Eastern Europe
Exploring the Hidden Europe in 2004 and 2008-2011
In 2004, I visited all 25 countries in Eastern Europe. You'll find the blog entries from that trip here. In 2008-2011, I returned to see what had changed since that time. With these two visits, five years apart, I accumulated enough material for my 750-page book, The Hidden Europe: What Eastern Europeans Can Teach Us.
This blog now has many excerpts from The Hidden Europe. But who the hell reads anymore? Just look at the best photos from Eastern Europe!
This map reflects how I define Eastern Europe. Eastern Europeans love to deny that they're in Eastern Europe. I tackle how and why I define Eastern Europe the way I do in the Introduction of The Hidden Europe.
Unless you live in the northeast corner of Europe, you probably don't know much about Estonia. So let’s review a few notable facts about this mysterious little country:
- Estonia is small, but it isn’t the smallest country in Europe. It’s bigger than Slovenia, Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland. It’s about the same size as New Hampshire and Massachusetts combined.
- Despite its small size, it feels big because only 1.3 million folks live here. It makes Estonia one of the least dense countries in Europe, with just 32 Estonians per square kilometer.
- Suur Munamägi, at a measly 318 meters (about 1,000 feet), is the tallest mountain in the country.
- Estonia’s relative flatness makes it a great place for Nordic ski training. One Estonian woman won two gold medals in Turino’s 2006 Olympic Winter Games and Estonians bought every pair of skis available at the shops the next day.
- Out of the nearly 200 countries in the world, Estonia ranks number two in adult literacy with its rate of 99.8 percent.
- Estonia’s forests keep getting bigger, perhaps due to the declining population.
- In 1990, there were 22,304 babies born; today it’s almost half that amount. With the death rate increasing slightly, you can understand why the Estonian population is declining.
- Only 46 percent of the population is male. However, before you single men book a flight to Estonia consider that the main reason for this disparity is that the men die off quickly—their average life expectancy is only 65 years.
- Estonia is the most libertarian country in the world, according to The State of the World Liberty Project.
- Estonia adopted the euro on January 1, 2011 with its government finances in better shape than all the other countries in the euro zone!
Estonia capital, Tallinn has Eastern Europe's quaintest and most adorable Old Town. Go visit!
This is an excerpt from The Hidden Europe that got edited down substantially. I originally wrote this article for ezinearticles.com. Learn more about what we can learn from Eastern Europeans. If you don't think Estonia is in Eastern Europe, read the Introduction to The Hidden Europe.
In 2004 and 2008-2011, I traveled throughout Eastern Europe to write my 2nd book, The Hidden Europe: What Eastern Europeans Can Teach Us. The book includes 60 photos. This page lets you download those 60 photos as well as see several more photos that don't appear in the book.
Download the 60 photos from The Hidden Europe
To see the 60 photos that are in the book, download one of these three formats and then see them in your favorite ebook reader:
- PDF: Viewable on all PCs.
- ePub: Viewable on all ebook readers except the Kindle. Just download the file and import it into your ereader.
- mobi: For Kindle users (download and import via USB, see below).
Read this if you have a Kindle: When you buy the Kindle version of The Hidden Europe through Amazon's website, photos are not included because Amazon charges publishers by the megabyte whenever they deliver a Kindle book (other ebook stores don't do this). Had I put 60 photos into the Amazon book, I'd make pennies on each book. To get around that problem while still letting you see the photos that appear in the hardcover version, we're making the photos freely available here. All you have to do is download the .mobi photo file and then import it into your Kindle (follow the USB instructions to do it for free).
The 50 best photos from Eastern Europe
The 60 photos that appear in the book aren't my best photos from Eastern Europe. Why not? Because I preferred putting photos of some of the people that I met or other photos that readers of the book would appreciate.
But what if you just want to see pretty photos from Eastern Europe? Below are my 50 favorite ones. Only a few of them made it into the book.
Step into Dubrovnik and the rest of Eastern Europe....
In the southwest corner of Finland is one of Europe's oddest places: the Ahvenanmaa archipelago (Åland in Swedish). It has about 6,500 islands (about 80 are inhabited). Ahvenanmaa is roughly between the Swedish mainland and the Finnish mainland, but it officially belongs to Finland. But you wouldn't know it when you visit.
That's because if you want to speak Finnish on this Finnish island, then you should take a boat back to the Finnish mainland. We only speak Swedish in this part of Finland.
How did this turn out? In 1921, the League of Nations (the precursor to the UN) said that these islands belong to Finland. However, the island’s inhabitants lobbied the Finnish Parliament to pass the Autonomy Act in 1951 (and amended it in 1993), which granted this archipelago unusual independence:
- Tallinn, Estonia Tour - Bronze Soldier and Old Town
- The World's Most Dangerous and Extreme Backpacking
- Slovenia and Crveni Vrh, Croatia
- Western Russia
- Excitement in Estonia
- Anal Austrians
- Miseries in Minsk
- Bomb Damage in Bosnia-Hercegovina
- Braving Bulgaria
- Cavorting Croatia
- Cruising the Czech Republic
- Fun in Finland
- Hooking up with a Hawaiian in Hungary
- Camping in Kosovo
- Lost in Latvia
- Loving Lithuania
- Mixed up in Macedonia
- Marauding Moldova
- Moving to Montenegro
- A Promenade through Poland
Your comment will be deleted if:
- It doesn't add value. (So don't just say, "Nice post!")
- You use a fake name, like "Cheap Hotels."
- You embed a self-serving link in your comment.
