd.com (cc: Walt Riker walt.riker@us.mcd.com, VP of Corporate Communications).

***

Illustration by Hilde Kokk De Keizer.
Read it in Postimees, too.

Bardakk

Ivan Ivanovich was everywhere. In the parking lot of Pae High School he had parked four deep amongst a sea of taxis, drivers abandoning their cars in the middle of the parking lot, perhaps assuming that everyone else was here for the same reason. A few of the drivers, boxed in and going nowhere, shouted in Russian at the rest. There wasn’t a word of Estonian to be heard, so I knew I was in the right place to take the state’s Estonian-language exam.

Inside it was chaos as well. Hundreds of Ivan Ivanoviches were pressed together tighter than a rugby scrum, all jostling for position to find their names and room assignments on thirty A4 pages taped to one wall in the entry way. A woman with an administrative mien stood quietly by, observing the shoving match.

“Is there anywhere else I can find my room assignment?” I asked her, not really in the mood to behave like a football hooligan so early in the morning.

“No,” she replied, and gestured to the scrum. Men were elbowing women, women elbowing men, everyone pushing forward like they were trying to get to the front row of a rock concert.

“What a bardakk,” I said calmly in Estonian, making note of the mass of people crawling atop one another.

“Ei olje bardakk,” she disagreed loudly with a thick Russian accent, clearly offended that I’d criticized her work. Surely, in her mind, our e-state was functioning at its finest, firing smoothly on all pistons.

This may sound arrogant, but so be it: There is normally nothing in Estonia I want badly enough to join in a shoving match with one hundred ethnic Russians. On any other day I would have turned away and sought more civilized ground. But I had been refused the right to vote in the past local elections due to the status of my living permit (temporary), and I was determined to rectify that by passing the B1 language exam. To my way of thinking, if you don’t vote, you have no right to bitch. And sometimes I really do enjoy bitching.

So I threw myself into the scrum. Instinctively, I covered my pockets with my hands to guard my wallet. This left me unable to elbow anyone, but I bounced back and forth from body to body as if in a mosh pit. Occasionally, someone gave me a dirty look, which I met with a sheepish smile, the international sign for “Don’t blame me for your culture.” Five minutes later I was standing in front of the papers, but I still couldn't find my name. One Russian woman had taken it upon herself to call the room numbers and then read the twenty or so names out loud. I heard lots of Nataljas, Natashas, Viktorias, Veronikas, Tatjanas, and Tamaras, as well as a few Sergeis and Ivans. But I heard no Vello. I heard not a single name not Russian. I could see only six sheets from where I stood, so there was nothing else to do but change position. I pounded forward and bounced off the wall much like a hockey player checked against the glass. I bounced left and could see several more sheets, and among the Russian names, I saw a Paul with an English surname. Rejoice, a fellow foreigner! But still no Vello. Knowing the military maxim that to advance is to conquer, I did not give ground. I fought forward again and then to the left. If my name were not on this side of the board, I would interpret it as a sign from God, that He, in connivance with the Republic of Estonia, did not want me to vote. But there I was. A proud student assigned to Room 209.

When I struggled from the line, Ms. Ei Olje Bardakk was present to assist me, and she pointed me up the staircase to the second floor, where proctors Mihael and Piia welcomed us to a sunlit room. Piia greeted us in snail-speed Estonian and explained the ground rules for the exam. I was told to put away the notes I was making about the bardakk downstairs. As I looked around the room it was clear that the only thing Estonian in this school was the language exam: even the exam proctor spoke with a slight accent. All the signs on the walls—inside the classrooms and in the corridors—were all in Russian. I hoped I would understand enough Russian to complete the exam.

The essay portion required us to fill out a survey about a moving company we had employed, which I gladly did, noting my dissatisfaction with the company since they’d broken a large portion of the items they were paid to move. Immediately, the young man in front of me removed a crib-sheet from his pocket and began to copy something from it. But it wasn’t enough, for after another minute he turned in his seat to me and asked in English, “What means ‘firma’?” Thinking that Mihael and Piia would only miss this if they were blind, I suggested he ask one of them. In principle, it was his business if he wanted to cheat, but I had not fought through the rugby scrum in the lobby to get thrown out of the testing facility for helping the biggest fool in the room.

The next assignment required me to write a letter to my good friend Kaido to tell him how I spent New Year’s Eve. “Do you remember, Kaido?” I wrote, “How you got so drunk last year that you puked on the mayor of Tallinn's car?” I often pity those who must grade standardized exams, so why not entertain them? I continued to explain to Kaido that I had gone to Moscow for this year’s celebration and that “Mr. Putin sent his limousine to meet me at the train station.” I described my wonderful holiday to Kaido, adding “As a souvenir, Mr. Putin gave me a grocery sack stuffed with American currency.” I finished the exam before the others—how could I not if they didn’t know what “firma” meant?—and handed it in. I noticed Mihael reading it over front and back, but he didn’t crack a smile. I wondered if smartasses were penalized. At the very least, my mention of vomit and the mayor’s car would surely elicit closer scrutiny, which might result in points deducted for incorrect grammar which might have otherwise passed unnoticed.

Exercises followed where we learned about the beauty of Estonia’s winter capital of Otepää, how Otto Kubo, Kalev’s Grand Old Man of Chocolate, studied chemistry in university and speaks ten languages, and how much a young Estonian named Raili loves and respects her aging grandmother. In general, I felt Estonia’s standardized test was less silly than those I’ve taken in Canada and the United States, and I had to give positive marks to Mihael and Piia for their diligent administration. Everything was clear. Everything moved smoothly. And, so far, the test had focused solely on the Estonian language. The morning’s rugby scrum appeared to be the only cultural assimilation test I would be required to take. I felt palpable relief. Perhaps I would not be asked to spit sunflower seeds great distances or fire a Kalashnikov from a speeding vehicle.

For the speaking portion of the exam I was partnered with Katarina who in her self-introduction said she was an unemployed mother of one. Katarina’s toughest verbal challenge came when Piia asked her to remove the chewing gum from her mouth so that I might better understand her. Katarina struggled, yes, but in my opinion she managed her part of the simple tasks presented us quite well. She had only to pretend she was a consumer, while my job was to sell her an overpriced book with 600 color photographs from TEA Kirjastus. But Piia was not satisified, and she told Katarina she would score only four out of ten. Me, I would get eight, which I shrugged off with the refrain that “Estonian is grammatically impossible,” which generally is guaranteed to make an Estonian smile with pleasure. Piia laughed and said that I’d done fine, which I wasn’t sure I had. I hadn’t really had a conversation with Katarina. I’d just made brief telephone talk. But if the state was happy, then I was happy. There was no scrum near the door on the way out—the papers had been removed—and I stepped into the light of the first warm day of the year, hoping that when it comes to voting in Estonia I won't have to push and shove to cast my ballot.

***
Bardakk = бардак = (literally) whorehouse = SNAFU = big mess

Inherit the Family: Marrying into Eastern Europe now in English from Amazon.com

Read Bardakk in Postimees.

British English

“We speak British English,” proclaimed Vesta, an Estonian woman, aged sixty, with whom I was trying to have a discussion about an essay I’d written for her firm’s corporate magazine. She refused to speak Estonian and insisted on English, though the whole process would have gone faster had she deigned to suffer through my halting Estonian. Instead, Vesta attributed our difficulties in communication to my Canadian English.

I often receive comments from Estonians about the superiority of British English over Canadian and American English. On a certain level I agree: When spoken properly, British English is indeed more beautiful than American or Canadian English. And although Vesta might not agree, I find Irish- and Scottish English even more pleasing to the ear. Canadian English, however, falls somewhere in between British and American—more American, but with the preservation of British spellings in a nod to Her Majesty The Queen, who is, indeed, still our Sovereign.

When a “British English” speaker likes Vesta gives me the speech about the inferiority of my brand of English, I often want to ask her why she pronounces the “L” in "salmon" and why, in written communication, she capitalizes the “Y” in “You” when it isn’t at the beginning of a sentence. I once pointed this out to a class of English students at a Tallinn high school who claimed that’s just how they’d been taught. I told them to go find their teachers and demand their money back. Whatever kind of English they’d been taught, it certainly wasn’t British.

Vesta will want to strangle me for saying this, but I think Siim Kallas is a great example of how Estonians can communicate well in English. Kallas’ English is what is termed “halting” in the true definition of the word (hesitating, faulty), as well as in the fact that it stops you in your tracks. His English is bad, but he’s loud. Add the shit-eating grin he constantly uses, even if he’s just repeating some tired old bromide, and he somehow really reaches people. It’s not self-confidence his technique emanates, but it’s a very believable proxy, ideal for non-native speakers who simply need to communicate in order to get what they want. Mr. Kallas is not a bad one to model, especially for “British English” speakers like Vesta. Loud is often good. We may not like to admit it, but the world loves loud.

