Tallinn, End of Week 1.

Explanation

For a while now for various reasons I have been dissatisfied with Sydney, Australia as a place to live. I'm well aware that a large majority of people already lose me there. Hang on, Sydney? Sunshine? Beaches? Beautiful, friendly people? Laid back inhabitants who would as soon look at you as buy you a beer? What's not to like?

When I tell them instead I'm moving to Tallinn, Estonia I get a few different kinds of responses. More often than not the response is confusion, being a country of barely 1.3 million people, the vast majority of people simply don't actually know that it exists. When a person is familiar with the place however, they're equally confused, but for different reasons; Why would you want to move to a cold, bleak ex-soviet backwater peopled primarily by dour faced reserved ice queens where the typical annual salary does not break a third of that in your home country? The most interesting response to me has been people that are familiar with both Tallinn and myself, quickly it'll be something like;

"Ahh, yes, I think you'll love it there"

With greater or lesser cautioning to figure out that I really know what I'm in for beforehand.

I've lived in Sydney for most of my thirty years of life, I'm intimately familiar with the culture and the personalities that it tends to generate, the political situation, the typical business attitudes that prevail, and every last little drawback it is probably possible to be aware of.

Internationally speaking, Sydney has an excellent reputation. The reasons I've already gone over and also what I believe to be an extensive focus upon a thin veneer of gloss gives Sydney an appearance that particularly shines at first glance. Most people would rather bleed than be rude to your face there, the laid back attitude is not just hype, but I've come to believe over time that it's mostly apathy dressed up as nonchalance.

Sydney has a very superficial / sales focused structure that is very much about appearances, I read a newspaper article a while ago commenting on hordes of gym toned bodies in their expensive clothing and cars sitting on some inefficient road somewhere barely breaking 10km/h on the daily commute to and from an office where they could mostly sit the day and look pretty / engage in watercooler babble in exchange for their paycheques. What you achieve is not so important than how you go about achieving it and how you look whilst achieving it.

It's a harsh sentence, and to be fair like everything else, it's not entirely true, I have loved Sydney much of my life, there are most certainly upsides to being focused as such, and if my impression of the vast gamut of humanity is anything to go by, I do indeed think that most people would be ecstatically happy with such an environment. I however have always been something of a stranger there, and as such have always been searching for a place that fit a hacker's soul.

Enter Tallinn.

If Sydney is a culture of gloss, Tallinn as I see it is a culture of substance, there is a social acceptance and focus that actually accomplishing things is much more important than how one appears whilst accomplishing them, women who by Sydney standards would be considered extremely glamorously attractive and might not ever have to do more professionally than being an executive assistant or some other low impact surface focused job I have seen at meetups entirely focused on the finer points of software development. Not only this, but they were engaged and interested and asking questions just like everyone else, and noone seemed to think that this was out of the ordinary at all.

On that exact same subject, technology is not something to be quickly glossed over and a huge episode made of the sales process after the fact, even from my brief professional interactions here, it is apparent that the product actually matters.

People here are not necessarily cloistered so much as they respect your privacy, I have had to ask a fair few general knowledge questions since arriving and had nothing but polite responses all around, but at the same time I have tried to adjust to some extremely poor situations based around my initial misunderstandings about the way things work here, my utter helplessness being quite obvious to anyone passing me by. However, critically; no one took it upon themselves to intrude upon me, helpfully or otherwise.

Critically for me at least, it is also one of the least religious places in the world. I strongly believe that religion and respect for religion breeds ignorance and mental decrepitude, Estonia is a good petri dish for testing this theory.

The cost of living is much lower and the quality of accommodation is much higher, I am currently living in a modern apartment with all amenities, internet, cable television, dead center of the city for the low sum of $530 AUD per month. The same setup without internet or cable television in Sydney would run easily north of five times that much. The quality of the internet connection is such that it could simply not be had in Sydney for any consumer accessible price, I have completely unlimited net on a DSL2 link for $40 AUD per month, the cable television package came entirely for free.

