Second Impressions

Orientation Week

I study at TalTech the biggest university of Estonia with 11.000 students and about 10% international students. Especially this semester there are a lot of new students from Ukraine. Some of their stories are heartbreaking. I couldn’t empathize with them emotionally, because it is unimaginable for me and the level of emotion is out of my scope. Still, I have the feeling they are integrating well in Estonia.

Meeting of international students in the old town

Weather

While in Karlsruhe the temperature can still rise to 28°, the highest temperature in Tallinn is 14°, exactly the half. This is not abnormal since the average temperature in Estonia is 12° in September. I am already wearing my winter jacket on a daily basis, but I have still some more layers left for the months to come. Estonian people love to make jokes about the weather, which is probably a way to deal with the upcoming inescapable cold.

When the window is open for fresh air.

Digitalisation

Digitalisation is everywhere. Without a modern smartphone you can basically not join the daily life here. Digitalisation even reached registering for your pension/retirement home. This is surprisingly, because the median age in Estonia is only 3 years younger than Germany with 42 years. Reasons why this country is so modern? I can only speculate:

Estonia is a young country. It is independent since 1991 and has built its government and infrastructure upon modern ideas. It could let go all the old artefacts of paper and Fax.
It must be modern to keep up. Estonia has no big companies or patents in existing technology, so to sustain they need to be innovative. Coming from a soviet era with Russian standards, the west European standards look so good. The northern Scandinavian countries present how good life can be. You can see western brands everywhere like Adidas, Nike, North Face, Apple, Samsung, Mercedes, BMW. People want to publicly identify them as a modern western society.

delivery robot in the streets of Tallinn waiting for a green light

Soviet Landmarks

In the landscape there are artefacts of the soviet time visible. In the city centre at the sea there are the ruins of an old soviet-Olympic building. It was build for the olympic summer games 1980.