First Impressions

 

It has been 4 days since I have arrived in Tallinn, a lot happened. The dorm I live in is crazy. Imagine, they put 60 young monkeys on one floor. That’s our floor, but with people. All from different countries, with an urgent will to party and no willingness to do the household. Its wild. Because we share our bedroom there is no escape from the monkey cage. On the other hand, there is always someone to help, to play or to share a meal.

Tallinn itself is an interesting city. The people give their best to make it the best city in the world, you can feel that. The organization of buses, tickets, paperwork,.. are all easy and just the way it should be. My university called TalTech has the same spirit as the city, super well organized, lots of information sharing, huge offer of events, activities, student groups, sport. I can write more about it in a few weeks.

 Probably the most innovative thing they do here is digitalisation. And it works. For a small country with 1.3mio inhabitants it offers impressing technology. At university there is a store without personal. You just go in, grab what you want and leave. The bill is created by cameras tracking what you buy and take of the money from your credit card the moment you leave the store. It feels unreal. Comparing It to other countries you could say it has the modern technology of the Netherlands, the order and organisation of Germany, but is still an eastern country. The minimum wage is not even 4Euro and you can see big soviet housing blocks all over the city.

For having a low average wage of about 1.400Euro the prices are high. A meal at the cafeteria is 5 to 6Euro. Food at the supermarket is a little bit higher and a beer at the pub is 4Euro. So, in general prices are somewhat higher than in Germany. What makes me wonder, how do these people survive. Or on the other side, what luxury life can we have (In Germany the average wage is about 4.100Euro)

Speaking of luxury, today we got free food at university. It tasted so good. It was like a welcome party. Of course, some people ate until stomach-ache. At least I didn’t have dinner this evening. For the beer we haven’t yet found the best one. We are trying everything, sometimes suffer and sometimes not. Soon I will give an update about the beers.

University starts on Monday. I changed almost all courses because they were all overlapping. Soon I can also write about Estonian study life.