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A View of Estonian Life |
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A View of Estonian Life |
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Jim completed a two-week road trip to Poland and Slovakia with our younger son Jay in late September. The main purpose was to visit with colleagues in Poland and attend a geology conference in the Tatra Mountains of Slovakia and Poland. As expected, the driving conditions through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were relatively good. Conditions deteriorated significantly in Poland, however. We saw on average one accident per day including head-on, roll-over and rear-end collisions. One unfortunate driver ran into a police car at a busy intersection in Warsaw, and we came on a car-train accident in Slovakia. We were happy to return to Estonia without any such incidents ourself. We spent anywhere from 10 minutes to one hour at each of several border crossings. We were relatively lucky, as we know border crossings can sometimes take 9-12 hours.
The Indian summer (old woman's summer here) was beautiful in late September and early October. Now we're well into autumn. Trees are bare, the sun is low, and daylight is becoming noticably short. This is the season of burning. In the city, piles of leaves smolder day and night, while in the countryside crop residues are gathered up and set afire. The combination of hazy air and long shadows brought an end to our efforts to acquire kite aerial photographs. Our results can be seen online--check "latest addition" at http://www.geospectra.net/kite/estonia/estonia.htm.
Susie and our older son, Jeremy, have made substantial additions to our life in Estonia webpage. Jim gave a series of lectures at the geology institute of the University of Tartu and to the Tartu Observatory. The latter boasts the largest telescope in northern Europe, and we had a private tour of the telescope and its dome. We have become fascinated with peat bogs, of which Estonia has many. We have visited large and small ones. Many are protected in national parks or nature reserves; some are mined commercially. Peat is used for agriculture and energy. Peat has long been utilized as a low-grade fossil fuel, but that use is declining here. Estonia relies mainly on oil shale, which is a relatively clean fuel for heating water and generating electricity.
Since the central heating system was turned on in early October, our apartment has been quite warm. In fact, we sometimes have to open a window to prevent overheating; we have no other way to regulate the temperature. In smaller homes, many people burn wood for heating, and most houses have huge piles of wood ready for the coming winter.
Jeremy just returned from a two-day trip into Russia in connection with the Baltic Studies program. Upon return, he said "it was an experience." He visited Novgorod, the historical capital of northwestern Russia. Novgorod was a thriving city with connections to the Hanseatic League, when Moscow was just a village. The Hanseatic connection was across Estonia from the Baltic seaport of Pärnu, to Lake Peipsi, and eastward. This route followed a series of lakes and rivers that drained westward to the Baltic. Tartu grew up as an important trading center on this route. However, the river connection was interrupted when crustal tilting caused a reversal in river flow eastward to Lake Peipsi about five centuries ago. Western Estonia is rising at 2 mm per year, while southeastern Estonia is sinking. Many former villages and churches in southern Lake Peipsi vicinity are now submerged because of tilting of the lake basin. These slow changes in geography are brought about by continuing rebound, as the crust recovers from being depressed under an ice sheet more than 10,000 years ago.
Meanwhile, Jay has just departed for a five-day trip to Moscow in the company of a local school group. Susie and Jim visited the Soviet Union in the early 1980s and have many memories. The boys will certainly appreciate the modernity of Estonia after seeing Russia!
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