Yesterday was not your average day.
Rick and I chatted with Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Later in the day, after Rick left for Canada to deal with some unscheduled business, Allan Martinson, an Estonian VC and our superhost met with former Prime Minister Mart Laar. Then I flew to Berlin, where I walked drizzly streets to the Brandenburg Gate, once the site of Checkpoint Charlie, the former barbed wire enclosed military turnstile between East and West Berlin.
Allan accompanied us to the Presidential Palace, where we passed two rigid military guards, up spiraling marble steps and into the presidential suite, where we sipped coffee for 30 minutes with President Ilves. The recently installed professorial president described how 50 years of Soviet suppression had retarded Estonia's natural emergence. After the empire crumbled, Estonia burst forward, using technology to leapfrog ahead. "We went from one revolution into the next," Ilves told us. "Poor little Estonia was working faster than other countries, including the US." The liberated little republic was using technology to give its people access to government at home and ideas from the rest of the world. Ilves is clearly enjoying his largely ceremonial job. He was just back from attending ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution against the Soviets. He also gave us the impression that he would also be happy reading a good book and listening to classical music by the fireside of his country home near the Latvian border. a title="Photo Sharing" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/shelisrael/278572423/">
Two-time Prime Minister Mart Laar, a cherubic history professor who recently received the Friedman Award for his economic reforms and driving Estonia into the the European Union (EU). We met in the womblike, ancient cellar of a coffee house. Laar began by telling me an historic vignette that happened in the neighborhood where we were sitting. In feudal times, a landlord executed a peasant from the town below apparently for no good reason. When the landlord went down into that town, he was tried and executed for murdering a peasant. This incident shook Medieval Europe where most lords thought they could just do what they want. His point, I think, was that democracy is in the Estonian DNA. 
He has twice served as prime minister and is generally considered the architect of the country's amazingly efficient, transparent and popular e-government. features include a flat tax (23 percent for everyone, very few deductions) and ubiquitous free broadband access for just about all Estonians. he bristled just slightly when I asked him if Estonia wasn't a bit like Singapore, a country I visited a few years back, where computerization is also very high and e-government is a word I heard in nearly all conversations i had with government officials.
"It's not about government delivering information to the people, but people delivering it to the government. We have the ability to vote from home, which changes who votes and the results. You can change your vote if you change your mind. Our e-government is a blueprint for a direct democracy where the people can decide major issues as they arise." These direct votes could happen every week or as needed he told me.
Of course a direct democracy would eventually eliminate the need for a Parliament, which impressed me since Laar is currently under consideration to become prime minister for a third time. The prime minister actually runs the country and is selected by parliament.
I then hopped onto an Estonian Airways flight to Berlin taking a window seat. Two Estonian teenager sat next to me. This was their first flight ever and they nearly smothered me staring out of the window for their first aerial view. This trip was about access for them, access of a different sort.
In Berlin, I wandered down streets that were dramatically modern and wide by contrast to the preserved 12th century Estonian neighborhood where we had stayed. There was the Brandenburg Gate, a magnificent edifice, once scarred by an ugly wall that kept the people of East Germany sequestered from freedom, where President Reagan had stood and declared, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
I strolled freely into what was once the East Berlin where people 20 years ago faced machine gun fire in an attempt to leave. I had Weiner Schnitzel and beers at the Einstein Cafe, where most of the crowd looked like they had strolled out of the movie Cabaret.
I took a taxi back to my hotel. The driver was so fat that his belly rubbed the wheel as we drove. He told me he was East German and was 25 in 1989 when the Berlin wall was torn down. He was hungry when he got to the West. He hasn't stopped eating since then he told me as he bit into a chocolate bar to emphasize his point.
It was an amazing day, with a recurring theme about the most tangible sort of global neighborhoods. Estonia and Berlin are dramatic examples of how different life can be for people in different neighborhoods. Mart Laar was so obviously right when he told me, "Access is what makes the difference."
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