After spending all weekend with a group of Estonian girls, I’ve decided that Estonian sounds like Dutch, with all the shaped vowels and plenty of k’s, but with an Italian rhythm. The girls were quite pleased with this description.
Although they spent much of the weekend talking Estonian, they took the time to translate key pieces of conversation or just to talk to me about their lives, their work, their taste in music. We took a drive to Saaremaa, the largest island, where Estonians go to chill out in the summer. It had all the fun that road trips entail, and even if I couldn’t understand everything that made them laugh, I enjoyed the antics. Merle put a piece of chocolate on the dashboard while she was driving, then forgot about it when we went to sit on the beach. Not one to waste chocolate, she licked it all up when we got back to the car. A five star hotel that Merle wanted to show us wouldn’t let us look around, so she invented a story that I was a journalist doing a story for an Australian magazine. The cover was picked up by Margit, who decided she was doing a story on toilets on Saaremaa. We agreed that strip clubs were pointless because they gave an increase in dramatic tension but never provided the climax and a happy ending.
We found secluded beaches to sit on, visited churches and walked around a Danish fortress. Unfortunately I’d forgotten my camera for the last, but the highlight was the guesthouse we stayed in on Saturday night. Built up around an old farmhouse, it had two more buildings for guests and a big barbecue area. We had to pay 250 eek (A$25) to use the grill, but it was worth it for the experience of sitting outside nibbling at the remaining salad, drinking Vana Tallinn liqueur as the sun went down after 11pm. The only other guests were a couple of Austrian hunters there to find deer and an animal I hadn’t heard of.