Recently, I was witness to a British book salesman attempting to sell books at one of Estonia’s largest bookstore chains. The meeting between the salesman and the bookstore’s buyer took place in the bookstore café, and I happened to be sitting nearby. The buyer expressed her distaste for American English and noted that she wanted to buy products in British English—she particularly disliked American calendars which begin the week with Sunday. The salesman, who also clearly represented some Yankee publishers, attempted to defend the Americans and noted that most English spoken in the world among the young tends to be American. The buyer was unimpressed and replied, as if channeling Vesta, “We want British English.”

I can understand that some Estonians don’t like American English since it is seen, at least in part, to be in the vanguard of American hegemony. Critics routinely hold Hollywood, MTV, and other culprits responsible for poisoning young minds with trash culture and trashy English. But I’ve lived in America, and I can say I never met a single person who spoke like he was a gangster in a Hollywood movie; I never met anyone who drew his nine-millimeter to blast away at Al Qaeda attackers; nor did I ever meet anyone who’d been in a car chase—all events which any amount of American TV watching might lead one to conclude are daily occurrences in the States. The majority of Americans speak an English which is actually quite attractive to my ear (perhaps because it isn’t so different from mine). Educated Americans speak a quite normaalne English which employs interesting syntax and diction and draws from a wide lexicon, and I even find the uneducated ones charming—from the South in particular—for their wonderful accents and colorful expressions they bring to the language.

Americans are certainly accustomed to taking abuse for their language and culture. Recently, Horace Engdahl, permanent member of the Nobel jury, took up the cause by accusing America of not participating “in the big dialogue of literature” and saying Americans’ “ignorance is restraining.” Mr. Engdahl, as even many British English speakers quickly pointed out, was talking out of his ass, but he still found many to cheer him on for his anti-American remarks.

But this is not to defend American English, nor is it to suggest Estonians take up the American brand of English. In defense of the brand of English Estonians speak (not to be confused with Vesta’s brand), I am favorably impressed with many students in Estonia’s English-biased schools. I have accepted invitations to visit both the 7th and 21st Secondary Schools, where I encountered remarkably good English spoken with a variety of accents, a few even British. The Estonian accent is strange to my ear in that it seems to be a transitional accent, which the speaker eventually loses as his language improves. While I will always have my accent when speaking Estonian, Estonians who speak English, if they practice enough, actually do move into a realm where their accent is slight and not easily placed. When non-natives speak English—Chinese, Russians, Germans, French, Italians, Mexicans, to name a handful—many have accents which allow them to be pigeonholed. Estonians are tougher to place, and not only because it’s a small country (Latvians, for example, have a very distinct, annoying, childlike, sing-song accent). Estonians just seem to have some natural facility for languages.

But despite what Vesta would like to believe, Estonians don’t speak British English. They speak Estonian English: a fact I wish they were no more ashamed of than I am ashamed of my Canadian English. Sure, there are some bad habits Estonians might break when they use English—stop trying to write Faulknerian sentences (Hemingway is plenty good); avoid the overuse of idioms when you want to make a serious point (better to be yourself); and exercise caution in the humor department (practice jokes before attempting to dazzle your foreign audience)—but in the end Estonians are pretty talented.

To Vesta’s credit, I wish I could speak British English. But I don’t. And it would be terribly pretentious of me to try. I cringe every time I hear Americans throw around British terms like “spot on” or “kitted out” or when they want to ride the “lift.” Even worse is when they pronounce “schedule” like the British or note that something is not their “cup of tea.” One cannot be what one is not. And it’s very unappealing when one tries.

Vesta and I never did find a common language. She heavily edited my text, inserting all sorts of passages she thought were both clarifying and British, which I argued were neither. In the end, it didn’t closely resemble what I’d given her, and I suggested Vesta replace my name with hers, which she gladly did, and then released the publication to a print-run of some five-hundred copies as well as to the ether where it now lives an eternal but ephemeral existence, a contradiction only made possible by the internet: present forever, forever ignored.

The reality is, however, that a freelance writer who works abroad happens upon many Vestas who insist on their own sort of British English, and so I have learnt, when writing, to add the gratuitous “u” to colour, to travel by aeroplane, and to greatly exaggerate my use of the impersonal pronoun, “one”. (Note that one must also place punctuation outside the inverted commas.) If a small, humbling gesture on my part is all that’s required to pay the mortgage and feed the kids, then I suppose I can manage to adopt some “British English.” It’s such a charming little language after all.

***
Read the Estonian version in Postimees.

HealthScare

The doctor’s face was beet red and not just because he was pissed off at my wife. We could hear the soap opera “Crying Maria” blaring in the room behind him, and he wasn’t at all pleased he’d been called out to examine Liina’s hand.

“What?” the doctor barked. This was Haapsalu, 2001, and Liina had been manhandled by some Russian thugs who jumped a queue to get aboard the Haapsalu ferry. Liina had boldly attempted to do the job of the ferry operators, who were too scared to even voice protest, and in exchange for her trouble the thugs held her arm and bent her fingers back over her hand. While Liina cried in pain in protective custody on the ferry’s bridge, the cops were called to arrest the queue-jumpers as they disembarked the ferry. Then we hopped in the car and raced to the hospital.

“What?” the doctor snapped again. Liina’s slow response time was getting in the way of his soap. “What do you want?”

Liina held up her swollen hand and explained.

“Move your hand like this!” the doctor demonstrated.

Liina moved it.

“It’s not broken.”

“Couldn’t we x-ray it?” Her fingers were as big as sausages. “I’d like to know for sure?”

The doctor reached out with surprising speed and seized her hand. He twisted it. Liina writhed in pain. “It’s not broken,” he repeated. “No x-ray is needed. Head aega.”

And that was that. The doctor returned to his television, and we drove on to a Tallinn emergency room where both a sober doctor and an x-ray machine were more easily available.


Say what you will about the Estonian healthcare system—and everyone has a horror story—I believe one thing is undeniable: it gets better every year. The days of drunken doctors (as well as Russian queue-jumping thugs) are mostly behind us thanks to EU standards, a more consumer-focused society, and the growing self-confidence of a citizenry who increasingly realize they’re not lower than grass on the great lawn of bureaucracy. Of course, there are some stubborn holdouts, who still think the business of society is transacted using brute force, favors from friends, and the occasional bottle of brandy, box of chocolates, or live chicken given as a bribe. These people are the Soviet residue, and they’re found mostly in the segments of government and business least touched by market forces. Which, sadly, is sometimes healthcare.

Last week, Liina accompanied her best friend Piret to the obstetrician at her family doctor’s practice. Piret is freshly pregnant and was quite excited to see her baby on the ultrasound machine in all its alien-like splendor. It’s her first child, and so she admits some of her questions may have appeared naïve to the doctor. Still, she didn’t feel she deserved the doctor’s repeated answer of: “That's of no interest to anyone in the developed world.”

When Piret could not spot her child on the ultrasound picture and asked if there was a chance she wasn’t pregnant, the doctor snapped, “Are you blind, woman? It’s right there in front of you.” To spare herself more humiliation, Piret falsely confessed that she could see her child.

“And how much do we owe you?” Liina asked, stepping in for Piret and ending the visit to the Soviet Doctor from Hell. The doctor demanded 995 kroons. When Piret took out her bankcard, the doctor demanded cash and told her to run to an ATM across the street. To spare them from seeing the doctor’s face twice, Liina produced the cash and the doctor snatched it from her hand as she shooed them out of the office. No respect. Not even a receipt.

When Liina recounted the story to me later that night I couldn’t help but recall our doctor from Haapsalu. “You think that doctor could have a sister in Tallinn?” I asked. Liina said she was afraid that doctor might have sisters in a lot of places.


Before returning to Estonia in 2000, Liina and I lived in the United States where I worked several years as an adjunct faculty member at a university. Adjunct faculty in America are the bottom feeders on the university food chain, and so the health insurance policy I was able to afford was little more than a guard against catastrophe—a 250-dollar monthly premium got me a five-thousand-dollar deductible policy to cover against major illness. Liina, who traveled frequently to Estonia, anyway, was able to use traveler’s insurance. This was quite cheap, but its downside was that it forced her to visit the American emergency room for any matter, large or small. The one time she did need a doctor—a shard of glass in her palm—we waited six hours to see the physician. The doctor was professional, though if he’d have allowed me access to the anesthetic, I could have done the job myself, and Liina would have been out the door in a mere fifteen minutes. And I might have been grateful enough to treat some of the other patients in the waiting room, many of them poverty cases, nutty hypochondriacs, or people suffering side effects of America’s greatest epidemic: obesity. With calisthenics I would have cured half and killed half, but the job would have been done, and the doctors would have been freed to treat people whose jelly-donut-eating lifestyles didn’t invite illness. But rules are rules, and while I might have been able to pass myself off as a doctor in Haapsalu, I wasn’t welcome to practice medicine in America.

