1997: A Glorious End to a Glorious Summer

From the archives: It turns out that I was blogging long before anyone had ever heard the term “blog.” Twenty years ago I was an exchange student in Estonia. While studying at the University of Tartu, I created an online travelogue to keep my family and friends apprised of my experiences. Both my life and the nation of Estonia have changed a lot the two decades since. This reprise is providing me with a glimpse at who I was back then and the excuse to learn more about more recent developments in my temporary home. 

Previous entry: Off to a Great Start

August 25-31, 1997

This week the most incredible summer of my life came to an end and I returned to my status of university student. We had orientation this week and I greatly enjoyed getting to meet all of the new people. Just to give you a rough idea of the situation here, there are approximately 175 new students here this year, 105 of whom are Finnish. Most are here for their full degree programs, often in medicine or law. The second largest group, paling in comparison, with only about ten new students, are the Americans. Most are here on exchange programs for only one semester and I am the only one that I know of staying for a full year. It’s possible there are others, but I just haven’t heard of them.

There was a bit of struggle this week as I had to start fighting with the university for my scholarship given to me by my church in Warrensburg. It’s all been taken care of by now, but thinking about it still makes me exceedingly angry. Therefore I won’t say anything more about here, please read on.

All in all, however, this was a great week and I had a wonderful time. In many ways I am sorry to see this wonderful summer go, but my excitement for the year ahead is a perfect foil. What an incredible experience.

25 August 1997
Monday

Tomorrow I start my new year at the University of Tartu. It is incredible. I am looking forward to meeting the new people so much. This is promising to be a wonderful year. I still don’t understand why I got so blessed.

26 August 1997
Tuesday

The new students are here. The new semester has begun. It is a great group of people, many new Finns and new Americans. I think that we will get along just fine. It was a good night out. We went to the Raekoja Plats beer garden, then to Krooks, Illegaard and then Zavood. It was a pretty good conversation all night long.

The majority of the group is great fun. I got to know the German contingent especially well. They are all wonderful and I sincerely hope to get to know them all much better.

27 August 1997
Wednesday

The world has come to a rather abrupt, screeching halt today. At orientation Piret came to tell me that there was a problem with my Warrensburg scholarship. I am still not quite sure what all of the problems are, and as things stand right now the university has seized the scholarship is threatening to withhold up to sixty percent of my money in “taxes”.

28 August 1997
Thursday

I had hoped to be able to say that today all of the problems with the scholarship were taken care of. Unfortunately, I cannot. However, significant progress was indeed made. I found out for sure that the money is actually here and the cause of the trouble we are now having. It’s all a big mess…quite frustrating.

Editorial Note from 1997: this entry was significantly edited and revised. My actual feelings, as expressed in my journal itself, are not exactly fit for polite company. Put diplomatically, I was doubting the credibility and honesty of nearly everyone involved in the scholarship thing. More frankly, I severely cursed anyone remotely connected, including several people who probably had nothing to do with it.

You will read more about this situation over the next week’s entries. Even with a month’s distance I am still immensely upset by the way this incident was handled by the administration of the university. There was little, if any, communication that ever occurred on how to handle the problem and what solutions existed. The story changed nearly every day and once their requirements were complied with, the goal posts were moved all over again.

This is not acceptable behavior from a university that is portending to be “moving into Europe” and once again “taking it’s place in western society”. Rather it is the action of a small, inept apparachnik who has no place in the university’s hierarchy and should have been extracted shortly after the fall of the Soviet regime. I do not, by any means, claim that this is the norm here in Tartu, but the fact that people such as this remain in power in the university in any capacity is a blight on it’s reputation and credibility as a modern institution of higher learning. Tartu can do better, with all the other wonderful things it has going for it, it really is a shame that this kind thing is still allowed to happen.

We met our new tutors today. My groups’ person is Inga, a student from Tallinn studying for a degree in English. We went for a town tour and closed off the day with pizza. At that point a series of chain events conspired to keep me out until 12.30 in the morning.

I went with Diemo, the German theology student to check on the foreign newspapers. After a couple of hours I left the for the university main building where I met Petter from Bulgaria. He is on his way to Oulu, Finand tomorrow so we said what will probably be our last farewell.

I was with Petter at Rotund when the English speaking crowd came by on their way to a Baroque concert. I joined up with them. It was a good performance, a harpsichord-cello duet. The music was nice, although I did not like the concert hall which is very long and narrow. The performers and audience are seated on the same level. Sitting any farther back than the first three rows made it very difficult to see anything.

After the concert it was back to Rotund and then on to a street dance in front of Kaubahall. There we bumped into three Finnish students whom I had met yesterday. Once the other English speakers left I went to Draakoon with the Finns. It was a lot of fun, of course “one more drink” led us to another bar, this time Zavood.

The strangest part of the night came there with another Finn. She asked me how I had coped in Finland without knowing Finnish. I told her that I had just used the Swedish street signs and so on. She couldn’t understand what difference that would make. She knew that Swedish and German were related but would not accept the fact that English is also a member of the same family. She said that Swedish was no help for her in learning English and could just not see the connection. To confuse the issue even more, she claimed to be a native Swedish speaker. How anyone can look at those languages and say that they are not related is simply beyond me.

29 August 1997
Friday

We got out class schedules today. I am going to be taking 24 hours a week of Estonian language. We start grammar on Tuesday. I checked on theology classes but was a little put off by the fact that I must learn German to study in Tartu, over half the professors in the department being from Germany.

We finished the day at the movies, seeing Addicted to Love with Meg Ryan and Matthew Broderick. Nothing special.

30 August 1997
Saturday

This was a very good day. I went bike riding, and took a sauna here. A lot of fun. I spent the evening writing my first homepage in another language. I now have my very own homepage in the Estonian language.

I love this life I am living.

31 August 1997
Sunday

I went to both St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and the Methodist Church today. As usual, I greatly enjoyed it and even managed to learn a little Estonian. When I came back Raivo helped me edit my homepage and tomorrow I will post my first foreign language composition.

Tomorrow classes begin at the university and I will once again become a student. It is hard to describe exactly how happy I am that school is starting. This has been an exciting and eventful summer that I will always remember, but first and foremost I am a student and I, for some strange reason, love having classes to go to and tests to study for. I guess more than anything, I am happy to have something normal to do.

Next entry: The First Week of School