Rob returns from Munich and reacts with surprise that I haven't already flocked straight for the tourist center of Tallinn; Old Town. This was due to the fact that I assumed like most tourist destinations, Old Town would hold very little of interest, he manages to convince me however that in this particular instance, I might be wrong.
Old town is a small, liver shaped slice out of the heart of Tallinn proper, completely encapsulated by a thick medieval wall, complete with ramparts and murder holes. Due to the absence of heavy bombing / artillery attacks during World War 2, the original structure of the medieval town is pretty much entirely intact around the outside.
My first glimpse of it through the misty Tallinn evening air, the city street leading up to the ancient gates adorned with ice sculptures of a swan and a dolphin make it look not altogether unlike something out of a Disney movie, The space inside the walls is a peculiar hybrid of modern and ancient, I see the first McDonalds since arriving in Tallinn just inside the gates, followed by a strip club and several boutique outlets that appear to be posterchildren for conspicuous consumption.
As we get a little closer to the center though this fades away to some fairly impressive architecture, a massive old tavern /restaurant complete with lit braziers and gothic font signs, amongst other buildings which look like the designs are something straight out of the fifteenth century. Dead center of the Old Town houses a wide open square adorned with all manner of fusion between the ancient and the new, the town hall complete with hard black iron shackles bolted to it's brick, various small cafes and restaurants, The oldest operational apothecary in Europe, established back in 1488, which now doubles as a museum, and lavish looking hotels.
We're heading toward a small restaurant called Kompressor located not far from where Rob used to live, when something makes him break into a chuckle as he tries to explain it. Apparently for some reason, someone here thought it'd be a good idea to have a bar, the theme of which is that it only plays music by Depeche Mode, in a textbook example of Estonian deadpan it is named simply "DM BAAR".
I don't quite know what to make of this yet but I think this may be emblematic of a wider theme I'm seeing here more frequently, if someone wishes to do something here, they don't tend to overthink it, they just do it. I can picture two Estonians sitting around a table having a conversation that went something like this;
"Would it be awesome if we owned a bar?"
"Bars are for posers"
"Yes but what if it was a bar that was not for posers, what if it was a bar that was *special*"
"That just sounds like more posing"
"What if it was self-consciously poser in a retro fashion?"
"Why Ülo, whatever could you mean?"
"Well, what if we only played Depeche Mode, for example?"
But, I digress.
As we sit in Kompressor and eat our very tasty pancakes, I get my first experience of a native drink called "Kali". Apparently it is made from fermented black bread and 0.5% alcoholic, however aside from the aftertaste, you would be extremely hard pressed to not think it was Coca-Cola.
Rob is telling me about the staff here being infamously rude, his example being that when he came here previously with a large group of friends and attempted to put two tables togther, the staff had given him a scolding in Estonian somewhat akin to what you'd expect from a mother addressing her teenagers.
"Excuse me, is this your apartment? No? Then why are you moving our furniture? It is very expensive you know, maybe next time you should ask for permission before you decide to take it upon yourself to rearrange the furniture."
The idea of it confuses me, all the more when from what I can see the staff seem perfectly ordinary and courteous, but then again, we didn't try to rearrange their furniture.
At the table next to us sitting around and chatting avidly amongst one another but entirely in a world of their own are nine similar looking Estonian blonde women, Rob uses them as an illustrative mechanism to point out how groups tend to be insular in this society; they go out to interact with each other, not their environment. I'm not entirely sure if none of them could speak English or none of them cared, but indeed, they were entirely oblivious to their surroundings and were intently focused only on the conversation amongst themselves.
We finish up at Kompressor and wander the streets of Old Town, I hear tales of the room in the inn where the devil was having a party, thrice boarded up when subsequent owners doubted the truth of the original rumor. Passing the old KGB building on Pikk, a large and I must grudgingly admit, beautiful church.
Exiting old town and coming upon a monument to a recent maritime disaster where M/S Estonia sunk betweeen Helsinki and Tallinn, 852 souls with her. Rob comments that in a population of 1.3 million, it was rare that noone knew at least someone from this group. It's an interesting statistic.
Rob was recently contacted by a complete stranger to me who had stumbled across this article and asked him if he knew who I was. This inspired me to check the analytics here and see just how many people were reading, it's a lot bigger number than I had imagined. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the general population tired of having their economies outsourced by large corporates to their economic advantage and decided that they wanted some of the spoils for themselves. How many of the people that have read this touch other people and will spread the ideas in some way? Time will tell.
When we finally arrive at Rob's place it's pretty late and I have to get home and finish off some work, but Triin has cooked up some wild boar and I get my first taste since I had wondered as an eight year old reading Asterix comics exactly what it would actually taste like. Pork, pretty much, that should come as no surprise but I'm so accustomed to being surprised by everything now something actually being predictable bears special mention at this point.
Day 2: Sushi, Toy dogs and Theological covers for gluttony.