Fortunately, Liina and I were both healthy and so were able to view the American healthcare disaster with detached amusement. We met plenty of the middle class who so staunchly defend their rotting system due to a hyped-up fear of socialism, a people so petrified of government at any level that not only were they unwilling to consider the single-payer system functioning so well a few miles north in Canada, but they were happy to entrust their system to insurance- and pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists who clearly weren’t motivated to act in the patients’ best interest. At 100 billion USD per year, it's arguably the world's most expensive and least efficient system.

We also met the underclass, those who rely on the emergency room as their primary caregiver and to whom preventative care is at best a dream and at worst a foreign concept. Mostly, our American experience taught us this: America is not for the meek, and it’s no place to be poor.

For most medical treatments, give me Estonia. Yes, the Soviet-era hospitals in their constant state of decay are rather depressing, and the constant buzz of the fluorescent lighting is probably the cause of more depression than winter darkness. And true, I wouldn’t want to have an organ transplant here, and I wouldn’t want to trust an Estonian doctor to diagnose trypanosomiasis, buruli ulcers, or Cushing’s disease, and it’s a fact the American system is tops in the world when it comes to beating cancer. But if I’m able to keep myself fundamentally healthy and only garden-variety illnesses visit me, I’ll take Estonia any day.

And that goes double for emergency treatment. Last spring, during a routine do-it-yourself project, Liina dropped a shelf on my face and I had to visit the emergency room. Since I wasn’t dying (just bleeding from my forehead), I had the presence of mind to put a stopwatch on the visit. Forty-three minutes in and out. And very pleasant doctors and nurses.

I’ve since been once more to the emergency room (Keskhaigla) for my back, and I can’t praise enough the doctors and nurses there. They’ve got their problems, too—the emergency room is full of people who refuse to see their family doctors for one reason or another—but you don’t wait six hours to see a doctor and you’re spared the humiliating financial triage performed by a curt American administrator.

My Estonian family doctors have always been excellent, too, though I admit I have the advantage of some professor friends at Tartu University’s medical school who have recommended physicians to ensure I don’t end up in the hands of doctors like Piret’s. And so far, I’ve used only state doctors, stubbornly believing that I truly ought to get something in return for a thirty-something percent social tax.


I’m pleased to report that Piret found a new physician and she started over. Thanks to an obstetrician and a team of medical pros who seem to love their jobs, it was a wonderful experience for her, and she’s more excited than ever about having a baby. She had to pay six-hundred kroons to a private clinic for another initial visit, but she didn’t get yelled at, and the doctor helped her see her baby on the ultrasound screen. She even got a receipt.

In a country which so desperately needs babies, this isn’t only a victory for Piret. It’s a victory for us all.

***
Read it in Postimees ("Tervishoid- ja õud") here.

***
Dept. of Shameless Commerce: Give Vello's book for Christmas (in English) this year. (A refreshing alternative to the usual gifts of Kihnu Island sweaters or bottles of Vana Tallinn.) Available in English from Amazon.com here.


Inherit the Family: Marrying into Eastern Europe

Running

How far can a dog run into the woods? was a favorite question of the American marketing professor and beer industry consultant, Robert Weinberg. “Halfway!” Weinberg liked to shout when his students couldn’t come up with the answer fast enough to please him. “Because then the dog is running out of the woods.”

To Weinberg, the dog represented a brand and the running was to illustrate that overexposure to the public isn’t in the brand’s best interest. If the brand becomes too ubiquitous, argued Weinberg, the result is public resentment.

Lately, I’ve been feeling that way about the singer, Ines. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m her fan. I think she’s beautiful, sexy, talented, and she’s probably a great ambassador for Estonia. But lately I’ve tired of seeing her. I open any magazine, turn on any TV channel, and there’s Ines, telling me why she helps deaf kids, why she doesn’t ride a bicycle in the city, why she works out at My Fitness or uses Sensodyne toothpaste (though the last could have been another omnipresent Estonian celebrity). No offense intended, Ines. I love you. But you’re running out of the woods.

Which is one reason I stick to writing. So far, I’ve avoided broadcast media, even though some of the appearance invitations are tempting and come from legitimate Estonian Public Broadcasting programs. A few television appearances probably wouldn’t put me in danger of being asked to talk on camera to a yeti doctor about the importance of dental hygiene, but I’m not taking any chances. (Although in case they pay handsomely, I’ve memorized the lines: I consider regular dental checkups and brushing twice a day to be of critical importance…)

Another reason I’ve tried to steer clear of broadcast media is that being witty on the page doesn’t necessarily mean you can be witty on TV. “Oh, it’s not at all a problem,” said one show host in an attempt to reassure me, “you’re great on the phone. You’ll be great on the air.” But I wouldn’t be great. I’d sweat enough under my armpits and between my toes that at best the studio would flood, and at worst I’d get an offer to do advertising for an antiperspirant (I consider the use of antiperspirant to be of critical importance...).

What I’ve come to understand is that in a small country the need for celebrities is no less than in a big country. The difference is that in a small country, to feed the media machine it’s necessary to operate under the assumption that if you do one media you can do them all. To me, this is like the Estonian Olympic Committee asking tennis-wonder Kaia Kanepi to fill a slot on the Olympic Greco Roman wrestling team, just because she’s an athlete and happens to be in Beijing. For better or worse, I simply don’t have the talent to be a television personality. I talk through my nose, and my thoughts tend to wander and return home after long periods of time—not exactly a skill TV producers are lining up to get.

The issue of my questionable talent aside, I’ve never been comfortable with broadcast media, especially television. The makeup you have to wear gives me a rash, and there is also the inevitable presence of other guests. Should the other guests include Barney the Dinosaur and not Toomas Hendrik Ilves, this has obvious consequences for one’s self-esteem. I once watched an episode of Terevisioon where a guest was interviewed about Estonian national security while an actor in a purple animal suit danced and played in the background. “If I were that guest,” I told my wife Liina, “I’d run over there and beat the shit out of that animal.” Liina replied that that wasn’t the Estonian way. “Okay,” I said, “walk over there and beat the shit out of that animal.” Liina just sneered and said I had a lot of learning to do.

I’m also not the most photogenic guy around. I’m not ugly, but I’ve never suffered from too much beauty, either, and I don’t want to be one of those pain-in-the-ass prima donnas who goes on TV and demands to be lit from the left side or, like I’ve heard Michael Jackson used to demand, requires a bathtub filled with Evian water in his dressing room.

And my Estonian language, which isn’t great to begin with, gets noticeably worse on television. My already strange accent gets even stranger. The few times I’ve tried television and later watched myself, I thought I came off sounding like an idiot. Liina has suggested it has nothing to do with the language.

Finally, in a land of so few television channels, I admit I live in fear that accepting one offer would pave the way to becoming a cheap media whore, the kind of guy who’ll do anything to see his own face on television. “Oh, get Vello,” producers might come to say. “He’ll do anything.” No disrespect intended, but deep inside my DNA I don’t have that gene which pulls me to fame like a moth to the light or a Tarand family member to a gameshow.

Part of what I have against the media in general (print included) is that all of us who participate in it are, to some degree, guilty of feeding the bullshit machine. Even the biggest media with the biggest budgets are not exempt from this trap, and despite CNN’s efforts, they’ve been only somewhat more successful at filling time than even Estonia’s worst television station. Regardless of what anyone says, there is simply not enough real news to fill a 24-hour broadcast, and the CNN “professionals” end up filling the air with so much nonsense, idiots with uninformed opinions, and blatant self-promotion, that I refuse to have it in the home. When I travel, I challenge myself by turning it on in the hotel room to see how long I can endure. Seven minutes is my current record, except for September 11th, 2001, one of the few times in modern history when there simply was no substitute for television.

Writers have other advantages which television personalities don’t. Working on the page gives us time to think about what we want to say and how we say it. If I want to play with a sentence and restructure it a dozen times, I’m only wasting my own time, and no guests sit around quietly suffering. (The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler once tried a “watch me write” live internet broadcast, though most people I know who tuned in soon tuned out in complete disgust, and Butler was promptly awarded the nickname, Robert Olen Butthole.)

You may think I’m taking myself too seriously and perhaps you’d be right. Going on television would give me something new to write about and it would “extend the Vikerkaar brand” (as a friend in marketing tells me I should do), and it might bring opportunities to earn money beyond writing. I myself don’t use Sensodyne (I’m a Blend-a-med man), but I do use Gillette products, and I like Snickers candy bars, A. le Coq beer, and Lay’s potato chips. Might there be a hairy man in a white jacket out there to interview me about my grooming- or junk food habits?

