Had a wonderful dinner with the Prime Minister of Estonia tonight.
My Dad, in the middle, grew up with the first President of Estonia, and he escaped on the last boat out of Tallinn in 1944.
Gatherings like this make me proud of my heritage.
(photo by Väino Reinart, Estonian Ambassador to the U.S.)
….Looking at your father…i wonder what you would look like with a beard =) Was the dinner at the Ambassy ? What was the occasion ?
heh…. nice.
PhotonQ: Not sure I can grow one yet… 😉
This was a dinner with a small group of local Estonian enthusiasts (Ross Mayfield, etc.). Ansip had just met with Rice and Cheney and Homeland Security folks, given the recent experiences with Russian cyber attacks. And he came to Silicon Valley to open a new office for Invest in Estonia.
CyberWar. Made a lot of noise on International/Intelligence and geopolitcal news….
But….Now i am connecting…you can say it …what were you doing in China uploading on flickr from Cyber-Café last month =)
"Not sure I can grow one yet… ;-)"
One day you should try a beard competition with Craig Venter ; ) and make a photo of it ….Or with a fake one..could be a funny picture to take…Thinking about for the NewYears picture. We should all be wearing a beard = open to imagination…
Merci for your answer !
Nope, I have no connections with Estonia whatsoever.
It must have been a challenge for somebody like your Dad to transmit an Estonian linguistic and cultural heritage on US soil, and I’m impressed. Given the geopolitical situation in the seventies, Estonian-language TV programmes, reading material and au pair girls for the kids must have been pretty hard to come by in the US (^^;
Estonian looks a lot like Finnish!
Do you know this page with a heap of bizarrely cool old Estonian commercial videos? I remember having looked at it before, about 2 years ago. They are wonderfully retro and weird in a very inspiring way. The music is great, too.
http://www.timeless.ee/?op=body&id=58
Kena isa sul. Ta võiks vabalt olla Michael Kahn-i vend http://www.quicksummer.com/?topic=80
http://www.editorsguild.com/v2/magazine/archives/0106/cover_stor...
schoschie: yes, Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian are from an ancient branch of Finno-Ugric languages, part of the Uralic family. Counting to ten in Finnish and Estonian is remarkably similar.
P.S. Some coverage of the PM’s visit:
"Estonia is a little country with a big goal: to become the Silicon Valley of Europe. It boasts some impressive bona fides: Almost all of the country’s bank transactions take place electronically, the government is paperless and people vote online, and the popular Internet voice service Skype was invented in Estonia…
Estonia is opening an embassy in Silicon Valley and another one in the online world Second Life." (WSJ)
"The prime minister appealed to NATO to retaliate militarily against Russia. He says NATO refused because it could not define cyberwar. ‘I cannot see any big difference between the situation where somebody wants to attack or blockade seaports or air fields of an independent country and when somebody attacks a website of the newspapers or websites of governmental institutions in an independent country." (CBS)
Techcrunch – with photos of the Embassy in Second Life.
Jens…. I have pointed my Dad to your comment and encouraged him to transcribe his memories…
P.S. Andrus and friends participated in a radio interview in the states recently.
I did a short post before end of April, the tension is rising again in Tallinn, maybe not with the outcome like last year. The struggle about the soviet monument. Two letters of Estonians who wanted to escape 1944. My grand uncle made it to Saaremaa. Something happened when the war front arrived. He is missed since then. Others went to Sweden later emigrated to Canada, two letters.
Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Leaders of Earth, and we’d love to have this added to the group!
Leave a Reply to Jens-Olaf Cancel reply