i keep a diary

January 29, 2005

Baltic Vacation Part Two: Traveling Solo in Estonia

Grant and Jake had left a few days before me to go on an all-expenses-paid tour of Finland and Lapland (courtesy of Finlandia Vodka). After they were done, the plan was for us to all meet up and head out on a ten day trip through several countries. I found a cheap flight into Tallinn, Estonia. So my plan was to fly into Tallinn, hang out there on my own for two days - take the quick ferry over to Helsinki, Finland to meet up with Grant and Jake (and crash at the ridiculous hotel that Finlandia was picking up the tab for).

After a wild time in Helsinki, the three of us would then head back to Tallinn, then to Berlin where our plan was to meet up with a total internet stranger that I met because he reads this site who offered us free places to stay in Berlin and Budapest, Hungary. Got all that? Ok, here we go, let's get it on!

Saturday, January 29th

me
Meredith snapped this pic of me in her apartment doing a panicky last-minute check to make sure I had everything I needed for my trip.
154 orchard ˆ me
me
Me at the top of the steps to Meredith's apartment getting ready to hail a cab.
154 orchard ˆ suitcase ˆ me
The distant Manhattan skyline always looks so puny in pics taken on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
nyc ˆ skyline ˆ taxi
I'm always so paranoid about losing my passport or something important in a cab that I always take a picture of cab's ID plaque.
taxi
me
Then I usually take a picture of myself chilling in the back while I've got the camera out. Yup. Here's me, just chilling.
sunglasses ˆ taxi ˆ me
NYC-Frankfurt for the first leg of the trip. I'm sitting here typing these captions on 2/26/06 (over a year after the trip happened) so I'm referring to a little travel notebook I took with me to help job my memory. The only thing I have written about this flight is "Sat next to a heavy German man on the flight out of NYC who reeked so badly of strong cologne that interior of my nose felt like burning."
tickets

Saturday, January 29th

Had a two-hour in Frankfurt before catching my Estonian Air flight into Tallinn - hey, you can smoke in the airport in Germany!
airport
While walking around the airport kept seeing all these signs for separate "prayer rooms" they had set up to accommodate five different religions. The room for Christian prayer is a normal room. The other four rooms for the other denominations all have trapdoor floors that send any (filthy, non-Christian infidel) inhabitants down a chute into a giant incinerator. You gotta keep an eye on those sneaky Germans!
airport ˆ sign
I had to take a bus to a different terminal and laughed my ass off at this "wagen halt" button. It means "stop the bus," but my friend Alysha uses it to describe the cringey feeling you get when you watch someone else do something that makes you so embarrassed to be a fellow human that you have to leave the area. (This came up at an NHL match when after the 2nd period, they had an "entertainer" in a sparkly silver lycra unitard skate around on the ice and juggle.)
bus ˆ sign
The shuttle bus drove us out onto the tarmac and right up to the plane.
airplane ˆ airport
I had much better luck on the second leg of my flight, I got seated next to two supercute Estonian girls who were living in Dubai and working as flight attendants and were taking some time off to come home and visit their family.
flying
I made it through customs without event and cab a cab to...
airport
...Tallinn's "Old Town" which is one of the most well-preseverd medieval-era towns in Europe. See that tower? It's one half of the "Viru Gates," one of the main breaks in the huge wall that surrounded the entire city.
walking
I skidded my wheeled suitcase through the windy streets looking for the Vana Tom hostel which seemed like one of the better deals (at less than $50 a night) in this section of town. It also had the added perk of being located...
walking
...directly below the "Striptiis Baar." Hmmmm...for some reason this strange Estonian word piqued my interest.
stairs ˆ walking
I checked into my room a little after 1pm (local time). I did a little unpacking and then decided to explore the town on foot before jet lag set in.
hotel
It's weird traveling alone. It's even weirder traveling alone in a Baltic country in the smack-dab middle of winter on a Monday afternoon. The place was utterly devoid of tourists. The only other people walking around were Estonian moms running errands.
walking
So I walked around the Old Town snapping pics.
walking
Then I wandered outside the walled area of town and explored the old Soviet-Era industrial buildings (from 1944 until 1991, Estonia was part of the USSR) near the water (Tallinn sits right on the Gulf of Finland in the Baltic Sea).
buildings ˆ walking
The whole coastline area is filled with these type of building. Eerily pretty.
walking
I'll spare you more pics of abandoned buildings. After I started to freeze my ass off, I looped back around and headed for Old Town to look for something to eat.
walking
Ever the intrepid fast-food connoisseur, I eschewed some of the finer Estonian eateries and opted instead to check out (Estonia's very own??) HESS BURGER. Mmmm...tastes just like home, except, um, different and deliciously weird. After I finished eating I noticed it was starting to get dark so I went back to Vana Tom to read for a while and take a little nappity nap.
fast food in foreign countries ˆ food ˆ weird foreign food
I woke up around 9pm and decided to go out and explore the Old Town area with my cam. It was exceptionally cold outside (probably around 10° F) so the streets were hushed, empty and bathed in amber light.
walking
Not too much to say about these pics.
walking
Just looking at them brings back that weird haunty feeling I had while walking around a strange city at night alone with nothing to do.
walking
I took a narrow tunnel that went underneath the walled part of town and followed a cobblestone road up a hill to check out some of the old Russian Orthodox cathedrals.
The view behind me.
Sah-sah-spooky.
best ˆ walking
An outside view of another one of the city's gates.
Walking back towards the town's square.
Tallinn has the oldest medieval town hall in Europe. Shit dates back to the 1200s!!!
The entire town hall square was totally deserted.
Well, except for that one dude. (Fucker.) This is the place they used to hold motherfucking public executions! And according the guidebook I have, on on single day in 1806, 72 people were publicly executed here for their participation in a peasant's revolt. (If you listed closely, you could almost hear an Iron Maiden song penning itself in the night's icy wind!)
I wandered around the town a while longer looking for some nightclubs I'd read about that were supposed to get crazy on the weekend - figuring I'd scope them out for when I returned to Tallinn with Jake and Grant after meeting up with them in Finland. And when I could no longer feel my feet...
...I decided to duck into the only pub that I could find that seemed to be open on a Sunday night at 11pm. Some replica British pub filled with UK ex-pats. I had few pints and half-heartedly watched Chelsea v. Birmingham (booooooring) then decided to call it a night.
beer ˆ money
Walking down some twisty back road on the way back to my hostel from the pub, I came across these disco lights being projected on the wall across the street. The international sign for only particular thing....NOOOODIE BAR! My pockets bulging with literally THOUSANDS of Estonian Krooni (which is like TENS of US dollars) I was feeling like a tycoon ready to shower bills on hundreds of svelte, exotic, cock-starved Russian teens looking for handsome Amerikan man. I paid the cheap cover (1 drink included!) and parted the curtain into the main room ready to break some hearts (or at least see some sweet, sweet boobs).
strippers ˆ walking
Instead I found an empty club and an empty stage. I was about halfway through with my complimentary (frozen, fruity!) drink when they finally managed to get a girl on stage. I stuck around until she finished her set, politely declined her offer to come back to my hotel for 1,000 EEK (like $85) and called it a night. (It would've been a wash if it hadn't been for the fruity drink!). I got home a little after 1am and took a few Tylenol PM so I could sleep at night and try to get on local time. Had crazy ass dreams all night but still woke up feeling refreshed (in not a little displaced) the next morning.
strippers

Sunday, January 30th

9am. Did I mention that Vana Tom's room price included a delicious meal in the morning?
food ˆ hotel ˆ sandwich
Complete with an eensie-weensie juice box with a bearded wood-elf? He loves him some juice!
weird foreign food
After finishing my lunch, I set out to do more exploring and to try to find a set of electrical adapters so I could recharge my cam batteries before they all died.
walking
Yep, more photos of the town.
walking
Traveling alone isn't very exciting.
buildings
I mean sure there's all sorts of weirdo buildings that you've never seen before.
buildings
With random architectural details you've never seen before (like these art deco topless Egyptian ladies, wtf?).
buildings
But other than that, it's not very interesting to show your pictures of.
Ok, well this one maybe.
Actually, this one too.
Actually, now that I think about it, this is a picture of three medieval turrets that are part of a huge wall complex built to keep the inhabitants safe from hordes of sieging armies. Shit's pretty dope.
But now we're back to boring old alleys.
Meh.
Hmmm...I see rope up there! Maybe they used this building to hang motherfuckers!! That's pretty bad ass. (But it's actually probably just for a bell or something lame. Never mind.) After I managed to located a charger, I decided to hit a coffee shop, warm up and check my email. The place was empty except for three totally gorgeous Estonian girls who were hanging out with one dude. As I across the counter from them on my computer, I noticed that everyone in the group kept looking at me, whispering and giggling. A few minutes later, as they were leaving, one of the girls walked over to me, said hi, slid me a note, and then ran outside to join her friends in a fit of giggles.
Awwww, yeah. I was totally stoked. It looked like my boring old trip was about to take a turn toward fun with a capital ET (Estonian Teen!). I finished up my emails, and while paying for my coffee I asked the counter girl who seemed to know the group that had slipped me the note, "Which one of the girls is Vitali?" She laughed and said, "Oh, you're not gay? Vitali was the boy who was with those girls." Doh. Tallinn's a typical small town. You drink just one fruity frozen drink in public (it doesn't even matter if it was in a strip club!) and the next thing you know everyone's got you pegged for being a gay! Just my luck! On the upside...
note ˆ strangers
...The Simpsons in Estonian! Hahah! Afterwards, I went home and took a nap and then for dinner I went...
tv
...to the fanciest, most-expensive and highest rated restaurant in Tallinn. Table for one, please! I showed up wearing my down ski jacket and a backpack. My very snooty, tuxedoed waiter took them from me to hang and carried them off to the coatroom like he was holding warm dog shit. Hahaha. Indignant fucker!
restaurant
Here's the view of my nearby window overlooking the town's square. I had the bacon-wrapped filet mignon served in a blueberry sauce with potatoes au gratin and a few single malt scotches. Cost of the whole meal with tip? 340 EEK. ($26 dollars! Holy cah-rap!).
best ˆ lamp ˆ restaurant
After dinner I went back to Vana Tom and was greeted by a supercute Russian girl at the desk, Christina. I started asking her about fun things to do in town that night and she told me that most bars and clubs were closed on Monday nights. I asked her if she wanted to head out and join me for a drink, but she told me she had to stay on duty at the desk until 2am. As I was getting ready to head back to my room she suddenly exclaimed, "Actually, you are cute boy! Do you want me to call my single friend Anna and she if she will take you out on the town?" I was like "Yeah, that'd be great!" Anna answered, but she was already in bed for the evening. Anna asked if I was free the next night and I explained that I was taking the ferry to Helsinki to meet two friends but that I'd be back in Tallinn with them later in the week. So with Anna's permission, Christina gave me Anna's number and it was decided that I'd call her when I was back in town and we'd go out.

I hung out with Christina at the desk shooting the shit for awhile and then decided to walk around outside (it had started snowing) to take some pics of the town at night in the snow.
strangers ˆ travel buddies
I headed off into the snow taking pics and wondering if there was any chance that by "hang out" later Christina meant "make out."
More snow and churches.
Much less interesting than exotic Russian hostel desk clerks. (And ps - thank Fuck I didn't see the movie hostel before I took this trip or I wouldn't spent my entire trip dreading that every nicety extending my way was just a ploy to kidnap me and sell to a dungeon where people pay to torture and kill humans.)
As it was, I was already spooked by the telltale snow tracks that indicated a struggle had taken place earlier that night. One that clearly ended with someone being thrown down a medieval well.
The Old Town from the top of one of the hills.
Walking back towards the hostel.
Another crazy Russian Orthodox church.