Monday, December 14, 2009

Living in Saaremaa - advantages and disadvantages

In 2009 Saaremaa has about 35 000 inhabitants.

The problems:
1) Local flights - now only a flight to Tallinn (our capital) is made daily, but not to the other cities of Estonia, for example there is a need after a flight to Tartu (next biggest city in Estonia, also a big university-city) - it takes 5-6 hours to drive there, even longer to take a bus, the local flight might be useful.
2) Ferry-connection is too slow - in summertime the ferry goes to mainland and back in every hour and it takes about 35 minutes (the route is 8 km).
3) Young people do not have many opportunities to do different activities - there are, of course different activity-groups and music-schools etc, but the opportunities compared to the capitals youth is somewhat different.
4) Smaller choice of stores and supermarkets - on many occasions you cannot find exactly the thing you are looking for in the local stores and many young people tend to buy their clothes or other stuff from mainland or use catalog-shopping for this reason.
Auriga shopping-center - the biggest in Saaremaa

How do we solve the problems?
1) More local flights - people in Saaremaa shouldn't have a disadvantage only because of the fact that they are living on an island and therefore have to depend on more matters to get to the different locations in Estonia compared to the mainland inhabitants, we should have more local flights, so it would take us less time to get where we need; there is actually a negotiation taking place at this moment on starting a flight between Kuressaare and Tartu, but they are only planning to use it on spring and summer.
2) Permanent connection to the mainland. Instead of waiting on the lines to take the ferry to mainland it would be better to take the bridge and not minding the time-table of the ferrys which often also means speeding tickets for the cars to get to the ferry on time etc.
Cars getting off the ferry

3) More activities for youth - there could be more different opportunities for us, for example a bigger cinema, which would actually look like cinema not the night-club which shows some films now and then in the daytime.
4) Bigger commercial opportunities - some bigger shopping malls with wider choice merchandise; of course here is the problem that big markets don't want to come here, because there are not so many inhabitants here and therefore the economic success is hard to be accomplished.

What do we like about living in Saaremaa?
- safe environment
- lot of greenery and nature
- many vacationing opportunities (SPAs, camp-houses, tourism-farms etc)
- beautiful sand-beaches
- many sightseeing sights - well preserved midage churches, Kuressaares fortress, Kaalis meteoric-crater, Pangas bank, Anglas windmils etc

Kuressaares fortress from the midages

Our group: Grete, Regine, Anett, Kerolin

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