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Scrap Metal and Estonian Brides

I spent a long day touring the Estonian countryside with my guide, Mati. It seems that the life and money are being sucked into the big city, Tallinn. Country people are moving there for work. The Estonian countryside seemed pretty dead — enjoyed by holiday-makers and offering work to those who can telecommute.

Estonia’s Baltic coast was once the wall of its Soviet-maintained prison. Now the ruins of that cage are a place that free Estonians come for peace, rest, and to celebrate their nature.
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The forests are thick, but the country is flat. Its highest “mountain” is under 1,000 feet, nicknamed “Big Egg Hill.” The endless pine forests are carpeted by wild berries and mushrooms. It is a part of the lifestyle to pick the berries. Mati said, “We have many berries. If you are very sick, some can make you well. Others can kill you. We pick them now for the joy, but during communist times, we picked them because we needed the food.”

The coastline is littered with souvenirs of Soviet occupation. Each little lip of land had a track for a gun and a searchlight. The metal used to keep the Estonians down is everywhere. Estonia’s first post-independence millionaires made their fortune selling scrap metal to the West. Today, Estonians enjoy their mellow, peaceful Baltic coastline, playing amid the ruins of their former prison.

History was tough even before the Soviet Union. If it wasn’t Russians, it was Germans…making life miserable around here. Until the mid-19th century, a good hunting dog was worth more than an Estonian peasant worker. And it was even tougher east of Estonia. In fact, Mati said that the vast majority of Soviet movies set in past centuries were shot in Tallinn, Odessa, or Riga. He said that was because these three towns were among the few from the former Soviet Union with an old quarter that survived the tumult of the 20th century.

And there was nothing charming about the architectural heritage of the Soviet Union. Ugly buildings, which dominate most cityscapes, are just assumed to be “from communist times.” Hotel Viru, long the only skyscraper in Tallinn, was an infamous Soviet hotel. Mati said it was built of a new Soviet material: “mico-concrete” (60% concrete, 40% microphones).

Doing my research, I asked Mati about a good Italian restaurant. He said these days, Italian restaurants are common in Estonia…but no good. They’re generally based on couples: Italian guy marries Estonian girl. His mom was a good cook, so they think, “Easy. Let’s open an Italian restaurant.” Mati said, “It’s always Italian boys and Estonian girls — not the other way. Italian boys think Mediterranean women (Portuguese, Spanish, Italian) don’t age well. Let’s face it: For this, God created the Catholic religion…so they can’t divorce.”

Mati explained his theory that Italian boys see Estonian women as the best bride material: They are the ideal Russian/Scandinavia/Estonian mix: deep, poetic, and romantic like Russians; free-spirited like Scandinavians, but without the problematic feminism of a Scandinavian; and the hands-on, can-do practicality of Estonians…the perfect woman.

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Tourists in Siberia and a Singing Revolution

The Festival Song Grounds in Tallinn mean freedom to a million Estonians. This is where choral music helped bring down the USSR.
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It’s amazing what a stretch of water can do. The Baltic Sea separates Sweden and Finland from Estonia. And the struggles of the last couple of generations couldn’t be more different on opposite sides of the Baltic. Traveling to Estonia spices up any Scandinavian visit — especially if you connect with the people and let them tell their story.

My guide, Mati, spent his time in the USSR military driving Soviet officers around the Crimea. Estonian boys got this plum assignment because they were considered smarter (and therefore safer) than village boys from the interior of Russia.

With Finland within rabbit-ear distance, Estonians were the only people in the USSR who got Western TV during the Cold War. Mati remembers when the soft porn flick Emmanuelleaired on Finnish TV. No one here had seen anything remotely like it. There was a historic migration of Estonians from the south of the country to Tallinn, where they received Finnish TV. Nine months later, the country experienced a spike in births.

Estonia gets jerked around a lot. It hopes to get the euro in 2011. While I can’t imagine a change in currency, for Estonians it’s no big deal. Mati’s grandmother lived through seven different currencies.

