George Rebane

Yesterday we returned home from a two-week visit to Estonia with our grown daughters.  The trip was a long-anticipated odyssey to introduce them to the other half of their heritage, to let them see and walk in the places about which they have heard from their grandparents and me.  For Jo Ann and me it was our second trip since Estonia regained its freedom in 1991.  The journey had special meaning because it was the first time our ‘core family’ had spent time alone after our girls grew up and went to college more than thirty years ago.  Now in their early 50s they are both mothers of grown children, and one is even a 4-time grandmother.

We all met at SFO – our Southern Tribe lives in the LA area, and the Northern Tribe lives in the Seattle area – and boarded Finnair’s evening transpolar non-stop to Helsinki where we arrived about eleven hours later in the afternoon ready for a good night’s sleep.  (All the Rebanes are tall dudes, and Finnair’s business class sleeping accommodations leave a lot to be desired.)  Upon arrival we were treated to our daily constitutional by hauling our bags about ten miles to the rental car counters located at the other end of Helsinki’s long linear terminal.  Jo Ann, a superb trip planner by any measure, had rented us a large Opel diesel van that had one significant drawback for watashi-ni, the duty driver – a six-speed manual shift.

We packed the van with our gear and made it to a first-class hotel near the Helsinki ferry terminal where we would board the next morning for the two-hour voyage to Estonia’s capital Tallinn.  There we disembarked and drove to a favorite supermarket to load up on a bunch of car-nummies and fat pills for the drive down to Viljandi in southern Estonia where I was born.  We arrived in the late afternoon and checked into the Hotel Grand where Jo Ann and I had stayed the last time.  The hotel was important for our family because my mother (pictured here as she was then) and her friend Rita Põder worked there as waiters in the hotel restaurant after I was born.  Rita, whose own story is also remarkable, weaved in and out of our lives as she and my family escaped from Estonia to Germany before the Red Army’s arrival in 1944.  (The details of all this can be found in the My Story vignettes of our 2008 trip starting here.)

This time we would stay in the hotel for three nights, and have dinner with our old friend, retired surgeon Dr Bruno Põder and his daughter Kirste Skovgaard.  (Our relationship with Rita’s younger brother Bruno is also detailed in My Story.)  Kirste is an educated and erudite woman who is fluent in five languages and is a free-lance professional translator for corporate and institutional clients.  We had a long dinner that lasted into the night catching up and reviewing stories common to both of our families.

Since we last met in 2008, Bruno had learned quite a bit of English, and we discovered that English has now dominated the country as its de facto second language.  Literally every person, especially the younger set, we met was fluent in American English.  Their language education begins in pre-kindergarten and goes through high school.  But due to the overreach of American movies, TV, video games, social media, … every kid speaks colloquial American by their mid-teens.  Need I remind readers that Estonia is probably the most wired country in the world with high quality wi-fi available everywhere, and governmental functions totally delivered online including, by law, the streaming of public meetings.

While in Viljandi, we took ‘the children’ on pilgrimages to my grandparents’ farms, churches where they were confirmed, and even tended my paternal grandparents gravesite, doing a complete weeding and planting new flowers.  Our daughters, connectivity and social media experts par excellence, were busy photographing and videotaping everything, and then posting on various outlets where different groups of friends and family were following our every move and consumption of great dishes.  (They also served as turn-by-turn navigators extraordinaire using their Google downloaded interactive maps, and also promise to make a public page with selected photos which I can link to this piece.)  Estonia is now an established tourist destination with awesome food service that has totally eclipsed the ‘traditional’ Estonian dishes that were prominently offered in 2008.  We all gave a resounding Amen to that change.

Expanding a bit on today’s Estonia, it is a picture postcard western country with everything extremely neat, tidy, maintained, and clean.  My closest country of comparison is Switzerland.  The 1.3M Estonians are comprised of about 70% ethnic Estonians (Finno-Ugrics) with the remainder made up of mostly Russians who were smart enough to stay in Estonia after the USSR collapsed and Estonia re-declared its independence in 1991.  Today Estonia is known for its IT industry, expertise in cyber-warfare, 2+% defense contributing member of NATO, and staunch ally and supporter of US efforts to oppose the world’s bad guys.  For more detail, here is the CIA’s compiled factbook on Estonia.

After completing the tours in and around Viljandi, we debarked to the old university town of Tartu for a two-night stay with a sidetrip to the scenic resort town of Otepää in Estonia’s modest highlands.  Part of the draw was the new National Museum built on one end of a former Soviet air base.  It featured a comprehensive history of the country including its wretched treatment under Soviet occupation.  From Tartu we motored to Pärnu, the country’s fabled beach city which looked like Coney Island on a hot summer day even though the temps never got much above 72F.  The overwhelming number of foreign tourists were from Russia and Finland, which from Helsinki is a day trip by ferry and car.  The available surf leaves much to be desired and reminds Americans of the surf on the Great Lakes.  We stayed there one night after doing the usual haunts in Pärnu’s picturesque central city.

Jo Ann insists that I include a little interlude on a park bench with a couple of gentlemen who appeared to have no visible means of support.  They were discussing the availability of government benefit programs when one looked over to me and asked ‘where you from?’  I answered that I was a tourist from California here for a short visit to their fair city.  Without hesitation, he responded, ‘You’re shittin’ me, right?’  I took this as the most sincere, spontaneous, and unabashed assessment that my Estonian could still pass for that of a native.

