And so it begins.

I've been doing a lot of thinking recently--of what I do, of what I want to be doing, where I want to go, who I want to spend time with.  What is happiness, what brings me joy, and of those things, how I can produce something--not passively enjoy the work of others, but actual create new things out of my passions.  There are quite a few travel blogs out there--not to say I couldn't do that, but it would be a big risk, a lot of work, and might not work out--so I started thinking: of the activities I enjoy doing, how can I do them from New York, on the side, while keeping my day job, at least for now.  I love to travel, and daydream of new places and cultures all the time; I also love to read, novels, cookbooks, memoirs, nonfiction, blogs, you name it.  So where do these things overlap?  What if I made a list of all the countries in the world (and principalities/colonies/whatever you call these places like Greenland and Bermuda that I want to go to/have gone to but don't have seats at the U.N.) and not only start to research where I want to go next, but what if for all of those countries, I read a book by an author from that country to get some insight into the culture and history.  If I can't go there, I can at least experience it through someone else's eyes.

Since I read a book each from Norway and Iceland before I went, I decided that Scandinavia would be first up, and then I somehow got from there to Estonia.  So Estonia it is--I'm about halfway through Purge by Sofi Oksanen.  Once I'm done, I'll write up a post talking about both the book and the country, maybe pulling from a little internet research.  This is going to be a work in progress, though, so it may evolve as I go.

So, let's go!

Tallinn, the capital of Estonia