But I doubt I’m in danger of running out of the woods anytime soon. According to Liina, I’ve had my nose up against the first tree I saw for quite some time, examining the bark in great detail and writing essays which speculate about why the ants I see move the way they do.

***
Read this in Estonian in Postimees.

Camping with Koržets

“Hey, you got any vodka?” As soon as the man shouted at us he regretted it, because his wife elbowed him hard in the ribcage. “But I was just asking,” he muttered, massaging the pain under his arm.

We had just entered Estonia’s weekend party headquarters, the Lake Peipsi RMK-sponsored campground. It was only five p.m., but the party already raged.

“You can pitch your tent in any of the marked sites,” the friendly gate attendant had said, but there’d been so much music—techno, rap, a little heavy metal—coming from the forested area the other side of the makeshift barrier, that we told him we thought we’d have a look around first. “Sure,” he said. “Park your car. Look around.” And so we did.

In the parking area, as well as at other strategic places around the camping area, guests were greeted and cautioned by a photo of Vladislav Koržets in a half-bug-eyed pose of excitement, finger in the air to make his point. A speech bubble was supplied by RMK, something to the effect of “Only dipshits burn down forests. Use the fireplace provided.” There was no text about what kind of music best complements birdsong, and it was clear that we weren’t going to hear any wrens or sparrows or blackbirds or nightingales. What we were going to hear was DJ Dima and His Posse of Righteous Russian Dudes. Except that for all the partiers were Estonian.

“Weird,” said my buddy Juss, having opened a beer to get into the party spirit. “These idiots are all Estonian.” And so they were. Every campsite was filled to the brim with Estonians, some of them young rullnokkad, Estonian vernacular for primitives fond of cars, but others—like the middle-aged, vodka-begging husband—were older, professional partiers. But where were the Russians? Was the music so bad that even they’d been driven away? “Tiblad are too smart to pay fifty kroons each to camp with these tshuhna,” Juss said. “They’re probably at home where it’s safe.”

And it was looking like home was where we were headed. We left the RMK party center and scoured the shore of Peipsi for a quiet place to pitch a tent, but we were constantly confronted with signs reading PRIVATE PROPERTY or demands by landowners to pay 100 kroons per person to sleep next to a caravan full of Germans. My Estonian companions had nothing against Germans; rather, since they considered themselves true Estonians, they were categorically opposed to being remotely near any other human being. “Camping here would be like putting up a tent at the song festival grounds,” said Juss, shaking his head out of disgust that his Canadian friend could never grasp the Estonian need for solitude. To me, our party of four (including our occasionally chattering wives) had already ruined any opportunities for solitude, so what were a few Germans in a caravan? Anytime we found a possible camping place, if there was even a single sign of other life, Juss would dismiss it as “another damned song festival.” Although it was a warm, late-summer weekend, and though we were near one of the most heavily trafficked parts of Estonia, Juss was still convinced we would find a solitary and absolutely free campsite with no neighbors inside a 500-meter radius.

As we searched for this paradise, we became hungry. We stopped at a fish stand to buy smoked bream. A friendly local Russian—a Russian, at last!—sold smoked bream, flounder, and salmon.

“Salmon!” Juss erupted, “there aren’t salmon in Peipsi.” Juss took me aside to point out that this kiosk’s SMOKED FISH sign was suspiciously similar to all the others we had seen on the road. Juss believed we were about to be the victims of a McDonald’s-like scam to sell us fish caught elsewhere. “You know that the bream they sell in Selver comes from America?” Juss tried to whisper but was so wound up he shouted. “Lake Michigan! They catch the damned things in Lake Michigan and ship them over here!” Juss paced back and forth like Hercule Poirot solving a case, and then he stopped and struck a pose resembling Koržets, his finger held declaratively in the air. “This is American bream and Norwegian salmon!” he declared. “How dumb do they think we are?”

“I’m hungry,” cried Juss’s wife, Ivi, from the car. “Are you two going to buy anything or not?”

“These aren’t Peipsi fish,” Juss shouted to her. “They’re selling salmon!”

“Well,” Ivi said, “buy some onions then. But get something.” And so Juss returned to the kiosk and ordered a bream.

“My father caught this fish,” the girl said in very good Estonian. “And he’s never been to Lake Michigan.”

“What about this salmon?” Juss demanded.

“Well, salmon do swim up the Narva River, but this one came from Selver. What can I say?” she shrugged. “Some people want to buy them.”

“Maybe they’d buy shark, too.” Juss wouldn’t leave it alone.

“Maybe,” the girl shot back. “Do you know where I can get some?”

“I can’t even find a camping place on hundreds of kilometers of Peipsi shoreline,” he confessed. “Do you think I could find a shark?”

The girl laughed and directed us five kilometers north where she said there was an RMK campsite.

“Oh, we’ve seen that one,” Juss dismissed her.

“No you haven’t,” she insisted. “This one is where normal people go.”

And so we decided to give it a chance. It was only five kilometers to find out what this girl’s definition of normal was. Would there be campers swinging from the trees and smashing empty vodka bottles against each other’s heads? Or would the campers be a young tribe, out to break a Guinness record for loudest outdoor disco?

There, greeting us at the gateway to the park was Vladislav Koržets. “Haven’t we been here before?” Ivi asked.

“This is where normal people come,” Juss said. “But it does seem like déjà vu.” He killed the car’s engine and we sat for several minutes, listening suspiciously.

“Sounds okay,” said Ivi.

“Maybe they just went to get more alcohol,” my wife Liina suggested.

There were three other cars in the parking lot, but there was no gate attendant, not even a barrier. Only a grinning Koržets cautioning us not to burn the place down.

We unloaded our gear slowly, sure that any minute we’d be driven back to our car by gang of Lasnamäe youth wearing leather and gold and throwing lit sticks of dynamite in their wake. But things remained quiet. We passed a campsite occupied by a young family who was listening to soft classical music, a small Russian flag flew from a guy-line on their tent. They smiled and nodded. Another young couple with an infant waved and said zdrastvuitye.

We found a spot nearest the lake and pitched our tents. We made dinner (Norwegian salmon we’d brought from Tallinn) and settled in for the night, bracing for the inevitable party.

Around eleven p.m., when I was half asleep, Liina was met at our tent door by a young Russian. “Do you have any firewood?” he asked in Estonian slightly better than mine. “We forgot firewood. I’d be happy to pay for it.” Liina told him we’d burned what little we had and that she was sorry she couldn’t help. “Are you all alone?” he asked. “Because you could join us around the campfire if you want.”

Liina thanked him and told him she was with her boring husband, who grunted inside the tent in protest to the characterization. The young man laughed and said I was welcome, too.

This was all too civilized, and I wondered how Juss was feeling about it. This was relatively private camping, free of caravans and Germans. And it was almost completely silent: our Russian campers were making less noise than even Koržets.

“Hey, Juss!” I shouted. “Got any vodka?”

Juss told me to shut up. Normal people were trying to sleep.

***
Read it in Estonian in Postimees.

***
Vello in English from Amazon.com, Abebooks.com and Alibris.com. Purchase it here:


Inherit the Family: Marrying into Eastern Europe
by Vello Vikerkaar

Childproof

When I was a child what I wanted most in life was a pet monkey. My mother said no, not because it was probably illegal or because we already had three dogs and two cats, but because “monkeys swing on the drapes,” she said, “and I’m not about to have one destroy my house.” At the time, I really didn’t understand, but mom did most of the housework and was hostess and homeowner, so I respected her wishes and so did not independently purchase a pet monkey. Not that I would have known where to buy one.

Just last week my American friend Patricia showed up for a visit with her two children, and before I knew it the eldest had used a ballpoint pen to add to Liina’s favorite Paul Allik painting. The second child, a bit younger and therefore lighter, had actually climbed the drapes halfway up the wall. I spotted him just before the curtain rod gave way and he tumbled a meter to the floor bawling. In that split second before he hit ground, I thought back to my childhood desire for a monkey and empathized with my mother.

“Oh, geez,” said Patricia, grabbing her screeching child and pulling him to her breast. “You should really childproof your house.”

Why? I wanted to ask but didn’t, since I was engaged trying to imagine what items I could leave in the house that could not be destroyed by her simian primates. I couldn’t think of a single one. Childproofing would literally require the house to be gutted, removing drapes, paintings, books, hiding our toothbrushes. I tried to imagine what Patricia’s home looked like. Perhaps it was nothing more than a padded-wall cell. Maybe the adults had surrendered and moved out.

