330am comes earlier everyday...
...because thats when the sun comes up. so we have had the busiest three days ive ever been through. ill start with school on monday. we got up at 8am after 4 or so hours of sleep and had some breakfast. we then walked to the university of tallinn for our first lecture with one of the key economic advisors to the estonian government, Dr. Urmas Varblane. it was interesting to hear how other countries are playing their cards during this economic crisis. more on that later as i have had about 4 other lectures on the same thing. that afternoon we took bus to do our first company tour; the Kalev chocolate factory. yea tons of fun for diabetics. anyway that was fairly interesting to actually get to see a start to finish production process after i had been studying that for a few years. we then did a walking tour of the old town in tallinn followed immediately by a welcome dinner (picture below). i can say that i have tried traditional estonia food and now be done with it. so next
on tuesday we got up and took a visit to the European Commission (the governing body of the EU) and head a lecture from the Head of the Commission, His Excellance Toivo Klaar. this was also on the present and future of estonia's economy and also about their proposed switch to the euro. our next lecture was at the university and was given by Mr. Aavo Kokk, former estonian daily paper editor and currently the top advisor on economic restructuring. that afternoon we did our company visit to ABB Estonia. ABB is one of the most impressive companies i have ever seen and if you have never heard of it google ABB. anyway enough of the boring crap......that night we had dinner at a little italian restaurant on the square, and then john, thomas and i all did a little shuffle around old town. we stumbled upon a depeche mode bar, a terrible english band from the 90s that apparently has a huge following in estonia. obviously we had to go in and it did not dissappoint. every depeche mode concert flyer ever plus the constant flow of terrible depeche mode songs made for about 30 minutes of entertainment. after that we came across the lone star texas bar where we enjoyed some chips and cheese dip and a couple of san miguels (which are from spain and made absolutely no sense why they would be in a texas bar). wednesday is still in progress here, so i will post about that tomorrow, but just know that i took both of the pictures below today and i did walk between both sites. twice. for now we are all of to the nameto baar (which means bar with no-name in estonian) to watch the champions league soccer final on a big screen. hope everyone is well and hopefully we will get an interesting video out of tonight.
posted by Graham Potter @ 9:46:00 AM