When Mati asked his grandmother where his grandpa had gone, she said, “He’s a tourist in Siberia.” That was the standard answer to shield little kids from the hell they were living in. After freedom, Mati learned that his grandma had a bag packed under her bed for the surprise visit from the local police that she dreaded but half expected. We all live with stress and anxiety…but imagine living fifty years with that fear, as she did.

In Mati’s youth, one-sixth of the world was technically open to travel (the entire USSR), but there was no way to get a plane ticket or a hotel room. In an age when all Estonian recreational boats were destroyed (1950s and 1960s) because they were considered potential “escape vehicles,” one-sixth of the world was a prison.

After independence, in the early 1990s, Mati and five friends built a business importing classic American cars and selling them to rich Russian guys. One day, four of Mati’s friends went to Russia to collect payment on a car and were killed — riddled with machine-gun bullets.

Mati said, “The Russian mob makes Sicily’s mob look like a kindergarten. Putin directed the KGB. If someone thinks Putin doesn’t understand, forgive me, but you are a fool or you are blind.” Mati decided to drop his car business and become a tour guide.

Tallinn’s huge Song Festival Grounds looks like an oversize Hollywood Bowl. Standing overlooking the grassy expanse, with the huge stage tiny in the distance, my guide explained that when Estonia was breaking away from the USSR, a third of the entire country — over 300,000 people — gathered here to sing.

Imagine little Estonia, with less than a million people, free for 20 years from 1920 until 1939, but lodged between Hitler and Stalin. Mati said, “We are so few in number we must emphasize that we exist. We had no weapons. All we could do was be together and sing. This was our power.”

And that spirit of song led to Estonia’s stirring Singing Revolution. I’m embarrassed that my guidebook coverage completely missed this aspect of a visit here. I’ve visited Tallinn several times, and the thrill of this phenomenon (and the historic importance of the Song Festival Grounds) never hit me. With this visit, I was so inspired, I purchased the documentary movie The Singing Revolution online. This marked the start of a new age in tourism for me: be inspired, go back to the hotel, buy the movie on iTunes, and enhance my experience by watching it right there. In the future, this will be commonplace among engaged travelers. (Curious? Visit www.singingrevolution.comto watch the movie’s trailer.)

The Soviet Union was good at wiping out cultures. The USSR intentionally moved people all around to destroy ethnicities and make their citizens simply Soviets. The Livonian culture died out in the 20th century. They tried to wipe out the little Estonian culture, too. They moved in Russians. They drafted Estonian boys, sent them to far corners, and gave them incentives to marry into other regions. Mati recalled how Russian girls swooned at boys in uniform — especially Estonians — and there was plenty of opportunity to marry.

But there’s something resilient about Estonian culture. Mati said, “I’ve been in most of Europe and what I miss when I return is this black bread. I cannot live one week without it. I spent one week in Thailand, and we forgot our black bread. We were very unhappy.”

Having traveled with Mati, Estonia will forever be a more vivid place on my globe.

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Salmon, Shrimp, and Paternal Leave

Edvard Grieg gained inspiration a century ago in a fjord-side hut just outside Bergen, in the west of Norway.
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The concert hall at Grieg’s home overlooks his composing hut, and the fjord beauty that inspired his romantic music.
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Clever Norwegian road signs remind drivers to be safe with a powerful emotional appeal. Care about your loved ones? Tired? Take a rest.
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I came to Scandinavia a couple weeks ago intending to both update my guidebook and sharpen my plans for filming here next month. I was fine with my intended Oslo and Stockholm scripts, but worried about a weak fjord country script.

Happily, I come away with piles of exciting ideas for our fjord show, from ginger glacier hikes to zodiac speedboat tours in the mist of waterfalls under towering cliffs. We’ll visit the best stave church in Norway, lonely in a lush valley — its thousand-year-old dragon eves still snarling at evil spirits in the sky. We’ll hike to a tiny, weather-aged log cabin farm hamlet stranded high above the fjords, where goats still find grass. And we’ll film an Edvard Grieg piano concert in a sleek little concert hall with a long black grand piano perched before a huge window to become part of a dramatic fjord setting, including the idyllic cabin where the composer wrote much of his best music. I am just at the mercy of the weather.