Seeing her drapes destroyed, Liina clearly wanted to take my 12-gauge off the wall and blast Patricia’s kids in the ass with a load of rock salt. Liina was aghast at the implication that we should childproof our home, as if Patricia had no obligation whatsoever to restrain her children. “This is what you get with kids” was what Patricia’s resigned face communicated. Liina’s face resembled that of a passenger on a jet airliner just before it crashes into the ocean at over a six hundred miles an hour.

As I’ve been led to believe, many parents today don’t punish their children by physically striking them. This may be a good idea, even though my parents certainly trotted out the hickory switch in instances of Major Child Crimes. Today, American parents punish their children with something called a “time out,” which means the kids are supposed to sit still in a corner until they’ve calmed down. But why can’t the kids be calm all the time? Or at least when they’re at my house?

Sure, within reason, my mom allowed us to run wild in the Vikerkaar household, but we were strictly forbidden from doing it in someone else’s home. And when there were adult guests present at our house, my brother Villu and I were required to follow simple rules about interacting with them: Don’t interrupt a conversation; Say “yes sir” and “no sir,” or “ma’am” as the case may be; All intelligent questions are welcome, even encouraged, but no gaga babytalk was allowed under any circumstances. Villu and I ate at the same table with the adults, used knives and forks with our elbows held in, and we chewed with our mouths firmly closed. And we, never, ever, climbed on the drapes. Destruction of the home was beyond consideration.

I’d like to think Patricia’s case is an isolated example of child mismanagement, but it hasn’t proved to be.

Not so long ago, I loaned a friend a signed copy of Raise High the Roof Beam by J.D. Salinger. (The reclusive writer had visited Tallinn, had drinks at our house, and so I asked him to sign his book.) It was the only copy I had, and my friend wanted to read it. It was a first edition, and I suppose that fact, combined with the signature makes it worth good money on eBay, though I’ve never cared too much about that when it comes to books. Until, that is, my friend emailed to ask: “Do you want it back in good condition?” I replied to ask if she was using it for archery practice. “No, but it’s hard to keep it away from my toddler.” Just how is that? I wondered. The toddler is exactly how tall? And a signed first-edition cannot be put out of a child’s reach? Particularly a borrowed, signed first-edition?

Yes, I rant to Liina, the world has indeed gone to hell. The modern “vaba kasvatus” has backfired, and the peasants are in full revolt. There’s only one way to quash it, and that’s with blood on the square. Liina agrees with me, though she says she’d stop short of guillotining children.

“Oh, but you’ll both feel differently when you have kids,” people tell us. But, no, we won’t. I can guarantee you that my child will never swing from your curtains like a rhesus macaque. He will not add his signature to artwork in your home. He will not mine boogers from his little nose and deposit them in your salad. And should he, by some wild chance, say, drag a dead, bloody deer across your new white carpet, then I will return to clean it spotless, dear host, after I take him outside and spank the living daylights out of him. Our kids will behave because it’s the right thing to do. And because we don’t believe behaving well is too much to ask of a human being, regardless of his age.

After we cleaned up the collapsed curtains and the potted plants the child destroyed on the way down, Liina took Patricia’s child in her arms. She told him that accidents happen to everyone and that she wasn’t angry. “Would you like me to read you a story?” Liina asked the child. “Oh, yes,” cooed the little one. “A story!”

Liina reached behind her and took a book off the shelf. She opened the cover and read Jonathan Swift’s first sentence: “A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country...” And onward she read to what turned out to be a very attentive little person.

***

Read it in Estonian in Postimees.

The Estonian Rovaniemi

Forget the Estonian Nokia. What we ought to be searching for is the Estonian Rovaniemi. I bow deeply to any town in the world which can convince tourists to visit by advertising cold and darkness.

I first heard about Rovaniemi in 1992. A Canadian family living in Tartu decided to spend their Christmas there, and so they drove northward to show their eight-year-old child, Charlie, the home of Santa Claus. Upon their return, they invited me over for dinner and for what has long been prohibited by the United Nations Convention Against Torture: the amateur vacation video.

For the two-hour duration of the footage, the screen remained pitch black except for the occasional trace of a street lamp or car lights. Sledding on Santa’s mountain? Pitch black. Walking through downtown Rovaniemi? Pitch black. Visiting Santa’s village and little Charlie taking a seat on the Big Man’s lap? Pitch black.

While I went for frequent refills from the wine bottle in the kitchen, they remained glued to the screen. “Remember that, honey?” the wife shrieked. “Oh, yes, dear,” the husband echoed. “That’s Charlie coming down the mountain now!”

I was baffled. Had this family been drugged by the Finns? There was nothing interesting at all about Rovaniemi—or their video—but they were as hooked as heroin addicts.

Even now, having finally visited Rovaniemi myself, I don’t understand the phenomenon. But I do understand that, if only for the sake of our economy, Estonia should have one, too. We’ve got dark. We’ve got cold and wet. What’s stopping us from having our very own Rovaniemi?

My first thought was that we should simply steal the town. Estonia could hire a public relations firm to circulate the rumor that Santa has decided to relocate to Valga or Otepää. After some thought I realized this would be too easily exposed as Eastern European treachery. Better to kidnap the man, blame it on the Latvians, and arrange it so Santa is liberated by Estonians somewhere near Otepää. Having seen both towns, I’m willing to bet that, all other things equal, Santa will by far prefer Otepää over Rovaniemi. If not, we could line Santa’s pockets with unspent EU developmental funds to ensure he sticks around. Then it’s only a matter of buying some reindeer and letting them roam the streets as thick as rats in an Old Town sewer. Our own little Santa Claus village would be complete.

But my conscience got to bothering me. What I like to think separates Estonia from Eastern Europe is its dignity. Estonians walk taller, talk straighter, and, in my estimation, live in a higher orbit than the rest of the region. Estonia doesn’t need a dirty trick. We don’t need to scare the crap out of the world’s children by kidnapping Santa. Forget the kids: let’s scare the crap out of the adults.

He may not recall it, but some years ago Mart Laar, while taking part in a panel discussion hosted by a now-defunct English-language magazine, came up with the idea that Estonia should have its very own Soviet Horror Park. Laar has always been a man ahead of his time in his vision for Estonia.

Personally, I see twenty hectares of horror.

Once my prototypical Canadian family has bought their tickets from the gate attendant, they’ll be stopped ten meters inside the park by an unshaven miilits wearing an untucked shirt and on his head a forashka as big as a serving tray. “Sure you bought tickets,” he’ll tell the still-smiling Canadians, “but you didn’t get them from me.” So Karl Kanada will dig in his pocket for a few bills to ensure his family gets to see the attractions. In some cases, the family’s car will be searched, the father’s porn magazines and children’s walkie-talkies confiscated. Alcohol will be removed (to be later resold in the gift shop or consumed by park employees) and a further fine levied on family members who neglected to purchase the park’s special health insurance which was recommended to them at the gate, the policy which guarantees foreigners the “same fine quality of medical care available to citizens of the Soviet Union.” (Incidentally, the park will house a small hospital where the only forms of accepted payment will be Levi’s jeans and live chickens.)

By this time, Karl Kanada and his family will be extremely thirsty and will descend on the park’s canteen, marked by a sign reading ресторан, at least half of the neon letters burned out. Karl will bribe the doorman, and once inside the family will spend hours deciphering the menu, finally realizing the restaurant has nothing on hand but pelmeni—and only fried pelmeni at that.

Exhausted, his hard currency nearly gone, Karl Kanada will take his family to the Intourist Hotel, where he’ll be charged the foreigners’ rate for a spartan room with no hot water and sheets a half meter too short for the bed. His key will be attached to a boat anchor and tended to by a dezhurnaya, who he will also need to bribe if he wants the family’s sweaty clothes returned by the hotel’s laundry service.

Sometime during the middle of the night, a knock will come at the door, and the family will be given ten minutes to pack and whisked down a back staircase into a waiting UAZ truck, then off to the park’s train station where a cattle car awaits. “Wait, there must be some mistake!” Karl will wail. But the guard will turn a deaf ear until Karl removes his Rolex, his leather shoes, his wife’s western brassiere, and anything else of value the family is carrying. Early in the morning, the family will return to their hotel on foot, to find their car stolen. “You only bought health insurance,” the desk clerk will inform them. “You should have bought the auto insurance.”

The deportation, being in such obvious bad taste, might be replaced by guests being rousted from their beds to be lightly beaten, then forced to sign a confession and inform on a neighbor—or, in cases of leniency, simply forced to write a postcard to their neighbors about the wonderful time they’re having.

To me, it’s a natural idea. It may not be exactly what Mr. Laar had in mind (I never had a chance to ask him), but it would certainly be one hell of a park. Educational for sure. Real family entertainment. The natural successor to reality television.

