013 The Tallinn experience

After the great boat trip from Stockholm, I stayed in the beautiful city of Tallinn for two nights. I was couchsurfing with Artti, a most interesting fellow who just came back from traveling around Europe without any money and survived by playing guitar on the street, hitchhiking and of course Couchsurfing. He now lives with his brother in a slightly derelict building on the outskirts of Tallinn, in an area where everyone speaks Russian (50% of Tallinn is Russian speaking). They just moved into the flat, and did not have warm water yet, nor a shower, so it was, lets say, somewhat primitive. The people however where grand. Artti showed me around in the city, and took me to some of his favorite places in town.

Tallinn turned out to be a very pleasant city. I found I liked it a lot more than Stockholm (sorry for all the Stockholmians out there). The center is very very old, and very very beautiful, and also very very full of tourists. But despite that last inconvenience, it felt like a good place. Surprisingly (for me) it is not a particularly cheap place to be in. I found that a beer, for example, costs about the same as in the Netherlands, same for food in the supermarket. Apparently the introduction of the Euro sent the prices skywards here. But the city has the right size, enough to see and do, and apparently very friendly people. This was the first capital city in which I encountered elderly shop attendants commenting on my good taste in choosing deserts in the supermarket, and museum guards pulling me along to make sure I did not mis out on a particularly interesting part of the exhibition.

One of the days, when Artti was working, I rented a bike, and had a nice ride around town, visiting some random inustrial area, a big park, a palace, and a huge art museum. They had amongst other things a very interesting exhibition about Estionan art during the Soviet period, showing for example paintings with a typical Estonian family on it. But to make sure it would not upset the Soviet censors, the family room included a poster of Stalin, showing that this was a proper patriotic house. On the top floor was also a more experimental exhibition, with a machine that was dropping lots of watterdrops at certain interfalls, creating words that were falling down, and were only visible for a short moment.

Later we went to picnic on a small stretch of beach in between a factory and the harbor where the cruise ships come into Tallinn. The next night he took me to a huge building that was build in the 70’s for the Olympic games that took place in Moscou and for which the water related events were located in Tallinn. It looked like some misplaced Aztec ruins, whit lots of stairs and a viewing platform where people hung out during the night. Perfect, those places you would never have found on your own.

The last night in Tallinn, we stayed in the flat with the two brothers, and two last minute couch surfers. Thank god for good ear plugs.