travel

Eesti

Eesti, Estonia, a country forever cursed with a name not dissimilar to that of its close neighbours. Is it Estonia or Lithuania? Or ist Latvia? One of the Baltic estates, anyway.

A well-known low-cost airline started running a new route between Stansted and Tallin, in Estonia, not long ago. For less than the price of a return coach ticket from London to Edinburgh we can now have a city-break in a country which most of us would struggle to accurately locate on a map.

Why do it? Exoticism for the masses. The experience of the other on the cheap. Or maybe because Tallin is said to have the best nightlife scene in the whole of  northern Europe. I too fell pray of the low-cost airline curse and boarded a flight to Estonia. I intended to find some signs of identity which would allow me to say that I had been to Estonia, and not just one of the Baltic Estates.

What I found was a country precariously straddling between its fresh EU member status and the omni-present legacy of the Soviet era. I found a welcoming country, with welcoming and proud people, who had that edge of naivety which you know will not last for long.