The change in six weeks

Flamingos of language

Estonia and Ukraine. In general our countries are not considered to be similar - at least we Estonians don't think that we have much in common with Ukrainians. We see Ukrainian people rather as warm temperamented slavic people who are similar to Russians. However, the recent history has brought us more together.

I spent my  January and February in Ukraine, mostly in Ivano-Frankivsk but visited also some other areas. Ukrainian people I met were sometimes quite worried about me and some other foreigners as they found Ukraine to be much more dangerous than some other European countries. My experience says the opposite - I really met (I would even say extremely) friendly people and got a lot of help when needed!

For example: I was on the bus from Sevastopol to Simferopol on Crimea peninsula and in was raining outside; and also inside as the roof hatch was broken and couldn't be closed. And I sat exactly under the hatch... But I didn't have to suffer for a long time as a lady from the last srow gave me her umbrella and so I sat in the bus under umbrella. Now I'm only sad I didn't take a picture of this moment.

For me it was very unexpected to discover that Estonians and Ukrainians have so similar situation with the language. In my country we have 70% of Estonian-speaking and 30% of Russian-speaking people, in Ukraine it's exactly on the contrary. As a result, we are both afraid that our language is going to disappear. Before going to Ukraine I didn't know that they have so many Russian-speaking people and therefore it was  really surprise for me to discover that although our population is like small green pea and their's is like a huge watermelon, we have practically the same situation.

I also felt something interesting inside myself. Until now I had seen Estonian and Russian languages rather as symbols. I have nothing against Russian-speaking people in Estonia but I still feel some patriotism inside me and feel that they should be able to speak Estonian as they live here. But during those six weeks in Ukraine, I felt that Russian language (and whatever other language) is just a tool, a tool to communicate with people. So I got a lot of motivation and decided to grind my Russian to come out from the closet saying proudly "My dear family and friends, I can speak Russian!". To achieve my goal I found a girl through a language course to talk in Russian and started to learn typing on Russian keyboard (it really makes me feel that my brain is going to explode but I like this feeling how my brain is enlarging).