Vello, some will cry, you’ve stooped to a new low! How dare you make light such a serious subject? I answer this way: Estonia can continue the frustrating search for its Nokia—or seksikat produkti, as Mr. Ansip was quoted calling them in Äripäev—which it possibly won’t find while anybody reading this is still alive. Or, it can take advantage of that which is right under its very nose. It isn’t pretty, but it would be authentic. And thanks to Hollywood, with the West thinking that the Soviet Union was all about Bond and “Goldeneye grotesque,” Estonia might be doing the world a service by setting things straight.

But there’s Solzhenitsyn, Edward Lucas, and Anne Applebaum! a reader will protest. People know the crimes of the Soviet Union! No, dear reader, they don’t. The masses don’t read books and never have. Bad television and theme parks are the communication tools of our time. If we want to change the popular conception of history, then we’ve got to do it with Disney. Or rather our own sick interpretation thereof.

***

Read it in Estonian in Postimees.

Turn Your Head

Text printed on a tip jar aboard Tallink’s M/S Star: The more you tip, the nicer we are.

Perhaps there wasn’t enough space on the jar to fit what the bartender really wanted to write: I’ve had a bad day. All my days are bad. The esprit de corps around here rivals that of the Gulag crews who dug the Belamor Canal by hand with shovels made entirely of wood. Won’t you, please, thirsty consumer, go away and not trouble me with your business?

I used to think it was worse in the USA, where the old rules of tipping have been thrown out the window, and even Starbucks employees (with health benefits!) expect tips after you’ve stood in line twenty minutes to wait on a long-haired philosophy major change his order three times and finally decide on a caffeine-free double grandé latté sprinkled with protein fiber powder. In America, there are tip jars in places like bookstores and movie theatres—as if twenty-five bucks for a hardback and twelve dollars for a movie isn’t enough. Tipping is such a part of life that the Internal Revenue Service taxes waitresses on tips whether they actually receive them or not. After Broadway performances, where tickets can cost hundreds of dollars, actors appeal to the audience for additional contributions. Bloggers have “Feed Me” buttons with express connections to PayPal. Tipping in America long ago stopped meaning a little something added for good service. It’s become an institution in itself.

Which is why I prefer Estonia. Like this country’s tax code, the rules for tipping are more simple and straightforward. If you are pleased with the service, you tip a little bit, often just rounding up the bill or not waiting on your change. Servers don’t yet feel entitled to tips, and I’ve even had instances where a waitress chased me out the door to return money I left on the table. “No, that’s for you,” I’ve had to explain, though this happens less frequently now that cruise boats full of Americans regularly dock in Tallinn. Damned Americans. They’ve gone and ruined this country, too.

But even in America I’ve never seen a tip jar as cheeky as Tallink’s: The more you tip, the nicer we are. Just how nice could the bartender be? What is the upper limit of his niceness? Would “nicer” mean a smile? Eye contact? Would he give me free salted nuts with my beverage? Would he carry my bag to shore and pay for my taxi home? Somehow, I suspect “nice” for him means not sharing the negative aspects of his job with the passengers. “Nice” means he’ll keep “nasty” in check.

I don’t expect their workers to be nice to me; I just expect them to do their jobs. Which most of them do, in fact. But the tip jar goes too far. It reads like a Christmastime message from UNICEF: Just a few cents a day can change the life of this starving African child.

I know the M/S in the vessel’s name means Motor Ship, but the bartender’s message makes me imagine shirtless, sweating Estonians shackled twelve to an oar beneath the auto deck, driven by a whip-wielding Soviet-era manager. He lashes at them to shut up about positive reinforcement in the workplace and row faster, those who slack off or die at the oars unceremoniously rolled overboard.

If I’m to believe what I read in the papers, then Tallink may not be the most employee-friendly place to work. The looks on their employees’ faces would seem to confirm that. I understand they work long hours for little money, but so do school teachers and shopkeepers and nurses. And, even in America, when’s the last time you saw a tip jar in a hospital?

But if a Tallink employee is dissatisfied, why can’t he reserve expressing his displeasure for when Enn Pant or Ain Hanschmidt are on board? Why hold it against me? I’m only guilty of buying a ticket.

And isn’t it, in principle, supposed to be the other way around? Isn’t—especially in this economy—the customer king? It might be equally tasteless (and might earn you a gob of bartender spit in your beer), but it would seem more appropriate for the customer to hold a sign reading The nicer you are, the more I tip.

But I understand. I once was chained to the oars in the service sector. I was a stock boy at Kmart, one of North America’s megastores. My job was to clean up the aisle when a mother emptied the contents of her baby’s diaper on to the floor (which, surprisingly, happened about as often as a Tallink passenger vomits in a deck passage). When I wasn’t on diaper detail I had to clean the grease off the store’s restaurant’s hamburger grill, all the while dressed like a Mormon missionary in a white shirt and necktie. When I was lucky enough to be allowed to sack groceries, company policy required me to look every single customer in the eye and say, “Thank you for shopping at Kmart!” My boss, Mr. Siegel (I was not permitted to address him by his first name) allowed no shorter version. A simple “thank you” did not suffice. I got out of there fast and went into the plumbing business. I still had to pick up turds, but I didn’t have to wear a necktie while doing it.

My advice to the Tallink bartender: You’ve got to get out of there fast. Like Huck Finn, you got to light out for the territories ahead of the rest. Before Aunt Polly in her sailor outfit gets ahold of you. But in the meantime, while you’re waiting to make your getaway, try to pretend you’re not unhappy.

When I lived in New York I knew a 24-year-old girl who married a 70-year-old gazillionaire. He was a shriveled up, bitter old guy who was downright mean. “How can you stand the sex?” she was once asked at a table with friends. She raised her left hand to show us the three-carat diamond on her finger. “When he climbs on top of me, I just turn my head and stare at this rock.”

That’s what you’ve got to do, Mr. Bartender. Turn your head. And if your rock isn’t motivating, then you might, perhaps, look at the door.

***
Read it in Estonian in Postimees.

Fair-weather Gentlemen

“What invoice?” the real estate developer said. He didn’t know it, but Liina had him on speakerphone. Phone conversations with him are cheap family entertainment.

“The one you didn’t pay three months ago,” she replied. This was one of her bigger clients for her interior design business. Around the house, I refer to this client as Snake.

“I didn’t get the invoice,” Snake said. “Can you send it again?”

That was three months ago. He still hasn’t paid. I sometimes think that we should translate Snake’s words to Latin and print them on currency: Ego non adepto invoice. Vos transporto is iterum?

The financial crisis has done a lot more than show who is, in the words of Warren Buffett, swimming without trunks. It’s put a host of so-called businessmen under the loop and outed those who are in American parlance, “fair-weather” gentlemen: they behave as gentlemen only when business is going well.

Of course Snake got the invoice both times that Liina sent it: she has a collection of his “we’ll get that paid right away” emails. So it’s a rather odd dance that plays out on the phone, where both Liina and Snake know the invoice was sent and received, yet Snake claims he never got it and Liina, out of a combination of not wanting to call the guy a liar and the hope of getting her money, plays along with him. Wouldn’t it just be easier on everyone if Snake would admit he doesn’t have the money? That despite his Audi Q7 and Hugo Boss suits, it’s really the bank who’s running his company?

Instead, he’s on the phone with my wife pretending he’s a bigshot, talking about other härrasmehed he’s in business with, and trying to convince her to take on another project, even after he never paid her for the last one.

An even better question: Why is Liina still talking to him?

I’ve tried her to persuade her to walk away from the guy, to take their contract to an inkasso company who will at least drag Snake’s name through the mud. So that the next time he appears in Kroonika, readers will look at his photo and say, “Ah, there’s Snake again. Has no one killed that scumbag?” Getting the money out of Snake would be nice, but telling him mine persse would be more satisfying. I can live without money. I can’t live without some measure of integrity.

Which is probably why I can’t understand Snake. To me, there’s no shame in bankruptcy itself. The shame is in pretending everything’s going swimmingly.

But I doubt Snake’s fooling anyone but himself. In Estonia’s real estate heyday, my dog Mundo could have run Snake’s real estate company. Some parts of the business excepted, it isn’t rocket science to buy property, build ugly apartments on it, and then re-sell it. In fact, the greed and false confidence of gentleman geniuses like Snake is what got the world into the mess we’re in. Why’d we ever let them run the place?

I think what we need in Estonia (not to mention the rest of the world) is a revolution of accountability. We start locally, because Estonia is so small no one can hide. Estonians seem to already know who the scumbags are in their country. But my question to you: Why haven’t we run them out of town?

