Tere, Eesti!

Tere! Tere! Tere!

They say “Tere!” a lot in Estonia. They say it when you arrive in the airport in Tallinn, they say it when you go through passport control, they say it when you get into a taxi, or enter a shop/restaurant/coffee shop. This is perhaps not terribly surprising when armed with the knowledge that “tere!” means “hello!”, but it’s strange how unaware you tend to be of the number of times people say something in any given day until it’s the only word you actually know and recognise. Then it just sounds like it’s the only thing anyone is saying, ever. “Get some new words!” you feel like screaming, completely oblivious to the fact that the strings of rapid-paced vowel sounds being casually spouted all around you are, in fact, words.

And they don’t just say “tere”, either, in a what would be a very convenient “everything is pronounced exactly as it’s spelt” manner. They pronounce it “ted-day”, rolling the ‘r’ in quite a sexy, Spanish-sounding kind of way. This caught me somewhat off-guard in my enthusiastic “I’m going to speak every language in every country”, particularly as I didn’t expect to hear it before leaving Dublin. “Tere!” said the flight attendant to the person in front of me as we were boarding the plane. “Tere!” replied the person in front of me. “Tere!” said the flight attendant to me. At the last possible second before my bewilderment at all this apparent teddy-talk became undisguisable, my brain caught up with what was going on. “Tere!” I exclaimed suddenly, a little over-dramatically. The flight attendant looked startled at my jubilance, and I hurriedly moved along the aisle.

Estonian is a tricky language, but I’m determined. It is this determination that made my flight here extremely uncomfortable, as I picked up one of the free newspapers in an attempt to soak in as much of the language as possible and fool my brain into thinking it could learn it without exploding in a confused mess. Of course, seeing people reading newspapers turned out to be the flight attendants’ easiest method of identifying which passengers were Estonian-speaking, and which were English-speaking. This meant that I was spoken to in Estonian for the duration of the flight, despite only just having worked out the whole “tere!” thing. In the end, I curled up to go to sleep, so that I wouldn’t have to keep pretending to understand what they were saying to me. I saw people around me requesting pillows. My neck was sore. I would have liked a pillow.

However, I could not ask for one. Asking for a pillow would have meant speaking in English to the flight attendants who thought I was Estonian. I would have let myself down a bagful, and Ireland not even out of sight yet! No, that wouldn’t do at all. And so it was that I slept for a large part of the three-hour flight with my head balanced most uncomfortably on a metal armrest.

My back and neck have been decidedly stiff ever since, but at least those flight attendants don’t know I’m a Fake Estonian.