It's currently -9C, and outside my window I can see snow falling. This may petrify some but for me it's perfect. I cannot stand heat; I do not tan, I go straight from snow white to beet red, and walking even short distances in Sydney temperatures results in very uncomfortable body temperatures and exhaustion. I have been in Tallin now for five days, every single one of these days I have walked at least three km, with absolutely none of the ill effects I am accustomed to from such activity.

Although I've not had to deal with this particular aspect of life yet, it was a prime reason for my relocation, taxes here run a flat 18%, whereas in Sydney they very quickly graduate to the maximum 47.5% Once again an extremely large difference.

So, now that I've explained the reasons for my decision, this will be the first in a series of posts with regards to my experiences living in Tallinn, the series will be at least twelve episodes long, as that's the time I have booked my return tickets to Sydney and must decide if the experiment was a success or a failure, and if I stay or return to Sydney.

Day 1: Arrival

First step, organising the apartment, I had already corresponded extensively with the agent in advance in Sydney with the plan being to instantly settle into my new apartment as soon as I arrived, amusingly the first thing I did when I entered was try to pay my landlord and the real estate agent for the apartment, as after thirty hours in flight I wanted nothing more than to sleep for a year.

The reaction to my insistence at thrusting cash toward them was both amusing and educational, the real estate agent insisted on actually showing all the parts of the property, as if we had not already made the deal in advance, the landlord wanted to sit me down and draw out the exact itemised details of my account and draw attention to the neatly stacked pile of instruction manuals for all the appliances that came with the apartment. It was clear that they had a very set idea of how this should go down and my desire for sleep would not intrude upon that.

After having been subjected to the lengthy introductory process and signing the appropriate forms in duplicate, getting extensive lessons on how to turn the key in the front door and monitor my water and electricity usage, Rob, a friend of mine who had initially proposed Tallinn as a potential destination that addressed all my pain points with Sydney who has lived here for some time insisted that we go to the local shopping complex in order to sort out essentials, as my luggage had been lost in Paris on the flight over from Sydney, so I had little more than the clothes on my back.

Rob and his wife Triin dragged me half asleep to the local supermarket and we setup a prepaid mobile phone account for me, $25 AUD for 2gb prepaid 3g internet. This sounded like a really good deal at the time through my sleep induced haze, and to be fair it actually was. The problems only manifested when it stopped working the next day and I was introduced to the soviet "Rule is rule" mentality posessed of EMT Estonia's employees. But that's for tomorrow.

I grabbed a few more essentials and headed home, collapsing onto my bed after thanking Rob and Triin for their asisstance. I woke early the next morning and wandered the city from 3am to 7am, photographing everything that caught my eye, of which there were many things.

Day 2: Orientation

As I mentioned before my luggage had been lost in Paris on the way over so I was left with trying to sort out the washing machine, I've never been a particularly domestic person, but due to the fact that my landlord had so kindly provided me with exhaustive manuals for every single appliance in the abode, my hopes were high.

Unfortunately it quickly became apparent just how unfounded that optimism was, as I am not able to read either Russian or Estonian, which were the only two languages for most of the appliances in the apartment. Hell, I'm a technical person, I can figure this out, right? An hour later, I gave up and called the landlord, two minutes later his explanation had me going and my washing machine woes were sorted.

I felt just a touch of sympathy at this point for people who maybe couldn't figure out a user interaction I'd designed into some software.

I got a call from the airport sounding happy to tell me that my luggage had left Paris, but his tone immediately shifted into a concerned note when he mentioend that it had somehow managed to be held up in Stockholm and would be delayed another six hours, and I could expect it about 10pm that evening. As I already had clean clothes at this stage I was no longer too concerned, but this is a good cautionary tale for making sure that one's luggage is extremely well marked at all times I suppose.

First time grocery shopping, the first thing I notice is how much less expensive food is here than back in Sydney, I got 1.5kg worth of Salmon for under $20AUD, my entire shopping trip cost less than $100AUD and should cover me for the next week and a half at least. I am duly impressed with how economical their food arrangements are, but a little concerned that it might prove to be unpalatable at such a price.