The first step in this revolution is the rule of No Second Chances. Let’s say you’re a university rector who spends the school’s money on Church’s English Shoes and a charter jet instead of on a student library. You should get the boot and never be allowed a second chance. That’s right: Never. Not in a million years. Your ass should go to jail. And when you get out, the only job you should be able to get is shoveling coal into furnaces at the university you cheated. Well, okay, from time to time you should be released to do yard work, so that professors may point at you and say to students, “Look, there’s the stupid son-of-a-bitch who abused the public trust.”

The second rule of our revolution is Money is Not Your God. This could be taught by replacing obligatory Estonian military service with eight months of helping lepers in Orissa, India’s poorest state. And this program isn’t just for young men. Let’s say you’re a minor bureaucrat, convicted of siphoning off EU funds and awarding contracts to your own MTÜ. India will be happy to get the volunteers, and a little time away from fluorescent office lighting will do every public official some good.

Third is the rule of Public Humiliation. Let’s say you’re a minister of parliament who swapped land or sold your signature for cash. Public humiliation should be so steep that you’ll flee to Argentina to live next door to Nazi war criminals (if you stashed a lot of dough) or in a tent on the beach (if you didn’t).

Some Estonians argue that the reason these rules can’t be applied is because so many who might apply them also have skeletons in their closets. This is entirely absurd. There are 1.3 million people in this country, most of them perfectly honest. Many have never cheated anyone, have paid all their bills, and will do most anything to honor their word when they shake your hand on any size deal. If you’re an Estonian and haven’t met any of them, then you need to crawl out of the cave you’re living in and meet new people. There are some damned fine people in this country. (More good news: Some of these fine people are businessmen and some work in government.)

But what if the problem isn’t Snake and his ilk? Might the bigger problem be the rest of us? Are we too forgiving? Are we too easily walked over? Maybe Edmund Burke is overdoing it, but what the hell: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Some readers may wonder how I can judge. It’s easy: I’ve never cheated a fellow citizen or stolen anything. And, for the rest of my life, I don’t plan to. I also know plenty of rich people who got rich without stealing. So, in fact, it’s damned easy to sit on my high horse and look down at people like Snake.

Yes, if Jesus were here he’d tell me not to be so judgmental. He’d tell me to turn the other cheek and give Snake love. But until Jesus arrives, I don’t plan on forgiving Snake. And I think Estonia would be a hell of a lot better place if more of its good citizens weren’t so forgiving, either.

***

Due to Vello's crankiness (too much Martin Amis?) as witnessed in the above column, or perhaps due to shrinking magazine advertising revenue, as of next week his column will no longer appear in Eesti Ekspress. (He's still available here in English.) He promises to take a hoe to Snake and to recover the Vello within.

One Hell of a Skateboard Park

Granted, my opinion as a foreigner matters not one damned bit. And, when it comes to Estonian monuments, that’s exactly how it ought to be.

But Estonia’s monument to her War of Independence is nearing complete completion (not yet ready, but ready enough for the dedication ceremony to already have taken place), and now its critics, including me, are free to wander in its shadow and ponder whether the nation got its 100 million kroons worth.

My verdict: Not half as ugly as I feared. The monument is too totalitarian for my taste and provokes in me a sense of irony that a people who have freed themselves from the grip of both Fascism and Communism would choose such a structure. It is, in a word, unEstonian. Standing under the glass Balkenkreuz looking over Freedom Square (or Victory Square, as some insist), one may wonder if the government has not constructed Northern Europe’s largest skateboard park. Concrete and glass may be the calling card of modern Tallinn, but for me they have little to do with Estonia. For me, Estonia will always be country lanes, stark coastlines, and forests so picturesque that frolicking hobbits would not be out of place.



But a monument is more than its physical structure (witness the Bronze Soldier), and this one will be whatever Estonians make of it. If, in winter, the city fathers elect to clean the concrete plaza of ice, then perhaps it might function as more than just another source of broken limbs. And there’s no arguing the monument has improved the neighborhood. The marijuana paraphernalia, porn-video, and “French hot dog” shops in the tunnel have now vanished.



The day I visited there were far more Estonians than foreigners present (one thing you can’t always say for Old Town), everyone milling about, taking photos, and sharing their thoughts. “I think it’s pask,” said one old man, though he wasn’t quite old enough to have fought in the War of Independence. But he was courteous, very quietly calling the monument “runny shit,” since a veteran of the War dressed in sportcoat and necktie, medals pinned to his coat, stood only a few paces away.

The Antidote to Public Transportation

The American writer John Gierach used to work as a bicycle messenger in New York City. He carried a kryptonite lock, because, in addition to locking the bike, it was the best for smashing out the lights of taxi cabs who crowded him out of his lane. And that's about the state of bicycling in Estonia. There may be bike lanes, but motorists haven't yet learned that they're for bicycles.

I'm a bicyclist, and I support Eesti Rattarikkaks, Estonia's non-profit organization with the goal to make bike transportation in Estonia as normal as in any other European nation. Dig this video made by one of my friends on the occasion of Estonia's "ride your bike to work day" or something along those lines. And, by the way, Scott, are you sure you've got the rights to that Beatles song?



If you're a bicyclist and want to throw in with this gang, visit here.

Veggie Quest

“Do you have anything for vegetarians?” We were in a café near Viitna and my wife Liina was hungry.

“No!” shouted the woman behind the counter. Shouted, I kid you not.

But Liina could see carrots and beets under the sneeze-guard and just had to point it out. “Couldn’t you just put those on a plate for me?”

“Those are for komplektid,” she sneered, meaning that in order to get a vegetable you had to order a full meal. She turned to the next person in the line, which just happened to be me.

“Don’t you have anything for vegetarians?” I couldn’t let her off without a fight.

By the look on her face you would have thought she’d been asked to gouge out the eyes of her favorite child. What had vegetables ever done to her? Had she been forced to eat beets as a child? Had her stepfather beat her with a sack of potatoes? I can’t say she hated vegetables, but she clearly had something against people who ate them.

“Just replace the meat dish with another vegetable,” Liina surrendered. “You can even charge me the same price.”

I thought that was a pretty good deal for the cafe, but the worker obviously disagreed. She crossed her arms and turned her back. The international signal for Get out of my restaurant.

I should have flashed the toy plastic police badge I keep in my wallet and told her I was closing her restaurant for violation of EU vegetable discrimination laws. I should have reached across the counter, touched her softly on the back, and whispered, “Vegetarians forgive you.” I should have done a lot of things. But those ideas, l’esprit d’escalier, as zee French say, came later. At that moment I was nothing but stunned. What had Liina done but ask for some carrots?

It wasn’t the first time she had been refused service for ordering only vegetables. Being an open vegetarian in the former Soviet Union is tantamount to being a convicted pedophile. At best, you’ll be scorned but served. At worst, you’re at risk for a beating. But usually, without too much of a fuss, you can strike some sort of deal with the restaurant.

The negotiation process can be intense. It often involves a long exchange with the waitress where Liina explains that being a vegetarian means eating vegetables. “Well, we’ve got chicken” inevitably follows, to which Liina replies that that’s meat, too. “What about fish?” Liina then explains that some vegetarians eat fish, but she does not. She eats only vegetables. At this point, the waitress’ memory will fail her and she’ll offer chicken again. After a several minute process, the waitress finally exclaims: “You mean you only eat vegetables?”

Sometimes, the waitress will have read about this phenomenon in a society magazine. She may be aware that Alanis Morrisette or Anne Hathaway are vegetarians. (Rarely will anyone know that Albert Einstein and Rainer Maria Rilke were vegetarians.) If you have a male server, there’s a small chance he’ll know Jenna Jameson, the porn star, is a vegetarian. But usually, even if the rural waiter has heard of vegetarians, he actually hasn’t met one.

If the server happens to be open-minded, Liina often gets a chance to make her vegetarian case. She’ll debunk the myth that you have to eat meat to get protein. She’ll tell how she once got anemic and when doctors blamed her vegetarianism, she proved them wrong and got her iron through beans, lentils, grains, and dairy products. “But you wear leather shoes!” someone always points out. This invites Liina to talk about how we unavoidably kill lower organisms with every step we take, but that she only wants to minimize pain caused to animals. It’s like listening to Gandhi (who, Liina will point out, was also a vegetarian).

It may be difficult to be a vegetarian, but what’s more difficult is being a carnivore husband of a vegetarian. I actually like the cholesterol bombs served in rural Estonian cafes. Every once in a while, I love the classic country fare: a fat-laden kotlet, seapraad, or snitsel. So every time we’re turned away from some greasy stolovaya, sent packing toward a healthier restaurant (or worse, the local grocery store where we’ll have to fix our own), I suffer a little bit, too. More and more, we end up taking our own food to the countryside, which means that, since I’m lazy, I eat whatever Liina prepares, making me a de facto vegetarian.

