Greetings from Estonia, northern-most of the three Baltic Republics (the other two are Latvia and Lithuania). The trip by SuperSeaCat across the Gulf of Finland was smooth and uneventful, we rode in comfortable airline-type chairs and our bus with our luggage came with us. In fact the crossing was so uneventful that several of us took naps.
The older parts of Tallinn, Estonia's capital, has very much the look of an old European city. The new, modern parts look like they could be anywhere in the developed world. The Estonian language is closely related to Finnish, and more distantly related to Hungarian, all three are not Indo-European languages but members of a cluster called Finno-Ugric languages that arose in the northern Ural Mountains.
One observation concerning both Finland and Estonia: the long-stemmed blond young woman is alive and thriving here. The weather is warm and as a consequence these attractive people are lightly clothed. All in all, they are a very decorative aspect of the local scene. I wonder if the famous-for-15-minutes Paris Hilton's relatives come from Estonia? In the last 24 hours I've seen 3 young women with her face, more than I'd see in a year in the States.
Our Russian guides say all the dislike is on the Estonian side, that folks in Russia care little about this tiny country one way or the other. I suspect, however, that the roughly 25% of Estonia's population that is ethnically Russian care a great deal and don't much like their adopted homeland's rejection of its fifty-year Soviet past.
