from Tallinn, Estonia: walls

Was I appearing displeased with the weather? No, after the brief showers of the first day, the weather has been easy. Until my last day here. Suddenly it was a problem: bright skies with the occasional puffy cloud, gusts of wintry air, temps, finally, seasonally appropriate for this far north. A real bummer.

I could hardly get myself going. Too daunting. Bright skies? I should be out with my camera. But it’s so cold!!

One way to get yourself moving is to set a reasonable goal, right? For instance: perhaps I should walk the perimeter of the Old Town, hugging the walls. No more, no less than that. Let’s see how vast or how small Medieval Tallinn really was.

The answer: one hour’s worth of walking, with a pause at a store or two.

Photographically speaking, you’re not going to get much from me hugging a wall. Picture after picture revealed yet another fragment of…wall. But it was a valuable exercise nonetheless. In that short expanse of time, I passed a school, a small park, graffiti, beautiful art shops, gates, and stalls of woolen goods, sold by Russian men and women who appeared somewhat bitten by the frost.

So, walk with me. And forgive the monotony of the stroll. Look beyond the crumbing stone.

I start at the gate, right by my hotel:





Then, slip in through this narrow space...





And continue. From the outside, btw, it looks like this:





Sometimes, it seems to grow out of buildings. Or, perhaps they built around it.




And look what is protected within. A school. Kids, thinking about snowmen.





Okay, some more wall. With parks, shops, all of it:










And there you have it. By 2:30 I was cold and my walk was complete. Now, I have plenty of work with me (I aspire to be good and to get things done) and my book could use a few hours (both the one to read and the one to write), but for God’s sake, it’s my last day! I’m to be out of my hotel by 5 a.m. tomorrow! Let me not fritter the last hours here!

Still, it’s so brisk...

I had contemplated doing something completely decadent, like signing up for a spa treatment in town – scrubbed with (Baltic?) salt, wrapped in algae, doesn’t that sound absolutely terrific? Sure, but my travels are decadent in their own right (so says my occasional traveling companion). It cannot be all about pleasure and indulgence.

So I set out to shop for others. There is the market of course. No one back home put in a request for a reindeer sweater (I asked; truly I did). So I went back to my favorite art stores. And chocolate shops.

Tempting?

(I took a trial bite. With tea.)








In the evening I went to eat at a place that wasn’t listed nor recommended, but it had a tempting look and name: the Embassy of Pure Food.




It was the best meal that I had in Estonia. Now mind you, you can't scream and shout at the little things, like service, or warm white wine, or warm-ish potatoes. Those are insignificant things. And maybe Estonians demand that their potatoes be served cool because they have been thus just about everywhere. But what I look for in food is a clever idea and fresh and honest ingredients prepared in a reasonably healthy way. For instance, if you serve sour cream, don’t also serve tons of butter and heavy cream, all fried, on one plate.

The Embassy of Pure Food presented a wonderful seafood appetizer and they actually knew where the scallops came from. And their salmon was yummy (with an artful cabbage chip – who would believe that you can be clever with cabbage?), and the setting -- a restored old building – couldn’t be nicer, and the cost was right down there.







So I leave Estonia with a note on how good the food was. Travel is remarkable in its unpredictability.

from Tallinn, Estonia: the mix

Well, if you can’t take the girl to the village, bring the village to her, right?

In the afternoon I set out for Estonia’s “Ethnographical” Museum (guidebook’s choice of words, not mine). In a mixed pine and deciduous forest by the sea, just outside of Tallinn. Rural houses, moved there so that you and I can get a sense of what life was like for an Estonian some years ago.





You know what makes you feel old? When you visit a museum of years gone by and you realize they are showing habits that were part of your childhood. Yes, it’s true: my grandma (with whom I lived in my early years) cooked on a wood-burning stove, drew water from the well outside and used a kerosene lamp for light, and in first grade, I learned to write dipping a pen into an inkwell. Ah well. One forgets that even in the States, ballpoint pens weren’t common in schools until the mid-sixties.






school kids, learning about their heritage

I had wanted to see the windmills of Estonia in their natural setting (on the island of Saaremaa), but the thought of driving on back roads in the night put me off. And lo, here you have the very same windmills, transported from the island to my own backyard. There, facing the tall bare trees, on the gloomy coast of a dusky, misty Baltic.











Except for two tiny school groups and a handful of others, the entire vast forested area is remarkably empty. As daylight fades, I follow the muddy road from one farmstead to another and chat to the occasional person who has the task of trying to describe the life of an Estonian family from, say, 100 years back.






In the States, when you go to places like Old World Wisconsin (another open air museum depicting life in the rural communities of maybe 150 years ago), you sort of know the shpiel: …and so they dipped string in hot wax and made candles and washed clothes on scrubbing boards, etc etc. It’s something that you want to show your kids when they’re growing up. This is your heritage! This is what took place before Madison had State Street and the Bratfest and the Farmers’ Market!

But here, I’m on new turf. It’s a less familiar world of feudal lords and Finnish influence and I listen with interest because, truthfully, there’s not much about Estonia of 100 years back that is known to me.



It’s completely dark when I finally leave. I take a taxi back to town and I stroll again through the Christmas market. This is the place where the older style has to sell itself. Few people go out to the forest to walk through the farms of a hundred years ago. Most every visitor and certainly every Estonian has made it here, to the old town square where artifacts, with roots in the very homes I visited earlier, are now presented to a worldly mix of shoppers. The woolens, the wooden forks and spoons, old patterns on mittens and socks, now sold mostly by old Russian women (the irony!). Here we are, pushing Estonian artifacts to stay afloat. So that your heritage may stay afloat.






Estonia of the young and restless wants, as Poland wants, to push forward within the European community. Onwards and upwards. To do so, stores must sell and people must buy. Judging from the crowded stores and shopping streets and Happy Xmas signs, it’s doing okay.





I find Katarina Kaik – a back lane where a generation of young artists works in guild-like settings, producing wonderfully fresh, but by my standards, expensive art work for the public.





I can’t get much out of the one or two who are still there, selling their clay works late into the evning. The price of this? You’ll find it on the bottom. Thanks. I was looking at the sign that says DON’T TOUCH! That’s for this shelf of unfinished stuff. Okay. So what time do you open tomorrow? From 11 to six. But it depends. Ah. This is the extent of our conversation.

Next door, there is a much touted by my guide book Italian restaurant, Controvento. It’s run by Estonian Italians and the cooks are from Italy, Peru and Ecuador. I need a break from traditional Estonian fare and so I claim a table in the nicely atmospheric dining room.

Ohhhhh! So this is where new Estonia eats! At the farside table, the dour couple of yesterday is replaced by an animated pair – they could not be more engaged with each other, with life!

Next to me, a striking young woman shares a table with a guy who cannot keep his hands off his mobile. Her other companion looks a little bored with life, but they are swirling wine in the glass and looking as if they have learned the routines of fine wine consumption.





Me, I'm trying to stay with the most Estonian ingredients – salmon carpaccio (it’s Norwegian so that’s close!) and Estonian beef. With a huge wonderfully green and full of veggies salad on the side.








The cost is nearly the same as yesterday’s Estonian meal. But everything about it is tastier. My palate has migrated away from the traditional foods of my childhood years. Sometimes I think wistfully about herring with onion and sour cream and dumplings that my grandmother rolled out on her huge wooden board. But truthfully, I love the utter simplicity of a good cut of meat or a fresh fish dish, touched only by lemon juice and olive oil.

I get up to leave and I catch a conversation of three English businessmen, assessing the markets here. They have invested in Estonia. But it’s a small country and it can only deliver so much. One of the men is behind some coffee empire and he talks of rumors of the coming of Starbucks. Considering the rich culture of café life here, one has to wonder about the audacity of Starbucks, but then, Paris has more than one Starbucks and however much they are scorned by the French in the press, they seem to be staying in business.

Back at the hotel I get on Skype – an Estonian invention. It’s a wired nation alright. Internet and cell phone usage is higher here than in France. People pay for parking using their cell phones. You can even vote online.

Thinking about the day, the post that I have yet to write, the photos that may help push the narrative, I’m feeling the confusion about this place. In much the same way that Poland still sometimes confuses me. In part it has to do with the fast pace of change in both countries. Depending on which decade you were born in, your life’s experiences will be hugely different. And at the same time, in some communities, like for my highlanders in southern Poland and probably in rural areas here, time stands still. For these guys, change means the addition of a phone line and maybe a television. Maybe. And in Estonia, you have an entirely separate introduction of the Russian presence, which confuses the picture even more.

Still, it’s almost time for me to leave Estonia. I’ll do a quick post at the end of Wednesday and catch a very early flight out the next day. It’s good to leave when you’re still scratching your head. You need time to digest the one little piece of the puzzle that's been handed to you. (And the food -- you need time to digest the food as well.)

from Tartu, Estonia: winter ramble

Estonia’s “red white and blue” is “blue black and white.” They are powerful words here – symbols of nationhood and patriotism. I’m not sure how the Estonian flag came to have those colors. They look a little severe. Maybe it’s all that was left. Estonia, after all, was sadly late in getting its independence.

Tallinn is the capital, but they say that Tartu is the soul. The cultural center of Estonia. Tartu is in the south and it is a major university town. It’s also very small for a city that claims soul-hood (100,000). But I know all about old university cities that feel a great cultural preeminence (Krakow comes to mind) and so I am sympathetic.

I’m sitting on a bus, heading out to Tartu. Estonia is a rare European bird in that it does not have much of a rail system. It hasn’t much of a highway system either. I assume that an Estonian, placed on a German autobahn, would freak.

But the bus is nice. Of course, I get it all wrong. I can’t read the schedule properly, I sit in the wrong seat (who knew that they would assign) and, embarrassingly, on the ride back, I try to evict a nice old lady from a seat I think really is properly mine (another, wiser Estonian tells me: just sit somewhere else; seating rules must be broken if an older lady digs in her sensible black shoes; I nod and move elsewhere).

I am eager to see the countryside. If Tallinn is the capital and Tartu is the soul, I want also the heart of the country – the towns and villages that make up its core.

But I see no town or village. Two hundred kilometers of road that passes through not a single cluster of houses.

I do note the forests. Beautiful forests of birches and pines…





…and a rare farmstead. And, almost every farm has evidence of a bird that we, in Poland, and obviously here as well, regard as somewhat of a regional treasure: the stork. The graceful, wonderful, bundle-bearing creature that comes in spring and leaves at the end of summer.





And suddenly, we are in Tartu. The bus depot is to the side and I follow others toward what I hope will be the center. The streets are wet and muddy. It’s not raining, not at all, but there is undeniable slush everywhere and if you ever doubt that money spent on street cleaning is a good investment, you need only travel to Poland or Estonia in the winter and walk down streets that haven’t had this spray of luxury in a while.

Tartu is very different from Tallinn. I see it right away. Assertive. Bold. If I thought Estonians are reserved, I’ll change my mind here. Toward the center, you’ll find this monument:





The sculptor depicted himself and his one and a half year old son – to commemorate Children’s Day in the year 2004.

Or, on the main square, you’ll find this, placed here on the eve of the new millennium:





Note her short skirt, his tight embrace. The Tartu residents mocked it for being too modern for this neo-classical square, but it’s come to appear on nearly every picture symbolizing this city.

About the square. It’s supremely lovely, but you have to also love Christmas (and I do) to appreciate it now. Here, take a look:





I am, however, hungry for a walk in the country. And I know there’s a path along the river bank that heads way up, away from the town. I find it and set out. I have only a handful of hours before it gets dark. The gray skies do little to take away from the beauty of a cluster of birches, or of the grand sweep of willows. Spend a quiet moment with me on this walk:
























I get lost in thought and photos and I hardly notice the time. I’ve run into a man and his mutt and another guy fishing. No one else. And yet, Estonia feels as safe to me as Poland did in my childhood days. My sister tells me things have changed (in Poland), and yet, I continue to feel safe, in ways that I rarely do when walking alone on deserted city streets or country paths on the other side of the ocean.

I see the lights of Tartu in the distance. I turn around and head back.






In Tartu, I pause at the legendary Wilde Café. It’s a play on words. It’s Vilde, the Estonian, juxtaposed with Wilde, the Irishman. Here they are, in front of the café, engaged in banter:





It’s lovely inside. Deeply comfortable chairs, old printing presses, an adjacent bookstore. And warm tea and “grandma’s cake:” apple raspberry, with whipped cream. Okay, so they were generous with the cream:





Very late in the evening, I am back in Tallinn. I am keeping to the deeply Estonian mood of the day and so I head to Grandma’s Place – a small cellar restaurant that has been serving Estonian food to Estonians and tourists for years.





It is a warm place and the waitress, who has been part of the establishment for a long time, absolutely blows away the image of the staid Tallinnian. (If I want staid and solid, I'll look to the Estonian couple on the other side of the room. They don't smile. At all. Ever.)





My waitress is not from Tallinn, but from the south. She is all smiles and she is efficient and warm and I let her pick out the truly Estonian dishes, even as I know what I am in for, because I see most other Estonians in the room eating the same (pork and sauerkraut).



herring, onions and sour cream



pork, sauerkraut, potatoes

I am not a fan of pork because it recalls the decades where Polish restaurants (to which we were exiled on our summer trips back home before finally moving back to Warsaw in the sixties) had nothing but pork. Oh sure, there would be other menu items on lists, but if you asked for any of them, you would get the famous “nie ma” (we don’t have any of it). But I eat the pork now, with the familiar beet salad and horseradish and pickled onions (and potatoes, never forget the potatoes) and I even enjoy it in the way that you do when you know you don’t have to have it for another… several years.

I leave in the glow of a warm dinner, finished off by a baked apple and a glass of Estonian apple wine.





I hardly notice the cold dampness of the empty streets. Comfort foods make you forget the weather. For a while.

from Tallinn, Estonia: Russian moments

Clouds roll in, then retreat. Time to go outside, to walk, up and down well beaten Tallinn paths and to think about it all. Especially about the Russian presence here.

It’s Sunday and so I set out for a park. A big deal park here: the Kadriorg Park, along with the 18th century Kadriorg Palace—a gift from Peter the Great to his sweetie. She was to become an empress eventually, but you have to wonder if it was worth it, considering the sleeping around she had to do (not of her own choice) to rise from servant to empress. Life is about finding ways to cope.

I take the tram to its last stop. I know I must buy a ticket on the tram, but where? I walk back and forth in search of a conductor. No such person. The tram driver sits behind a glass partition. I ask one of the passengers – sorry, but where are the tickets? A finger points to the driver. I hand over 15 KR and she slips me a ticket. Next challenge: where do I “cancel” it? This is standard East Europe stuff: cancel, or risk arrest. Or huge fines. Or both.

I slip my ticket into what appears to be a cancelling machine. Nothing happens. Flip it over. Nothing. Everyone in the entire tram is staring at me. I shrug and rehearse the “I tried” defense in case a controller hops on board.

Only at the very end of the ride do I figure out that I used the wrong cancelling machine. Should’ve aimed for the other one. Who knew.




Have I mentioned that Estonian people appear to be…reserved?

The park is nearly empty. And so less significant than, Warsaw’s Lazienki! But, maybe that’s me, jostling for my own people and their contributions to posterity in this corner of Europe.





Katerina’s little nest egg is lovely though. It’s a museum now, with international art. Nice paintings. Best are the portraits of the Tsar-folk, including Katerina and her Peter.

A group of young girls is having a museum birthday party. Cool! Better than Fast Forward (Madison’s roller skating venue)! A museum person enchants them with Katerina’s treasure trove of essentials. They giggle. I giggle. They move on. I linger.





The little palace is close to the sea and so I take a stroll toward the water. There is a monument, with an inscription in Russian. I read the words, but I cannot place the commemoration. Ships? Lost hope? On the part of the Russians? Here? I ask someone nearby and he explains: it’s a monument to commemorate the loss of the Russian war vessel that traveled between here and Helsinki in 1893. Sinking ships, sinking powers of dictatorships, is that all in the past?





The Baltic waves hit the shore gently. The water looks unwelcoming. I know this is unfair. It’s the Baltic, for God’s sake, not the Mediterranean. And it’s December. And a gray December at that.





