As an American, I'm a bit of an oddity at Tallinn University. A typical round of introductions goes something like this. "I'm John, and I'm from Latvia." "I'm Jane, and I'm from Poland." "I'm Tom, and I'm from Italy." "I'm Katie, and I'm from California." "Wow...." Many haven't really encountered Americans who aren't tourists, and I am frequently asked why on earth I would come here.

The short version- the one I give to most students- is that I've already graduated, but I'm here to study and do research with a grant from the government. This prompts one of two responses, usually. "Ahh, I get it, it's for your CV." Alternately, "Why does the US government care about Estonia?" At that point I explain that it's Cold War-era program designed to broaden American perspectives and to showcase American goodwill abroad. Normally, the subject changes afterwards.

So why did I pick Estonia? Even now, I have a bit of difficulty putting my finger on it. About a year and a half ago, I sat down with a pen and paper to brainstorm Fulbright ideas. I wrote down topics I was generally interested in on one side and places that I had liked from my travels on the other, and started drawing arrows to link entries on the two sides of my paper. Eventually, I put the paper down and thought about what really interested me most from my EU semester. I decided the subject I'd developed the most long-term curiosity for was Russian-Estonian drama and its repercussions. As fate would have it, there was no language requirement, and a former Fulbrighter to the US was writing a book in English on the exact same topic. From that, a proposal was born. Almost as important- I adored Tallinn when I visited.

I haven't yet settled into the core of my research; however, I've observed some things in the last two weeks that I never noticed during my first visit. The first is that, if you know what to listen for, you realize that Russian is all around you- even in the city center. This surprised me, as I had heard that much of the Russian population is confined to the massive Soviet-era apartment complexes along the edges of the city. In many of the tourist shops selling all sorts of authentic, hand-crafted goodies in the Old Town, you'll probably hear the shopkeepers speaking Russian to one another, and, if there's a radio on, it's probably in Russian too. If you speak Russian to them, you'll encounter a look of surprise, and then quite probably a smile. I met some lovely girls from Narva, a border city that is almost entirely ethnically Russian, who were absolutely delighted by the fact that I understood them and came here to research THEIR way of life. I'm happy to hear as much Russian as I do in the university- for a long time, ethnic Russians were barred from the university by default, as classes are only in Estonian, a language that-until recently- many never learned. Their presence shows that many young Russians are integrating more and more into Estonian society, and one of my goals for the year is to figure out what precisely that means for the future of Estonia.

For more information, check out this NPR story.