{"id":1614,"date":"2008-05-04T10:10:34","date_gmt":"2008-05-04T17:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/?p=1614"},"modified":"2008-05-04T10:10:34","modified_gmt":"2008-05-04T17:10:34","slug":"meeting-toomas-hendrik-ilves-president-of-estonia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/04\/meeting-toomas-hendrik-ilves-president-of-estonia\/","title":{"rendered":"Meeting Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>ZOMG, I just shook hands and got my first autograph with a head of state! <\/p>\n

President Ilves<\/a> spoke at the very beginning of a thank you concert on Sunday evening, the final day of the Teeme \u00c4ra! 2008<\/a> weekend. After speaking to the assembled crowd of a few hundred in the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds<\/a>, he hopped off stage and walked toward some of the standing crowd. He had one uniformed high-ranking member of the Estonian military with him, his wife, and maybe four or five bodyguards with earpieces. <\/p>\n

Veljo, some of the Teeme \u00c4ra crew (including Rainer Nolvak and company) and I were sitting near the front row. As soon as I spotted President Ilves starting to mingle with the crowd, I hopped up from my seat and walked over to him, microphone in hand. His back was turned to me at first, but I made sure that the bodyguard saw me and knew I wasn’t threatening.<\/p>\n

When his body turned toward me, I made a “one minute” gesture with my index finger and started blabbering away in English — THI went to high school, ugrad and graduate school in the US and used to be the Ambassador to the United States. I mentioned that I was an American radio reporter and that I knew his son, who is an undergraduate at Stanford University. That definitely got his attention. <\/p>\n

So then he looked at me and said: “So you want an interview?”, to which I responded, “Yes, if you have two minutes.”<\/p>\n

We talked about the cleanup day, and he compared it to his first days in the late 1960s in the US when being ecologically-conscious was just starting to hit Americans. As he spoke, I wished that the band on stage would have stopped playing — didn’t they know that I was interviewing the President? (Plus, every radio reporter hates doing interviews when there’s music playing in the background.)<\/p>\n

And yes, I was gauche enough to ask for an autograph<\/a>, but I had left my camera at my seat, and when I went back for it, a small crowd had gathered, taking photos<\/a> and asking for autographs. I snapped a few shots, but didn’t get one with me and him together. <\/p>\n

Still, pretty effin’ sweet, eh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ZOMG, I just shook hands and got my first autograph with a head of state! President Ilves spoke at the very beginning of a thank you concert on Sunday evening, the final day of the Teeme \u00c4ra! 2008 weekend. After speaking to the assembled crowd of a few hundred in the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds, he hopped off stage and walked toward some of the standing crowd. He had one uniformed high-ranking member of the Estonian military with him, his…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-estonia","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-q2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}