18.08.2009: there's that word again ...



If there’s one word that’s appeared on this blog more than I ever would've anticipated, it’s this one: “Estonia”. I came here in 2006 on a visa run* from Moscow, and liked it a lot – but I certainly never imagined that I’d be back three more times in the following three years.

Now I’m going to add even further to the ‘Estonia count’ in Ranting Manor, by telling you something that I’m sure you’ll be absolutely thrilled to know: namely that tomorrow, August 19th, is a national Estonian holiday. It’s the day of “re-independence”, which I think is an interesting term. Estonians have been governed by various foreign powers over the centuries – the Swedes, the Poles, the Germans and the Russians have all had their turn at ruling this pretty little country. And so I guess that, when they gained their independence from the USSR in 1991, it was a long way from being the first time. Hence the all-important prefix.

But how do I know this? Well, it’s a funny story ...

See, when I left Kazakhstan, I had some pretty huge travel plans. Quite a lot of English teachers tend to organise their year this way: they work hard for nine months, and then over summer (when language schools tend to wind down) they see a bit of the world – or in some cases, quite a lot of it. It's a long period to be without work, though, so most teachers top up their holiday funds by doing summer camps.

In previous years I’d wanted my summers to be like this, but they hadn’t turned out that way for various reasons. So the plan was to make it up this year with a big, big holiday. I had eight or nine countries on my radar, on two continents – plus visits to friends in three widely separated locations and, of course, the summer job.

Well, you know the first part of the plan worked out: Uzbekistan was amazing :-) And from there I headed back to Almaty, spent a week organising and saying “goodbye”, flew to the Baltics and made my way out to the islands. All more or less as planned. Then came the job in Finland, and a return to Tallinn to sort out the next leg. And this is where it all came unstuck ...

In the last entry, I mentioned that I’d accepted a teaching job in another former soviet state. That was to start in September, so ultimately all my summer travels were just a very roundabout way of getting me there. Before I tell you why that's no longer happening, let me just expand a bit on something else I said last time.

In 2005 I left Paranoid Delusional Land** hoping to see some big slices of the world, with Russia as my starting point. The plan (in so far as there was one) was to ‘live around’ – in Asia, in Europe, maybe in South America or the Middle East. As it’s turned out, though, I’ve spent most of my time so far just seeing the former USSR. Not sure how that happened; it’s a pretty significant diversion, really, and I’ve often wondered whether it was the right thing. But recently I’ve been feeling more and more comfortable with it, and the question “Shouldn’t I be somewhere else by now?” enters my head less often than it used to. There’s definitely something about these countries and their people which makes them extremely interesting places to be, and now with a little bit of the language under my belt (stress on the word “little” there) and some cultural knowledge, my desire to find out more is increasing with time.

The problem, though, is this: other than the Baltics, the former soviet republics are all ‘visa countries’. The difficulty of obtaining visas varies widely from one republic to the next; in Kyrgyzstan, for example, we simply bought our visas at the airport, with no supporting documents other than our passports. Whereas in Russia ... well, let’s just say there are good reasons why you can find travel agencies that offer ‘Russian visa support’ in most parts of the world.

Having been through visa ordeals before, I’d actually dealt with all the necessary formalities and bureaucratic hoops months in advance, and I was looking forward to getting an attractive new page in my passport. (For all the trouble they cause, one consoling factor is that visas are often quite pretty.) It all seemed completely sorted until about six weeks ago. That was when my school informed me that immigration laws had changed, and that I’d have to go through the entire application process again – this time including a few extra steps, like trying to get a criminal record check from the Kazakh police. ("Sorry, what?") Almost every day for the next month, I spent at least a moderate amount of time trying to work out how the fuck I could satisfy these new laws. I still don’t know.

In the end, my school suggested that I give up and go to Plan B. They said I could arrive on a tourist visa, then somehow ‘upgrade’ it later in a neighbouring country (a variation on the idea of the visa run, I guess). So then it was just a question of getting the tourist visa, which should be no problem – they’re given out a lot more freely than other kinds.

In Tallinn, then, the idea was basically this: stay until I get the visa, then go visit friends in Germany and Slovakia, then on to my new job. So off I went to the embassy … where the whole plan crumbled like fine honeycomb fed gleefully into a document shredder. They told me, politely but firmly, that they don’t give any visas to Australian citizens. And that was it: end of story, end of plan.

So then … what to do? With my money beginning to run low, I realised that something needed to happen soon. So I approached a language school in Tallinn. An hour later, I’d been offered a job. I thought about this for a couple of days, made a few enquiries at other schools, wrote some emails to visa agencies to find out what other options might exist … and then finally, tonight, I made my decision.

This is where the national holiday comes in. I accepted the job, and on Friday I have a meeting with the school director to discuss my classes, my documents and other induction-related stuff. (The contract is only seven weeks long and it’s one of those “more than part-time but less than full-time” deals, so depending on living expenses and the availability of other work, I may renew it or I may not.) She would’ve been prepared to meet me tomorrow, but she can’t because the entire nation is taking a day off. That was the first I’d heard of it. Later I enquired about the origins of the holiday, and the whole ‘re-independence’ concept was explained to me.

The parties begin tonight, btw, and I’ve already heard some fireworks. So tomorrow (and the next day, and the one after that) I’ll be back in serious, sorting-my-shit-out mode. But tonight, while Estonians celebrate their re-independence, I’ll be celebrating too – though for slightly different reasons. For me, it’s about something that would never have entered my head just a few days ago. I’m celebrating Day One as a resident in my new home: The Republic of (here comes that word again) Estonia.

Weird, eh?




(* When your visa specifies a limit on how many days you can stay in one country in a row, so you have to leave that country briefly and get your multiple-entry visa stamped somewhere else.)

(**a.k.a. Australia )