An Introduction

When I finished settling into my new room on my first day at Turku University, my head and judgement still woozy with jet lag and a cold, I registered this blog. The next day, I got swept away by the maelstrom of registration, exploration, and rampant socializing that mark an exchange semester, and no posts ever materialized.

Nearly a year later, I've found myself at a point where procrastination means reflection, introspection, and writing to the internet, instead of working on a thesis. Now's the time for new habits, good and bad, and perhaps this blog will be one of them.

I am an American who has spent two and a half years in Europe, mostly in Estonia, but also in Finland and Germany. God willing (and the creek don't rise), I'll be moving to Berlin in a few weeks, and finding a way to take advantage of my confusingly vague, yet oddly specific Master's degree (more on that later). If my dreams come to fruition, I will become too busy to spend much time in front of the computer, much less maintain a blog. If things come to pass the way they always do, (as the late Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin said, "Whatever organization we try to create, it always ends up looking like the Communist party," as well as, "it has never been like this, and now it is exactly the same again,") I'll have plenty of time to work on this project.

This blog will mainly feature observations and reflections on ex-pat life along the Baltic Rim, travel accounts, short essays, and perhaps occasional stabs at plumbing the Estonian psyche. And, yes, as frequently requested, the occasional axiom.

-Kevin Axe