Having made contact with a reader of this blog and being told that today is actually some kind of religious festival, the name of which unsurprisingly escapes me at this point, I cleave to the important part of the information, there are special, tasty buns that you get on this day and your excuse for eating them is that the church said it's ok.
I head out to the nearby streets with an appetite for irony buns and run across a tiny little dog intent on alerting his master to my presence, the current temperature is approaching -10C and I would have thought that such an animal wouldn't be a practical pet in this environment, but apparently I have much to learn about the survivability of extreme cold.
I come across a sushi parlour not a block and a half from my apartment and stop in to try some, it's extremely good, and this has been a pattern at all the sushi places I have tried over here so far, they also deliver sushi to you, which is absolutely unheard of back home. I get a card and resolve that at the earliest practical opportunity I will definitely be making use of this. Apparently there's another sushi parlour in Tallinn that has a specific theme to it, I lack suitable language to describe just what I'm talking about here, so I'll just give the link and be done with it. This is not a fabrication, I assure you, that place really exists.
Of course, they also deliver. Perhaps that's just normal here?
On the way home I stop by the bakery and get my ecumenically approved pastry treat with icing, I don't feel any more holy consuming it, and when I mentioned a religious festival to the establishment owner she looked at me like I might look at a door-to-door evangelical on a saturday morning at my front door, but when she figured out I just wanted a special bun she was quick to provide the goods. It was basically a finger bun in a different form factor, and tasted as such.
Back home to hack on oracle website I've been working on.
Day 3: Foreign exchange meetup
I come out in the morning for my daily stroll and with a little dismay note that I can actually mostly see the ground, it appears the snow has withdrawn a little, at least for the meantime. It makes walking quite a bit easier but at the same time it's something of a trap, as the snow melts it leaves patches of ice here and there which look much like normal snow, but have none of the traction properties one would expect from them. I learn to look out especially for the gaps between somewhat snowy and not snowy at all areas, and although my feet simultaneously lose the ground multiple times mercifully I am able to retain my "never fall over" winning streak.
Later on in the day I head out for a meeting I was invited to by Luiz and Daniel from Aqris, it's a collection of visitors from foreign lands, a significant amount of which appear to be exchange students. Walking to the venue, Vapiano in Solaris Keskus, I catch sight of what I later learn is the Estonian Opera, quite a beautiful building, all doric columns and grand windows and carvings.
Ice is everywhere and I don't well grasp how it is that the snow is actually melting, because to my senses, it appears that the temperature is actually decreasing. I see strange things such as large stainless steel columns with what looks like a spontaneous gush of water that just started pouring from the ceiling and flowed out onto the surrounding tiles before freezing solid. I'd love to know how such formations actually come to pass but can't muster the imagination to formulate a hypothesis through the -15C cold.
At Vapiano, meet a bunch of new people, it seems to be a very common theme that men end up in Estonia because they fall in love with Estonian women. I meet two people who fit this description on this particular night, I meet a guy who teaches foreigners Estonian, a visitor from northern Italy on her way home, a procurement manager for an Estonian bank regales me with tales of the hardware appetites of my fellow software engineers and the kind of criteria she uses to assess if their requests have merit.
Lastly I meet a girl who migrated from Cypress and studies law, she explains to me the basic premises of Estonian law, it seems a lot less complicated than it's common law based counterparts, I'd heard similar things before on this same subject, it seems that the civil law system used in much of Scandinavia is more based on actual legislation disregarding the importance of precedence as opposed to common law where precedence is accorded much more weight. It turns out that the biggest difference this person had noted between Estonia and her home country was a reduced focus on the superficial, so it looks like I'm not alone in this observation.
Day 4: Auto trouble
Rob calls up the next day to ask me to assist in shoveling his car out of the snow, we take a walk over to the first place he lived when he arrived in Tallinn, his wife's mother's apartment and proceed to dig the modern little vw out from beneath two solid feet of snow. I ended up discovering that for me personally the best way to get rid of snow was some combination of punching it into a well packed paste and then peeling it off and discarding it, it feels good to get out and be physically active again after so much time coding, after a few hours the task is done.
We head up to Triin's mother's apartment and settle in for dinner, my first experience with kefir, a strange drink not native to Estonia but widely popular, my current best explanation for it would be a thinner version of sour cream, intended for drinking. Needless to say the taste of raw kefir does not much appeal, but with a couple of teaspoons of sugar it starts to taste less like sour cream and more like vanilla yoghurt, which is much more tolerable. Apparently people here often mix it with kama, which is a grainy / cereal like mixture that when mixed with kefir ends up tasting not unlike what you'd imagine thin sour cream mixed with a large amount of bread crumbs might taste like.
Also on the menu is potato and pork, the potato here is actually yellow, Estonians appear surprised when I tell them the potato back in Australia is white, I have no idea why the difference in colour, but Estonian potato definitely tastes a whole lot better, as does the pork, it makes up for the unaugmented kefir / kama mix and then some.
