The fog was still clinging to the pines, thick and milk-white, when Urmas stepped onto the porch. He didn’t say “Good morning.” In Estonia, if the birds are already singing, you’re late to the conversation anyway.

A lone moose, currently officiating a private breakfast at a newly planted apple tree, looked up, considered Urmas with deep Nordic indifference, and trotted back into the treeline. A family of wild boars followed suit, vacating the potato field with the begrudging air of teenagers asked to clean their rooms. Then, the silence returned. That heavy, ancient Estonian silence that feels like a weighted blanket.

Urmas adjusted the hem of his linen trousers. He took the long way to the well, past the herb garden where the mint was aggressive and the cucumbers were crisp enough to wake the neighbours. He pulled up a bucket of water – the windlass offering its rusted tectonic creak – and doused his head. The water was 4°C. He felt magnificent.

By the time the fire was crackling under a soot-stained pot, Urmas was already in his element: the art of waiting for water to boil. He watched the bubbles rise in the kind of perfect, geometric rows usually reserved for Excel spreadsheets.

Breakfast was a study in minimalism. On the weathered terrace table sat the mint infusion, the pocket-warmed cucumbers, and the star of the show: a smoked bream and a cluster of those legendary, pungent onions from the shores of Lake Peipsi, grown by Old Believers who know secrets about soil that the rest of us have forgotten.

Yesterday, his business partner had paddled over with the fish and a casual update: their second startup had just cleared its Series C funding. They were officially a “Unicorn”. Urmas had nodded, noted that the smoke on the fish was “adequate,” and they had spent the next three hours in the sauna discussing nothing at all.

Thoughtfully, Urmas peeled the onion. He pulled out his phone to digitally sign a merger that would change the Baltic tech landscape, all while a crane shrieked in the nearby bog.

He took a bite of the onion, felt the sting of the earth and the rush of the future, and made a rare, impulsive decision:

“I’m going to Tallinn,” he muttered to the empty meadow. “I might even talk to someone.”

Be like Urmas. Come to Tallinn. And then you’ll see.