The weather has been scorching during this visit. I’d just wash out my shirt and put it on wet. Locals were acting confused, saying, “I can’t even think straight in this heat.” Scandinavians were at the beaches in droves. I noticed in both Helsinki and Stockholm that the former military forts (the Gibraltars of the Baltic: Vaxholm and Suomenlinna) were now parks with families picnicking literally atop 19th-century gun emplacements — places once strategic for national security, and now strategic only for sun worship.

Society here is famously compassionate and well-organized. Highway billboards show a man napping peacefully on his thankful partner, who shares an important message to approaching drivers: “Sleepy? Pull over and take a rest.” Another billboard has a dad driving with his child’s arm snuggly across his chest like a belt. The sign reads, “Buckle up for your family.” I put in a lot of miles safely. I wore my seatbelt and kept myself awake thinking about random stuff. Did you even notice how many people have the initials HH? (Hubert Humphrey, Hugh Heffner, Helly Hanson, Herbert Hoover, Howard Hughes.)

Norway has laced and drilled its way together with an amazing road system connecting fjord country with Oslo. The longest tunnel is 15 miles. When a toll is levied (as it is for cars entering Oslo and Bergen, to keep down traffic), toll booths are antiquated. You don’t stop and pay. A camera takes your car’s photo, and the license plate is matched to your credit card, which is billed. Those new roads zip travelers around quicker, but also make previously tranquil valleys noisier. I had to drop one unfortunate campground with great riverside bungalows from my guidebook. For ten years, it was a fine little budget place to sleep. Now, rumbling trucks trample the tranquility, so it’s out.

Scandinavians speak English so well, most tours at museums and historic sites simply dispense with the local language and locals and tourists-alike hear it in one language: English.

I was at a cousin’s dinner party with a dozen people in Oslo. Because I was there, they simply spoke English. I felt like it was an inconvenience, but it fazed no one. Topics were fascinating: One man, who just wrote a book on FDR (in Norwegian — a market of only 4 million readers), talked with me about the intricacies of American post-WWII politics as no one I’ve ever met. Someone else suggested that, as Norway’s international telephone prefix is 47 and the USA’s is 1, the system must have originated in America. Another observed that Europeans seem more interested in American Indians than Americans are, and asked if that might be because we feel guilty and they have no guilt on the subject. And another observed that Midwest Americans talked louder than other Americans, and wondered if it was for the same reason West Coast Norwegians talk louder than people from Oslo — because they are always trying to be heard above the constant wind.

Norwegians love to vacation in Greece. They agreed with me that Greece may have invented the aesthetics of beauty, but you’d never know it today by driving around the country. One suggested it might be like how England invented the Industrial Revolution, yet has today’s rustiest economy. Perhaps economically or culturally, a society is inclined to rest on its laurels — it’s just human nature.

People seemed very content. Two new parents at the party were debating the various ways to split their paid maternal and paternal leave. There seemed to be little concern about any economic crisis. These Norwegians were just loving their salmon, shrimp, and goat cheese.

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Nordic National Galleries: More than a Scream

In the last week, I’ve been in three national galleries: in Oslo, Stockholm, and Helsinki. Each one is a hardened little palace of culture, showing off the nature of the land and the psyche of its people in a proud and central architectural jewel box.

It just seems obvious that a national gallery would give a probing view into a people. Of the many national galleries, Scandinavia’s do this extremely well. (Others that come to mind — like London’s and Washington DC’s — mix it up with more generally great art.) But in a little country (with no history of art-grubbing royalty), in a land where the visitor who hits it on a bad month might wonder why anyone would want to even live up here…much less paint, a national gallery works to show visitors that people who live here are not nuts. (Do you have a favorite national gallery for giving an insight into a particular culture?)

In each case — whether Norway, Sweden, or Finland — the paintings exaggerate the power and awesomeness of nature. In those tangled, plush, tumultuous symphonies of nature, the piccolo section is the country folk — people in traditional peasant costumes, tiny but in sharp focus…surviving with grace. Or, in the most famous painting in Scandinavia, just letting out a bloodcurdling Scream.