On the walk back we go via Kaubmaja and I notice a 98,000 kroon 750 ml bottle of Cognac. I wonder how long it has been sitting there, and how long it will be sitting there in future. More to the point, what the point of such an object is at all here? Bored Russian oil magnates on holiday perhaps? Who knows. Hennessey, what is your business plan, please?
Day 5: Aqris super early pancakes
Arrive 6:50 am at the front door of the Aqris office, hitch a ride through the front door with a sympathetic native as the event is not due to begin till 7:15. 25 minutes early starts to matter a fair bit though when you're -15C. Looking around at the office I notice that the equipment they use is much the same as dev houses in Sydney use, it's interesting to come to a place with a radically different economy and budget and see what it has in common with someplace that does not have to be as stringent with their costs, it becomes apparent what is really useful and what is just gloss.
Pancakes are delicious, I talk to Hegle, a freelance usability expert and catch up with Daniel and Luiz, take photos out the back window of the trains coming and going, talk a little technology with Urgo and depart before I interfere with the workday for the rest of the team.
Day 6: Tartu
Andrei contacted me after reading my first post here and invited me to come see Tartu that following weekend, I took him up on the offer and head out for the bus stop, the whole thawing thing that I was worried about turns out to be a complete phantom. Snow has started falling more heavily than ever and the temperature has dropped to -17C. It is at this point that I realise the term "blistering cold" is less poetic license and more descriptive of reality than I had originally assumed.
That said, I still love it. Sometimes it makes me just want to sprint headlong into the howling snow and feel it cut deeper into me, when I get home and sit back and relax, feeling the chill seep out of my body and the blood flow returning to normal is one of the most pleasant things I have ever felt.
Perhaps another thirty years and I'll see things differently, but for now, I could not hope for better.
The bus ride from Tallinn to Tartu takes 2:45, there is free wifi on the bus, the surreal feeling of barreling along a deserted highway, fields blanketed with snow and fir tree forests in the distance, the edges blurred by snowdrift, wind whipping tiny zephyrs of white confetti across the entire scene whilst hacking away in a bus seat on my code is something that will not soon leave my memory.
After meeting up with Andrei he takes me on a full tour of Tartu, the larger part of the city proper is one big university, various faculties scattered all over the place, it's a much less hectic pace than back in Tallinn, a total population of approximately a hundred thousand
There are long tree lined footpaths, sculptures and statues are plentiful, there is even an ice sculpture of a tiger in the main town square directly next to another bronze of a pair of kissing students. The entire aura of the place is not dissimilar to what I have seen of Boston in movies, with the caveat that I have not actually visited anywhere in the states myself. Back home the closest thing that springs to mind is what I imagine a single huge usyd campus might look like.
In the central square of Tartu, Andrei tells me about an event not that long ago where a couple were filmed in flagrante delicto on the arch of a bridge at one end of the square across a river, the photos appeared in tabloid newspapers across the world. The local students were so amused by the event that they affixed a bed to the arch not long after in tribute. No word if anyone ever figured out who the culprits were, but Vana Tallinn made a conspicuous feature in the corners of the infamous photos.
Later on we go on a short tour of the surrounding area, first stop what is locally referred to as the nuclear cucumber plant. Apparently the power station for Tartu has enough waste heat and excess capacity that the locals were unsure what to do with it, not wanting to simply waste it however, they decided they'd establish a set of greenhouses complete with vegetables feeding off the waste heat / electricity from the station. It gets it's name from the eerie green glow it casts into the night sky of Tartu, although it is not in fact a nuclear power plant at all.
We also go to see the houses of the richest people in Tartu, for the amazing sums of 3-4 million kroons (approximately 300 / 400k AUD) these places look much like stately plantation households or English countryside manors. Another eye opening comparison, what counts for a fairly remote neighbourhood in the Sydney suburbs, say Minchinbury, a quick search of domain.com.au shows the upper end of properties starting around the 400k mark and going up from there. Andrei tells me that you can buy a totally decent good quality apartment in Tartu for around 70k AUD.
Stay or Go?
Still wanting to stay.
Disappointments
My disappointment is only kind of a disappointment; it's the kind of weakness that you say to a job interviewer when they ask you what is your weakness, one that interpreted correctly is actually a strength, but you spin it so you seem to have a heaping helping of humility and this particular hurdle is surmounted. EMT didn't call me when they fixed my phone.
They did however, fix my phone.
Positives
I'm beginning to feel quite attached to the mental state of the Estonian psyche. It would not be unfair to say that I came here fundamentally to be a hermit, although it would be simplifying far more than is sensible. But I find myself becoming one of those annoying, people loving humans. I empathise with the things people tell me here, I do not find myself surprised by their petty concerns; they do not seem to have any.
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