I’ll be keeping a diary/journal of my adventures and publishing it online in much same way as my Iceland adventures…

You gonna opt for the dorm or the outhouse?

Anyway, I never realized how lucky I am until I read this. I don’t have to go on vacation to work my butt off and live in substandard conditions.

Seriously, I hope you have a great time.

Re: Sounds amazing

I managed to find a teach yourself Estonian CD-ROM from here, to try and get some smattering of the language. I’ll try, but there’s this from the Lonely Planet guide…

The local [language is] Estonian. Basic English is widely spoken in hotels and shops, but in general only the best educated and those at higher levels in tourism have conersational English.

The one language that nearly everyone understands throughout the regiion is Russian. But Estonians […] have little fondness for the tongue of their former imperial rulers and can be touchy about being addressed in Russian. If you do know some Russian it’s advisable to make the attempt to communicate in some other language first – try English, and if that doesn’t work then say you don’t speak Estonian and ask if the other person understands Russian.

…and then later…

Estonian belongs to the Baltic-Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages. It’s closely related to Finnish and, distantly, to Hungarian. The complex grammar of Estonian make it a difficult languageto learn – try your luck with 14 cases, declining adjectives and no future tense. Added to this is a vocabulary with no link to any other language outside its own group, save recent borrowings.

[…]

You’re unlikely to pick up more than a smattering of Estonian in a short visit, but knowing a few basic words and phrases will go down well with the people you meet. For trivia buffs, Estonia boasts the word with the most consecutively repeated vowel: jäääär, which means ‘edge of ice’.

I have always been fascinated by the Baltic countries since I was looking through an old set of encyclopedias as a teenager and found a section about them.

When I asked my parents about it they told me they no longer existed as they were “taken over by Russia” (not a direct quote, but the kind of thing they said; this was the mid-80’s after all).

So to me it’s totally fantastic that they even exist again, let alone that you have the chance to visit there and help in the conservation of the place.