The next day took us up to the ferry crossing to Muhu, one of Estonia’s islands.  On that island is Pädaste, a little hidden luxury resort built on the grounds of a meticulously restored and modernized historic plantation situated on the island studded Baltic shore with great views of passages and lagoons.  Jo Ann surprised all of us by having reserved the resort’s unique ‘farm house’ with ancient woodwork and a genuine, perfectly manicured, thatched roof about a foot thick.  The house and its surrounding acre was fenced off, secluded by trees and shrubbery, and reserved for us.  During our two-night stay we visited the island, the ladies did yoga and got thoroughly massaged, and we ate at the resort’s internationally known restaurant.

At one of our meals in the magnificent manor house we were joined by Mr Martin Breuer – owner, hotelier, and restaurateur – for an extended conversation about Estonia’s excellent business environment and his plans for replicating Pädaste in southern Europe.  We had met him during our 2008 stay, and resumed our conversation as if it had continued from the night before.  Mr Breuer is a Hollander who has made Estonia his home because he loves the country and its people.  And wonder of wonders, Martin has also learned what he self-effacingly calls “marketplace Estonian”, a no small feat for an adult to learn a Finno-Ugric language (there are three – Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian) with about 15 cases each.  I hope to have Martin Breuer contribute a byline to these pages in the future.

From Muhu we ferried back to the mainland and on to a four-night stay in the capital Tallinn that would complete our visit.  We took some country roads with GPS firmly in hand trying to find that ridiculously flamboyant field of flowers which we accidentally discovered and photographed in June 2008.  No joy, either it had already bloomed or was now a cultivated field.  But you can confirm our find here.

Jo Ann had reserved our rooms in Tallinn’s Palace Hotel, right across the street from the Old Town and Jaani Kirik (St John’s Church) where my parents were married in 1935.  Everything was within walking distance, and boy did we walk.  As always lots of pictures and lots of retail therapy.  We again had to buy more luggage to haul back the presents and the loot.  Tallinn is overrun with tourists, many of whom are there from the cruise ships tied up in the harbor.  I won’t bore you with all the usual things we saw, did, and where we ate.  BTW, the hotel’s bar café served the most awesomely delicious hamburger and fries I have ever eaten – whoulda thunk?  More on Tallinn here.

Finally, last Sunday it was time to come home.  On Saturday night we had our ‘farewell dinner’ in Old Town at an old Estonian restaurant named Grandma’s Place (Vanaema Juures) eating traditional Estonian fare.  I had my last chance to gab to the waitress in Estonian to clarify some aspect of the restaurant’s history.  The ladies spent the remainder of the evening ramming everything into the now increased number of suitcases.  The next morning we piled into the Opel van for the last time and drove to the harbor where the Tallink operated ferry ‘Star’ took us to Helsinki as we enjoyed our breakfast in the ship’s restaurant (to our delight and the surprise of our Russian waiter, we were the only clients in the very tony establishment) – the ship had many other eating venues and dining options which were appropriately packed.

Upon disembarking we drove through Helsinki to the airport.  Helsinki and Tallinn are worlds apart as far as charm and scenery are concerned, mainly because ice-bound Helsinki was never a busy commercial port as was ice-free Tallinn for the many centuries as the Baltic’s northern most port of the Hanseatic League.  And before boarding Finnair to SFO, we had a final surreptitious and fortunate encounter in the airline’s lounge with a Russian-American high-tech entrepreneur who is the CTO of a specialty micro-chip company designing ASICs and FPGAs for AI applications, located in Silicon Valley, although he prefers to live in San Diego.

He overheard our older daughter (software engineer) and me talking about special hardware now being developed to implement deep learning algorithms, and introduced himself.  The following hour plus got us into an extremely illuminating (to me) conversation about geo-politics.  As an expatriate Russian and now US citizen, his views on what is happening with and in Russia viz China and the West were sober, well-explained, and cast recent events into a more revealing if not a new frame.  I heard nothing that contradicted the general views and interpretations which readers have seen in these commentaries.  What was most interesting to me was his analysis of the factors Putin must consider (and appear to consider) in how he plays off China against the US.  We traded cards, and it would be an added bonus were we to have another such opportunity, say, six months from now.

As we bedded down for the long pursuit of the sun across the North Pole, it occurred to me that according to today’s standards my last hopes for a political career are doomed since I am now on record as having had contact with a Russian, no matter his citizenship, and we did talk of politics and national interests, and (gasp!) even the last election.  Alas Fortuna, why are you so cruel?

But all things considered, this trip was both epochal and wonderful, during which we all had a chance to catch up and cover matters of family, history, childhood memories, and ongoing pursuits while unrushed and in great detail.  Jo Ann and I are blessed with an extraordinarily wonderful family.

[update]  Of the gazillion pictures we all took on the trip, daughter Teine selected some of them for public viewing and posted them here.  You are spared the rest which I'm told are on a private family and friends site where such numbers are not only tolerated, but are considered obligatory viewing as interpreted within our 21st century social contract.