Friday, August 15, 2008

Tallinn, Estonia, June 1999

After a difficult trip on Czech Air from
Prague to Helsinki, we sped to Tallinn. The Helsinki
airport is really modern and clean and coldly elegant.
Even the toilets are modern and clean and coldly
elegant. Every adult has a cellphone, and there are a
few variations on them for the really dedicated, like
cellphone headsets so you can wave your cellphone
around for emphasis as you trot along talking to your
far-away friend. (Boy is that a dated comment now! But
the cellphone use was notable in 1999.)

The info desk in the airport was
great-- several friendly Finns helped all the people with problems in front of us in Finnish, German and British English. They told us exactly how to cross the city, how to catch the ferry to Tallinn, how much everything would cost and what the schedules were. Then we found they were right-on to within 5 minutes.

Tallinn is beautiful.

Tallinn's old town center is really old -- medieval again. They're just now starting to restore it, so you can see workers taking apart and putting back together the heavy cobblestone streets and the 3-foot thick walls of old buildings.

Estonians look like the stereotypes of Scandinavian. The streets are
full of attractive, tall, thin Nordic young people. (And for some reason in spite of the daily high temperature of barely 50 degrees and icy winds, the young women are mostly wearing mini skirts that hang to about 1/2 inch below their butts, accompanied by 3 or 4 inch heels.)

It seems that in the center of the city, everyone under the age of 30 speaks intelligible English, and most speak excellent English. This morning we went to
a "bed and breakfast" service that hooks up tourists with locals who want to rent out rooms in their homes. We met the owner, who told us she was an engineer in
the department that built roads and bridges for 25 years. Her department had 600 architects and engineers until 1991, when the "velvet revolution" kicked out the
Russians. Then they pared down to 80, and she needed a new job. A year later, she put out ads in the paper and on TV, and now she has a network of these private
citizens with rooms to rent.

So we chose a little house in the city center, right near the old town. It turned
out to be right next door to the Tallinn Patent Office. The building is crumbling -- the paint is peeling, the cement internal staircases are chipped and uneven, the windows don't close all the way -- but the residents are comfortable leaving their sleek modern bicycles unlocked in the corridors. Our host, Margitt, showed us our little room (with another window that doesn't close all the way). It doesn't have a lock or a handle on the door, but we've determined to enjoy the sense of trust so apparent on our way in.

This morning we walked up a narrow cobblestone street to a spot above the old town walls to look out over the city. An Estonian guy approached us and in quirky English that I think sometimes became Finnish and whatever other foreign languages he speaks, he pitched a bagful of Estonian music to us. He had a Walkman, a DiscMan, and about 30 tapes of various sorts of local music, and he got us to listen to
Estonian bagpipes (not too different from Scottish bagpipes), an Estonian baritone singing Cole Porter tunes in Estonian, some horrible rock, jazz from 1990, and some military-sounding folk music. He had photos from a huge rock concert Tallinn hosts every 5 years, and he urged us to come to that in July. Actually, he urged us to tell all our friends about it too. He was a real character -- really excited and open. He gaveus tips for all the places he thought we should visit, and told us which bars with and without covers have good music, which have tourists and which are just locals. And when we bought a tape, he told us thanks, he really needed the money and now he had to go hunt some more music lovers.

Last night we had dinner in an Italian-run place our guide book recommended. It took
us awhile to find it, since it was hidden down an alley that from the main street just seemed to be a tiny entrance into a private parking area. The walls and cobbled floor of the alley were being reconstructed with huge heavy stones. Huge stone slabs
that had apparently been recovered from some archeologic excavations were hung along one side. They had those swirly engravings of fierce creatures and
elaborate, difficult medieval letters that you see in
history books.

The restaurant is in a medieval building with meter-thick walls covered with
inches-thick white plaster. Some skilled artist drew lions and vines every here and there on the walls. The windows are all stained glass. When we sat down, I
said "Who cares about the food, I'm just happy with the looks of the place." But the food was great Italian basics, just what we'd want in an SF eatery.

Today we ate lunch in an equally elegant Indian place. The food was pretty good (the raita was actually mayonnaise with paprika in it and the rice was Chinese
rice with saffron in it, but everything else was excellent. I. says I am being a real food snob for mentioning this at all.) It was just as fancy and ambitious as the yuppy places San Francisco goes through so fast. The only surprising thing on the
menu was that the section after Pork and before Vegetable was Moose. Moose gets its own section on several menus we've seen here.

We can say "Check, please", "yes", "no", "room", and "thank you" and we're probably not going to learn much more, but we'll do better at the
next stop.

That nice lady Ms Margit turned out to have rented us a room we couldn't really sleep in. The bed was about 3 feet wide and was covered with a quilt of exactly the same width. Since I. and I are not pancakes, this was *not good*! The window didn't close completely and it was *damn cold*. That didn't bother I. as much as it did me, but he didn't like the mattress, which appeared to be constructed of some sort of hairy wool
over sprung springs. (The sprung springs were heat-suckers, too.) It was lumpy and hairy and had little spokes that stuck into your unpadded parts through the cloth. And sunlight shone right in on us all night. We'd already committed to a second night
there, so the next night we got a second quilt, I. slept on the couch, and I slept fully clothed with long johns in the bed.

After that we moved to a B & B in the suburbs which was *great.*

One night we watched Estonian TV, where they were showing a world championship of some sort of weightlifting. Big blond men with love handles wearing diaper-like loincloths
heaved up logs with hand-holes carved in the center and weights on the end. The object (apparently) was to get the log over your head, lock your arms, and maintain that position for a few seconds. Then you could un-lock your arms and sort of run out of the way of the log-with-weights so it crashed to the ground and bounced a couple times. It was narrated in British English in that usual breathy, ungrammatical
sportscaster way and subtitled in Finnish or Estonian. We watched for a minute or so, and the sportscaster said, "and this is
challenging the world record with 275 kilograms!!" Whatsisname couldn't do it, but he was quickly replaced with some other big blond guy who the sportscaster said had never failed before. And lo, as we watched, he broke the world record for log-with-weight lifting! (BTW, that's about 600 pounds.)

Our guidebook mentioned that Estonians are famous for being unwilling to smile. They "prize emotional control." We found that to be very true. In some really modern tourist places we had what we would consider typical interactions with the people who
worked there -- they smiled some and we smiled some -- but most people we met just didn't smile. We went to the Russian market out in the suburbs and while resting on benches there we watched a little kid and his dad. The little kid had just recently learned to walk and he was excited about all the colorful things going on around him. He'd see something interesting and turn around to face it and stare happily, and then
see something someehere else and sort of teeter around to look at it, too. And every now and then he'd look at his father as if to say, "look at all these
exciting things!" and his dad just looked at him
stony-faced and blank. He never smiled at his little kid. I got kind of depressed about all this no-smiling cold place. We gave it another 2 days to give it a good
chance, but we ended up leaving after 5 days in Estonia instead of 10. So we went to Helsinki instead, which though climatically no warmer is a lot warmer socially.

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