Like the Swedes have Carl Larsson, each country has its Norman Rockwells who painted almost photorealistic looks at 19th-century Scandinavian life. Rather than paintings celebrating kings and popes, it’s people’s art — a bridal voyage (perfect to show off the traditional jewelry and formal wear), low church devotion (perfect to show the strength of renegade Lutherans not following the state dictates — until they ran out of patience and moved to Wisconsin), and solid families at work and play.

And the “slice-of-life” scenes seem to just as often be slice-of-death scenes: a stoic family filling their rowboat, oaring in the coffin of a dead daughter, her sister clutching the funeral flowers through the bitter ride, and the harsh season clear on the weathered faces of the heartbroken parents.

And there are the struggles with a puritan 19th-century Protestant society, and the psychological problems that result. Basically (if you spent much time with Edvard Munch), messed-up men who didn’t know how to handle women.

As is the case with so many minor cultures in Europe, the 19th century was a time of resurgence and awakening — Finns holding back Russification, Norwegians distinguishing themselves from the Danes and Swedes. Legitimacy can be founded on epic myths. In each of the galleries, huge murals celebrate the Paul Bunyan beginnings of their nationalities. In The Mid-Winter Sacrifice, the noble Viking king prepares to sacrifice himself to the gods so spring will return and his people will be fed. In The Wild Hunt of Odin,the rowdy horde of Viking-like warriors gallops across the sky, snatching up unsuspecting maidens and the souls of sleepers forever.

I’d suggest that anyone traveling across Scandinavia use each country’s national gallery as a cultural springboard for venturing further from the capital.

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Cheap Tricks in Norway

While gourmet dining in Norway comes with appetite-ruining prices, simple plates of the day (with free, good water and all the potatoes you want) make an affordable, if forgettable, $20 meal — add a beer and your $20 meal becomes a $30 meal.
Enlarge photo		 Norway has very good beer that comes with a price — causing many to split just one.
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When I’m in Norway, I’m always amazed at how clear it is to me that I am with my people. (Three of my grandparents left hard times in Norway for hard times with promise in the USA.) I remember once being in Sweden, thinking, “Yes, these are my people.” Then I crossed the border into Norway and, while wandering through the tidy pedestrian shopping streets in the first town, I realized, “No, those weren’t my people…these are my people.”

While I love traveling here, this year I find my people are somewhere between frugal, cheap, industrious, and greedy. Their tourist trade is built upon a gift from God: incredible nature. Their economy is founded upon another gift from God: lots of oil. Researching and updating my guidebook here — sorting through all the creative marketing tricks masquerading as “deals” while jacking up all the prices listed — I can’t help but think, “These people are doing everything they can to get more business…except lower prices.”

While the rest of Europe seems to be holding prices steady during these tough economic times, everything here costs more kroner. People are moping about how slow business is and don’t see how their prices drive travelers away. For example, the Bergen Card (a 24-hour tourist pass) gets more expensive and less helpful every year. Last year the aquarium was included. This year it’s covered only in the winter. Who comes to Bergen to see an aquarium in the winter?

Coffee (at $4 a cup) tastes both sour and bitter to me. It’s the only place where I “cut the taste” with a couple sugar cubes. The beer, while very good, costs $8 a glass. Budget travelers find some solace in the fact that water is served free and you get seconds on potatoes if you like. So, a $25 dinner plate can easily amount to a $25 meal — perfectly affordable. I found that some fjord-country hotels empathize with the situation and welcome travelers at breakfast to make a sandwich (even providing a little baggie) to go for a light lunch.

Travelers might sense particularly aggressive business practices in fjord country, where there is only tourist travel and no business travel. Hotels, restaurants, and tour companies have a short two-month season in which to make their hay. It’s deadly quiet even in early June or early September. And with the slow economy bringing tourism down this summer, I imagine they are none too confident.

God may have given Norway its incredible scenery and its rich oil reserves, but they need to earn their tourism. Norway, my people, I’m glad you get the cushiest perks in Europe for your high taxes (from great schools and paid paternal leave to a plush retirement). But give your visitors a free public toilet once in a while.