Welcome to Estonia

"Well, isn' it ironic, don' You think?" One day before I left, my professor gave me his new book about Estonia: Estonia, the New EU Economy: Building a Baltic Miracle? I haven't had a chance to read it yet (left it to UK), but the title sounds very (maybe a bit too) challenging. Building a miracle? Are You sure? If so, I have reasons to believe that we are very far from that miracle and that we need to put a lot of effort into that holy cause.

Why is that? Ok, take my first hour in Estonia. I'll leave all the destroyed roads in Tallinn aside and focus on a little incident that awaited me in one of Tallinn's biggest hospitals'. Since I had to have a tonsil operation this Monday (write about it a bit later, when the experience has settled in), I had to give a blood test prior to that. I chose to give it in the abovementioned hospital for reasons of convenience and because it's the main emergency hospital in Tallinn. The reception I got there was really awful: in the reception I met a person that completely changed my perception of a dumb bureaucrat. She gave me every reason to hate her and by the end of our five-minute conversation (felt useless to argue with her for a longer time), I felt that I should really write about this experience. So what happened? Basically she tried to avoid every reason to give me the blood test saying that she would have to find me a doctor etc. Well hello, isn't it her job to find me a doctor? Isn't it her job to help me instead of telling me how stupid am I? Haven't really met such a case of "powerful bureaucrat" in my life. Hope someday she will figure out that her job is to help me, because if I wouldn't be there, so wouldn't she. And what about telling me not to chew a chewing gum during our talk. Who is she? Why is she telling me such kind of things? I really do not understand...

But then again with a few exceptions Estonia is good. Friends, family and even the snow that I can see from my window looks nice from a distance. It's probably due to the fact that I haven't had the chance to 'enjoy' it the whole winter...

Still, my main question is about the signals we are transmitting and the message they contain. What are we trying to say, when we publish books about miracles and then again expose signs of total ignorance and underdevelopment? We need much more understanding and an effort to show that we are really trying to be a miracle, not leave it up to others to think so.