Hello World!

(just a bit of IT humor to start off the year)

Estonian flag as map of Estonia: Stasyan117, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve been in Estonia since the end of August 2022 and arrived here without processing all the challenges I faced during the previous two years. But this is a new year and I’m thinking about being in a new location, where my old patterns of coping don’t really work.  I arrived in Tartu without expectations, and still it has been hard. Learning a new language, failing tests, and navigating a country that relies on being a formal resident with participation in their electronic systems for everything (when I am not) has made me dig dig onto internal and external resources to survive.

Image by -Rita-👩‍🍳 und 📷 mit ❤ from Pixabay

Just being a vegetarian outside of California has been an eye opener. Living in California, I know we have it good, but we have it good because we made it good. Californians have thought about food, cooperatives, health, organics, the planet, air pollution, and how to live on an increasingly fragile planet for decades. During the Summer of Love (1967) there were approximately 3.4 billion people on the planet. Today here are just over 8 billion or more than double since the explosion of living lightly on the planet started in West Coast communities.  In my United States’ circles, we have a saying “the hippies were right.”   Once a fringe movement (for some people not me), the ideas put forth in the late 1960s and 1970s are the ones that if broadly implemented will create a livable planet for humans and other creatures.

I didn’t become a vegetarian until ten years after the Summer of Love, but since I joined the club, I’ve been able to rely on all the great stores focused on vegetarian and vegan lifestyles that arose from West Coast hippie culture. That is until I landed Eestis (in Estonia).

Image by Anemone123 from Pixabay

The teaching and learning methods I grew up with in California and used all through my graduate studies, don’t apply to my language learning classes here. The method seems to be based on first language acquisition instead of second language acquisition.  As someone who grew up outside of Europe, my previous learning methods did not prepare me for Estonian teaching methods. I have had to learn how to be at the literal bottom of the class after a lifetime of being in the top 10% of class without too much effort. I have had to adjust my attitude big time!

Between not eating well and trying to keep up with a class driven by the achievements of medical students in their late teens and early twenties, I was on the path to a melt down.

My classes ended in mid-December. Since then, I’ve been able to re-balance my life, my eating habits and my Estonian language studies.  I’ve visited family in Sweden, am trying to eat better, and continuing to study in a more balanced fashion.

My goal for 2023 is to study and write about Estonian mythology and maybe even learn Estonian!

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay