Confederacy of a Dunce - Visiting Tallinn 3

Monday, September 12, 2005

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Well, after a long delay it's time for me to walk back down memory lane and fill in the last section of my description of our trip to Tallinn. On the third day we started reasonably early, as we needed to catch a local bus out to the Open Air Museum. None of our touristy materials had a transport map, but we knew the correct bus number, and in a triumph of information gathering skills, I found a bus map in the telephone book in our room. I didn't tear out the page (I'm always irritated when I find missing pages in hotel phone books, after all you never know when a future guest may have an urgent need for an escort, liquor and/or pornography [or a restaurant, rental car or other hotel listings]), but instead committed the bus map to memory. Or something like memory (I did not bother showing the map to Mrs. Dunce as I was supremely confident -- can you see where this is going?). The #21 bus leaves from somewhere right near the very-underused train station, although it's a little unclear from the map whether its terminus is at the train station proper, or "just a little further down" (As it turns out, it was the former). We made a quick pass by (many of) the bus stops at the station and didn't see any indication of #21, so I advised a walk in the direction I (vaguely) remembered from the map. We walked a while in the hot sun. Walked some more, past a couple of bus stops that did clearly not serve the #21, but following the vague path the bus should take. Of course we were walking up a one-way street upon which our desired bus could only possibly be heading back towards the train station, but I was sure we'd eventually catch up with whichever road went in the right direction. On the way we saw some very nice examples of ramshackle buildings collapsing under their own weight, lots of locals going about their daily business, and definitely no other tourists or business establishments aimed at tourists. After, oh, call it between 30 and 45 minutes, we finally found a suitable bus stop (yes, indeed the two one-way streets eventually made their way into a single two-way street) and joined the masses on the bus heading towards the open air museum.

As it turned out nearly everyone was headed either (a) to the zoo, or (b) to a big shopping mall with carnival rides in the parking lot. You guess which one was more popular. We got off the bus with an older American couple (although we were not "with" them as no words were ever exchanged between us) and headed into the Open Air Museum. It's a large collection of historic buildings moved from different parts of Estonia (ranging from 18th-20th centuries), clustered into a dozen or so different homesteads which illustrated life in the different regions. It was quite empty, obviously more of a weekend destination, but there were a few people hanging around in traditional costume at some of the homesteads. I was pleased that they didn't approach us, I am not entirely comfortable with costumed interpreters even when my vocabulary has more than a solitary word ("please" = "palun"). It seems they were mainly there to provide a small amount of security for those buildings that were open to visitors (mind your head going through the doors, even Mrs. Dunce had to duck. I guess the winters are really brutal, especially in the Estonian islands, so doors and windows were really, really small). It was a really nice afternoon visit, and the bus journey home was quite uneventful as we got on at the very same bus stop. It headed further out, past some very large, newly-built homes until it finally turned around, taking on a massive crowd of locals headed for the mall.

Estonian farmhouses, photo by Mrs Dunce

We wandered around town a little more, seeing some more of the sights, then took a short rest before dinner, which was at the Russian restaurant Troika. Featuring various sorts of live music, occasional dancing girls, and set in the basement of another nice merchant hall on the town square (we may not have gone far off the beaten track, but everywhere we went was quite good). We started with a "grandmother's special" (pickles, honey and sour cream) along with some vodka (but not much, as our tastes tend to run [fast] in the opposite direction from vodka shots), and I also had a starter of herring done the usual way (with eggs, onion, sour cream, dill.... there may have also been potatoes involved). Mrs. Dunce had a shockingly huge blini (Boyar's blini, no less) which was well beyond anything we'd seen before bearing the same name. As for the mains, I had some sort of seafood (salmon perhaps?) but the memorable bit was Mrs. Dunce's Vladivostok catfish, breaded and fried as catfish is meant to be eaten.

After dinner we wandered back to the Hele Hunt for a leisurely pint or two. Or such was our plan, but we found ourselves seated across from two young Irish lads on a whirlwind tour of Scandinavia and the Baltics, and found ourselves in for quite an evening of conversation and a few more drinks than we had planned (it was near 3am when we finally left). As in our previous visit the pub never filled up (by British standards of vertical drinking, anyway), although there was one particularly noxious group of British men hanging around the bar in the company of a local gentleman who was obviously their guide to the city. Mrs. Dunce overheard some classy advice, which I pass on to any readers for whom this information might be useful: "Go with the Estonian girls, because the Russian girls will charge you an extra hundred." Are the Estonian girls (compared to the Russian girls) really so ignorant of the capitalist system that they fail to charge what the market will bear? Or are the Russian girls that much better at whatever it is that they do? Or is it a supply/demand thing, Russian girls being exotic and unobtainable while Estonian girls are a dime a dozen? Or more likely, RUSSIA=BAD, ESTONIA=GOOD, and the guy was just doing his part for independence.

And then it was a stagger to bed and a long lie-in (we didn't even partake in the free breakfast, that's how tired we were). Lunchtime came quickly (after a buzz through the Town Hall) and we splashed out on sushi. Suprisingly it was really good (even with a few strange digressions from the familiar... blue cheese & creme fraiche roll, anyone?) and while we gobbled the last few shreds of pickled ginger, the skies opened, and buckets upon buckets of water poured down on the crowds of tourists (the tourist population seemed to [at least] double every day, and this was Friday). Fortunately we are in training to become English so were equipped with umbrellas. We still got drenched from the waist down, but made our way to the Museum of Occupation. This was a very interesting concept for a museum: built with a central theme around a fairly recent period in history (starting about 1940 and going until independence in 1991). As the museum's site points out, it deals with a period about which we have incomplete information - an epoch characterised by totalitarian power and mass repression - and there is a plan to create a memorial complex, to remember those who did not return to their homeland. As such the physical exhibits are fairly limited: assorted physical objects, organized by date, which illustrate important facets of life but specifically pertaining to the occupation, first by the Nazis and then by the Soviet Union (it was very interesting to see some parts of this from the perspective "The Nazis weren't so bad"). Each display from a particular period, however, featured a documentary of the events of that time, shown on a screen at the top of the display case. I would have liked to watch them all (I still could, through the film clips linked here, at least if their server ever goes faster than 4KB/sec), but as each of the seven lasted about 25-30 minutes, and the screens were set in a position which caused a lot of painful neck-craning, I think we only lasted through the first four. It was really interesting to see the Soviet period documented in this manner from the inside.

Our last dinner in town was at an Estonian restaurant outside the old town, but I'm sorry to say I don't remember many of the details (perhaps because it had its unmemorable aspects, perhaps because we were approaching exhaustion at the end of the trip, perhaps because so much time has passed since we were actually there). It was a large, multi-roomed place, but very empty. Food came quickly and was dispatched just as quickly. As I recall it was quite tasty, but at the moment all I remember is the ambience which wasn't exactly thrilling. And then it was off to bed (and our last dose of German TV). Come morning we had just enough time for breakfast, then a super-cheap cab ride to the airport (70EEK, barely half of what we paid for our cab ride in the other direction). And home sweet home.

travel

Monday, September 12, 2005 3:10:44 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)