Tallinn is awash with boys and girls in folk costume. Today has seen the Song Festival Grounds host the culmination of the 10th Youth Song & Dance Festival, with more than 30,000 young singers, dancers and musicians taking to the stage in celebration of their cultural heritage. I'm always delighted by the fact that the same kids and teenagers I struggled at times in the past to get to say anything in English other than swear words and the lyrics of Fifty Cent songs (which amount to the same thing) will still happily don their tights and skirts and vests and throw themselves wholeheartedly into unbridled expressions of national pride. They might all be striving - consciously or otherwise - to be indistinguishable from any other teenager in Europe these days, but it is to their credit and the good fortune of Estonia that they never, ever will be.
As the Prime Minister put it at the Song Festival today: a nation who knows to always sing from the heart will live forever.
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