All the boonies of the world

Inspired by the town that time forgot by North!

There's a Russian proverb, which says, that 'Moscow is not Russia'. True to form, all the sticks on this Earth suffer the kind of oblivion that are spared to distant regions out of their conglomerating metro areas.

The regions of Russia are massively muddy and decrepitly derelict. Asphalt on the main roads is like the surface of the Moon, with a 20 km/h speed limit, or simply a distant dream. No war traversed those roads.

Stateside regions are adorned with flying trash, dysfunctional police, the smell of meth, and the edges of city blocks littered with people standing upside down. Not just in the sticks somewhere, but in Philadelphia, too. An entire city of brotherly love. For some obscure reason, the cult of AR-15 has strewn its deathly mandibles throughout all these tiny places we never knew the names of.

And then there is the very pockmarked Ukraine, mixed with light where there is freedom, and darkness where there is none. Albeit less-developed, it was and is striving to where Estonia is now.

Compared to all that hopeless despair, Viljandi is like a little island of paradise: there is no war, there are no junkies, the streets are clean and safe to walk, and the roads don't have potholes. Everything works, and the police do, too.

Undeniably, there is some poverty. All countries have poverty. But in Viljandi, in Estonia, there is this uncharacteristically strange sense of contentment, that everything will turn out to be ok. — Like an enduring hope for a better future: "some things are not nice, but they'll be fine one day." Maybe this is how peace feels like.

And so, I am to end this post with a somewhat sarcastic coda: "All the boonies of the world, unite!" :>