So as a vegetarian, I’d like to ask all rural café owners reading this to please allow your staff to replace the meat with a vegetable. Even if you don’t give a damn about animals, your profit margins will be higher. And you’ll sell one more karbonaad than you would have otherwise, since Liina’s husband always follows when she gets thrown out on the street.

A Finnish Mother's Warning

In Finland there are few castles to fall on you, but you can, especially the farther north you go, get yourself in trouble with drink. While the western world may read on the john, Finns evidently party there. This sign was spotted on the bathroom door at a hotel near Rovaniemi.

Hug Edgar!

It's political season in Estonia. Today, the Centre Party began its campaign to trash the Reform Party. In the usual pattern, Reform will return fire, and soon we'll all be in a foul mood.

But a group of progressive-minded Estonians would like things to be different. "I truly believe that Edgar Savisaar just needs love," said a spokesman for the campaign, Kallista Edgarit! [translation: Hug Edgar!]. "What if we all just gave the man a hug? Would he somehow come to understand that the world is not a hostile place?"

The group is offering the artwork free of charge (right click and steal it here, for example). But if you'd like it on a t-shirt or coffee mug, you can buy it from VelloMart.

Guilty

Hard to believe, but in this economy a hamburger at the Radisson still costs 160 kroons. That’s far too much to pay, but it’s the only decent burger in town. The price includes French fries and an extra large serving of guilt.

This recession has hit me hard—freelance writers are the only ones who go bankrupt faster than bad restaurants. Ordering the Radisson burger brought all kinds of guilt, financial and otherwise. Most of all, I felt guilty because I knew my wife Liina was home eating boiled potatoes. And there I was, sitting in the restaurant next to a street-level floor-to-ceiling window. I felt part of a billboard advertisement for some luxury good, the headline shouting: I’m not sorry that I’m a rich asshole.

Except for that I’m not rich. If the plague came to Tallinn, I’d die in the city with the masses, not having the means to afford a castle in the countryside.

I tried another mental tack to deal with my guilt. I thought of Liina at home and reasoned: She’s Estonian; she actually likes boiled potatoes.

But that only partially worked. While I didn’t feel like a rich asshole, I still felt like an asshole.

But, I thought, I’m not as bad as some.

A real estate developer I know forces his wife to borrow money from her girlfriends in order to pay the family’s utility bills, while he himself somehow finds enough money for international travel. “Business trips,” he tells her. Perhaps. But when he comes back he’s always tanned.

My neighbor, a mid-level attorney at a large law firm, advertised his wife’s fur coat on osta.ee. He snuck it out of the house and delivered it to the buyer, and his wife suspected nothing until she wanted to wear it to a dinner party. All evening long the wife talked about nothing but her “stolen” fur. The next day, the husband admitted he’d sold it but had said nothing because he didn’t want it to spoil dinner.

And I’m feeling guilty over a burger? Strangely, I am.

Before my food even arrives I notice how filthy the table is. It’s not sticky, but there are breadcrumbs all over it. For a 160 kroons… Yes, one would think.

Another lawyer I know, in order to cut down on family expenses, forced his wife to sell her car but then traded his own Toyota for a Mercedes Benz. When she questioned this logic he shouted at her, “Now’s the time to get the best deals!” All I’ve done is buy a hamburger and I somehow feel like I’m in his league.

And then it arrives. It’s a beautiful patty of beef complete with melted Roquefort cheese and four thick strips of bacon on top. The guilt momentarily subsides, but then I see the fries. Is that all? There are at least thirty percent fewer than in pre-crisis days. And they’re not even fresh: they’re clearly frozen; from a plastic bag. 160 kroons. And that doesn’t include a beverage.

But the burger’s so good. The beef is exquisite, and there’s more bacon than I’d hoped for. It’s cooked perfectly: pink in the center and hot off the grill.

I think about Liina at home. I’ve asked her to help share the burden. I still pay the mortgage, but she covers the utilities, the car insurance, and the groceries. I imagine her stabbing a potato with a fork and biting into it. I see her put it back on the plate and sprinkle it with salt.

I signal the waiter and ask for the check. The guy at the next table flags him down and barks “I’ll have another.” I want another, too. But I couldn’t bear another. I’d deserve the heart attack I’d die of.

Liina, if you’re reading this, forgive me. I’ve asked you to sacrifice and you have. Without a single complaint. I feel as if I’ve cheated on you. And worst of all, I can’t promise it won’t happen again.

Food for Thought

Does anyone dine out anymore? I don't do it enough to write a restaurant review, but obviously someone does: the following was sent to me as a press release this morning. I'm pleased that people in Estonia are dining out and that they haven't lost their sense of humor. Given what the Social Minister said to the BBC yesterday (15% unemployment on the way--it's currently around seven), I hope we're all lucky enough to find something to laugh about.

The 2008 George Bernard Shaw Food for Thought Gastronomy Awards

“He was never more serious than when he was joking.”
–said of Mr. Shaw

After much deliberation, the George Bernard Shaw Society of Estonia proudly announces its Food for Thought Gastronomy Award winners for 2008.

Hermann Simm Best Kept Secret Award
There’s no such thing as a secret, though some information does take longer to become public. In the spirit of secrets that shouldn’t remain so, we’re proud to celebrate Riis, the secretive cellar restaurant run by three charming young women who refuse to use anything but fresh vegetables. Pärnu mnt. 62A.

“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” Best Gourmet Restaurant Award
In the oblivious spirit of “Let them eat cake,” this award honors the places we’d all like to dine in more often, if only our pocket books would allow. This year’s honor goes to Horisont at Swissotel. Not only a spectacular view but, considering the economy, an altogether fine place for a last meal.

Luciano Pavarotti Six Chickens for Dinner Best Soul Food Award
When you want to stuff yourself in a comfortable restaurant surrounded by staff who seem to actually want you to be there, Contravento is the place to go. Contravento has held its own for years now as the Tallinn institution of Italian food. Vene 12.

Passepartout Best Ethnic Restaurant Award
Named for Phileas Fogg’s manservant, this award honors courageous purveyors of the spicy and exotic. Given the quick expiration of restaurants in the republic, Estonian food now classifies as exotic and ethnic, and so the award goes to Eesti Maja with its good food and service at a fair price. Lauteri 1.

Tree Huggers’ Haven Award
Where to go after a long day of spiking trees? Exhausted from ramming that whaling vessel? There’s no place better than Nop to relax with an organic pastry, big dill pickle, or beetroot and sauerkraut. Carnivores welcome, too. Nop is one of the jury’s absolute favorites. Köleri tn 1 in Kadriorg.

Sweaty Edgar Best Hole-in-the-Wall Restaurant Award
This is the place you creep off to when the wife is out of town. Its hygienic standards are questionable, but you don’t really care—the food is good, and it doesn’t matter how you dress, because you won’t see anybody you know. Torn between two fine grungy spaces, the jury chose to give the award to both. Ironically, both feature names of jury members’ ex-wives. Try Karmen at Paldiski mnt 72A and Diana at Tammsaare 87. Can’t go wrong.

Holly Golightly Best Café Award
Stylish and flighty, it’s the best place to get the food Tiffany’s never served. You may have avoided Museum, since its appearance from outside makes you think it might be filled with Russian thugs and plenty of blonde bimbos. But that’s its charm, my friend, and if you don’t see Holly there, you can be reasonably certain she’s arriving soon. Vana-Viru 14.

Rick Blaine Best Bar Award
No bar has ever measured up to Rick’s Café Americain, but there’s always hope. A sophisticated place where rogues, spies, les femmes fatales, and bon vivants gather to swap lies. If you’re after shady, then Lady Shadow on Suur-Karja won’t disappoint. With any luck you’ll find yourself seated next to Mata Hari while being eyed by George Smiley through the swaying belly dancer.

Bob Dylan Fat Black Pussycat Dive Bar Award
You might find Dylan seated in a dark corner composing “Blowing in the Wind,” but you sure as hell won’t meet any Eurovision candidates here. We’re happy to give the nod to Valli baar, which sadly seems to be losing a bit of its charm with all the hen parties paying it a visit. But we have faith that Valli baar will always have a seat for a drunk, as long as he’s able to maintain an upright posture. Müürivahe 16.

Oliver Twist Best Gruel (Worst Restaurant) Award
For the second year in a row this award goes to the restaurant Paat in Viimsi. It’s a Mecca for diners who love frozen vegetables. True, the view is hard to beat, but plenty a customer has gone in as a teenager and come out as a pensioner. It’s, in a word, slow. Address withheld as a merciful public service to diners.

Kalev Meedia Most Ridiculous Business Concept Award
Something like a 150 semi-formal seats in a beach restaurant in a location trafficked only three months a year isn’t the mostly likely formula for success. We wish Pärl all the luck, but don’t see it lasting without a lot of serious cash to prop it up. In the Pirita rannahoone.