This turns out to be completely unfounded as I can say without a shred of doubt that the quality of the food here leaves store bought economical food in Sydney for dead, the milk, fruit juice, meat, bread all taste extremely flavourful, I don't know what they put in this stuff but I hope they keep doing it.

My first brush with the unwillingness of the locals to intrude upon ones obviously bad choices ensues post my first shopping trip, here you buy bags yourself and load the groceries you purchase into those bags rather than the Sydney way where the groceries are bagged appropriately by the checkout staff as you check items out individually.

I wasn't sure exactly what to do here, but I made a critical assumption which turned out to be very wrong; Surely if I am doing the wrong thing, the checkout staff member will simply stop me and tell me what I'm doing wrong. That being my safety net I proceeded to just load the groceries into the bag, trying to do obvious stuff like keep the eggs and bread on top. It became quickly apparent that there was no way in hell that all these groceries were to fit in a single bag so I asked for some more.

I had noticed the staff member surreptitiously stealing glances at my activities, but no facial expression changes and certainly no vocalisations were actually made and so I assumed that everything was ok. After she had handed me another bag to fill up, I managed to fit everything into the bags and set off back home. I think I got about a hundred meters before the plastic started to tear, and the remaining three hundred meters home I had to stop every fifty meters to dig my fingers into knotted remnants of plastic that remained of the top part of the bags.

Fortunately the bottoms held and the content did not spill, mission accomplished, lesson learned, do not assume that anyone will tell you you're doing the wrong thing here. Payoff was the aforementioned cheap and excellent dinner, Salmon, mushrooms and egg in white wine.

Day 3: Work

I set up my workstation and proceed to get into my grails coding projects, this day proceeded as well as expected and largely uneventfully with the exception that I now realise just how much I had taken my previous setup for granted, my performance is extremely reduced by not having the ability to work with two monitors at once and I'll need to sort this out as soon as it's possible to afford another monitor, it looks like my options for this are much the same as back in Sydney, 230$ for a 1920x1080 21" monitor.

So, not *everything* is cheaper here. The rest of the month working on a single monitor is going to teach me to make sure I never have to deal with this particular situation again.

Day 4: Agile Estonia conference

Oliver from Aqris who I had contacted via the grails firms directory when I had decided to make my trip out here had invited me to a conference on agile software development methodologies, this was the first indication I had that my suspicions about fitting in here better than back home would come to fruition, the talks focused entirely on implementation details and justification, one of them actually made a heartfelt call to employing the scientific method in the pursuit of software development especially and is one of the best presentations I had seen in some time.

I made a few new contacts amongst the attendees of the conference and left happy. I walked out onto the nearest main road and waited for a cab to come by hoping to flag it down on the way, however this didn't happen and after about a half hour I was beginning to think that perhaps it wouldn't. I stopped a person and asked what the story was and they informed me that if I wanted a cab I'd need to call one, This was unfortunate as because of the aforementioned failure on the EMT service, I was unable to do so.

I walked another two hours following whatever I thought was interesting, snapping happy shots of multifoot long razor sharp icicles hanging from warehouses, snow decked pineleaf windowsills and an extremely pale ghost grey cat with no collar and piercing arctic blue eyes. I came upon a tram track heading in the same direction as I wanted to go and took the first tram out, 2.50$ later I was back 50 meters from home.

Stay or Go?

So far, definitely want to stay.

Disappoinments

EMT mobile for cutting me off a day after purchasing their prepaid plan, twice acknowledging via service calls that the disconnection was a mistake and ensuring me that it would be rectified within the next day, and twice failing to do so.

Positives

Everything else, even the episode with the groceries was a concrete example of just how much freedom I had to do as I pleased without the interference of anyone else, even if perhaps it was in a way that didn't turn out as well as it could have. The quality of the food has been the most obvious unanticipated advantage however, I am living more healthy than I have in as long as I can remember just because healthy food tastes plenty good enough that I have no desire to eat otherwise. I don't shy away from physical activity anymore as well, as I know it will feel good and I will see interesting things, the health benefits overall even in just this small window have been very eye opening and in a way that I hadn't foreseen.