The birds jump waves, artfully, playfully. I watch. In a few days the deep freeze is coming. I’ll be gone by then. In any event, this is plenty cold for me.




On my way out, I pause at the old Coffee House (it’s part of the estate. So it’s old). I drink a good Russian style tea and eat with great pleasure a poppy seed pastry. Better than great! A flood of sweet childhood memories hits me. Of dense, sweet poppyseeds, of warm cafés, of life in this part of the world.





I head back to the Old Town. Or rather, new Tallinn in old quarters. I pass children skating in the shadows of St. Nicolas church.





And still, there is the Alexander Nevsky cathedral, looming over us all. Staring down at the city that dared defy the Russians. And now, a Santa dangles from a townhouse and children skate and the indications are that all’s well here, in Estonia. Leadership crises and political corruption notwithstanding. I should talk... I’m from Poland after all.





I want to spend the afternoon at the Museum of the Occupation. When I first heard of it, I thought, incorrectly: oh, it’s about World War II. I’ve since found out that the museum documents the Soviet occupation – from 1940 until 1991.

But I cannot find the Museum. I ask one Estonian looking couple. No, we’re not Estonian. No clue. I ask an older woman. Surely she is a local. She is that. She answers in stern Russian – ya nye ponyemayu ( I don’t understand). She walks on. I could have persevered, in Russian. I’m okay with that much of it, but I let it go.

Is it hard to be Russian in Estonia? What if you once believed in the Soviet Union? What if the ideology (if not its leadership) appealed to your sense of fairplay? My family was like that. It was a long time before they gave up and walked away from it all. I had left home by then.

The Museum is so painful! An independent nation (finally!), vowing neutrality during the war, then aligning itself with the Nazis with the hope of preserving its nationhood, then finding that not Germany nor the Red Army would support a free state. The war years and those immediately after are like a confusing nightmare where you don’t know which person will stab you first. Except we know the real outcome – Estonia becomes part of the Soviet Union. At the very beginning of the war, the Germans struck a deal with Stalin. Sort of like handing over Katerina to Peter the Great. Here, you take Estonia.

I watch news clips. Survivors, recalling this period of occupation. It’s not the Russians we despise. It’s the government!

Well yes, sure, I understand the distinction. And yet, the Russian families came to this place to find a better life in this conquered land. They didn’t come to Estonia. They came to the Soviet state of Estonia. Who can sort this stuff out now?

I look at the row of suitcases.





They once held the belongings of those who sought to escape. From the Germans, the Russians…

And in the basement, I see the old statues. Torn down from the streets of Tallinn just in the last decade. Fallen heroes of the Soviet Union.






I walk back to the old town. A trolley bus rattles past. That and the tram cars – staples of transportation in post-war Poland as well. The buildings I pass – Same design, same windows. Same street signs, too, as those back home.





I’m back at the Christmas Market now. And now I hear it everywhere. Russian. Only Russian. Yesterday, my ears were picking out Estonian. Today it’s Russian.





A Russian here must learn Estonian to gain citizenship. A vast number remains here without citizenship. Estonian citizenship brings freedom of travel abroad. But Estonian citizenship means that you need a visa to enter Russia. What if your friends and relatives live in Russia?

I head for a sauna at a nearby hotel. So uncontroversial. I sit and I count the minutes. Saunas always make me feel as if I am one step from suffocating. I walk out when I can’t take any more of it. Maybe it is why I find them so comforting. I survived. Still breathing. Yay.

But there’s one more chapter to this day. I have picked Troika, a Russian restaurant, for dinner.

A woman croons the melodic ballads of Russia. Vodka? The waitress asks. I deliberate, then pass. I’ll drink the Georgian wine from Tbilisi, I tell her. I traveled there once. With my father and mother. When that country, too, was a Soviet state.

I eat meat dumplings and Vladivostock catfish. And boiled potatoes. I ask for some veggies or a salad and I’m given a huge plate of pickles, with honey and sour cream for dipping.













Yes, I eat it all. It’s food as I remember it. The food of Eastern Europe. Some drown their worries in vodka. Me, I eat dumplings and catfish and pickles.