EEK!

My time in Estonia is sadly at an end, for now. My personal circumstances have changed since moving to Tallinn last December, and for a variety of reasons I wanted to avoid triggering residency, which, allowing for all my travels over the year, would have happened at the end of August. And so, after my trip to Vienna, I moved to Скопје, rather than returning to Tallinn.

It’s interesting how quickly I acclimatised to Estonian life - I’m spending much more of my time comparing life in Скопје to Tallinn, rather than Belfast. Hopefully I can make it back soon…

For the whole time I’ve been here, Tallinn has been a city undergoing rapid change. The most noticeable version of this, of course, is a skyline full of cranes with new buildings going up everywhere. Over the last few months there’s also been the dramatic change of tourists pouring into the city, and the Old Town, in particular, adapting to their presence with a burst of outdoor terraces (no doubt even more popular this year due to the new indoor smoking ban). Even the steady climb of inflation, high enough to keep Estonia out of the eurozone for another few years, has been noticeable, as items that I buy in the supermarket week by week slowly creep up an EEK or two here and there.

But even so far this week I’ve noticed three dramatic changes. Firstly, my local Rimi has rearranged where everything is. Tesco used to do this quite regularly, so it shouldn’t be that much of a shock to me, but it was quite disconcerting to walk through the door of a shop I’ve been in two or three times a week for 8 months, and hardly recognise it. The biggest change was to move all the light drinks (Coke, water, alcopops, and “long drinks” etc. that dominated the entire right hand side of the store), over to the other side where the more hardcore alcohol is (Vodka, wine, Vodka, spirits, Vodka, etc). This is presumably to make it easier to close off that entire section during the times that Tallinn County have declared that alcohol sales should be banned (currently after 8pm every day). Previously they had to section off various areas with security tape, like a CSI zone, so I guess they got fed up with having to jump through so many hoops every time the county changed its mind again (for a while they seemed to go through this madness several times a week).

Then, today, whilst out for a stroll at lunchtime, I was passed by a number 6 tram. This was very surprising, as there are only four trams/lines, from Kopli and Tondi respectively to Kadriorg and Ülemiste. But today I saw a Kopli-Tondi tram. I’m assuming that there’s also a new number 5 tram, which I guess must be Kadriorg-Ülemiste, but I haven’t spotted that yet, and I can’t find any information at all online about this. (Wikipedia informs me that there used to be a #5 tram between Kopli and Vana-Lõuna, but it was shut down a couple of years ago. It still knows nothing of these new ones.) This new tram could prove useful if I need to go visit my bank’s central offices again, as previously I would have needed to get two rams for that, changing at Viru Keskus (although, like everything in central Tallinn, they’re well within plausible walking distance).

But the biggest shock this week has been the light. Over the past few months I’ve become a huge fan of the fact that it wasn’t getting dark until nearly midnight. I didn’t realise how much I liked this until I visited Košice at the end of June, and it was dark by 9:30pm. But unfortunately the days are quickly starting to shorten again, and last night I was stunned by how dark it was by 10pm. Although lots of people commented on how insane it was to relocate Tallinn in the winter, they all meant the -23°C temperatures, which turned out to not overly bother me. No-one mentioned the 20 hours of darkness, and now that I’ve experienced the joys of nearly 24 hours of light, I think I’ll find the short days unbearable. It’s enough to make me want to fly south for the winter, but it turns out that there’s nowhere habitable in the Southern Hemisphere that’s even as far south as Tallinn is north. But I still expect that I’ll want to spend December somewhere on the underside of the world.

Google Maps have finally added street names for Tallinn, along with directions finding, and all the place names I added months ago to Google Earth! I know my way around the main areas fairly well by now, but I don’t actually know what lots of the streets are called.

So occasionally I’ll need to go somewhere but not recognise its address, and spend quite a while finding it on a map, only to eventually realise it’s actually somewhere I know quite well. It’s fairly easy to find places in the Old Town by checking one of the many tourist maps I have lying around, but anywhere outside that is always a little trickier. Hopefully now things will be a lot easier.

One of the many things I really like about the banking system in Estonia is how well integrated it is with various other online systems.

In particular, I really like how, if I’m booking flights on Estonian Air, I can pay directly from my bank account rather than having to use a credit or debit card. At checkout I just select my bank, and get transferred to my normal internet banking system where, once I’ve cleared security, I get a pre-filled form for making a payment to the airline. Then as the transaction can happen in pretty much real-time (Yay for no clearing cycles), the airline can confirm my payment and complete the transaction straight-away.

Estonian life is full of little things like this that just Make Sense. In the UK there would be a million reasons given why you could never do something like this. Here they just make it happen.

With all remnants of the winter snows gone, temperatures up 10°, and a few extra hours of daylight. Tallinn is becoming a different city. The tourists are starting to arrive en masse, wheeling their crates of cheap vodka, beer, and cigarettes around their harbour.

Yesterday I took advantage of a sunny day to explore the Linnahall. This was built for the 1980 Olympics, and serves as a ‘bridge’ into the city from the harbour. Any of my readers who went to QUB can consider it a cross between a Mayan temple and the David Bates Building. Mostly it’s a huge series of crumbling stone steps on a wide variety of split levels. I’ve wanted to investigate this since I arrived here, but it’s precarious enough to navigate parts of it, and it would be almost impossible in snow.

A building like this could never survive in the UK. The safety elf would have it closed down in a heartbeat. Stone steps that have crumbled away into nothingness, with no handrails, and no guard rails to stop you tumbling over the edge are a distinct no-no there. Walking across the top of buildings generall doesn’t seem to be a major tourist pastime in the UK.

It doesn’t seem very touristy here either. A few tourists peer quizzically at it from a distance, or take a few photographs, but clambering all over it seems to be reserved for locals - particularly at the sides and back, which are covered in graffiti, and where you have also have to keep a look out for extreme cyclists racing down the slopes at the sort of speed where they’re not going to be able to get out of your way.

But there are few hidden treasures, and it’s worth spending a while investigating, if even just for the exercise and the great views. There also seems to be some sort of nightclub tucked away at the back, and this is also where the Copterline 18 minute helicopter journey to Helskink departs. I must return soon take some photos of my own, so I can replace these “borrowed” ones…

It’s been a hectic 6 weeks, and I haven’t had a lot to write here, mainly I haven’t actually been in Tallinn much. Two trips to California, and another one back to N. Ireland have fried my brain. I have no idea what month it is, never mind day, or timezone.

Grrr. The story of How Easyjet Ripped Me Off needs to be told more widely than just this little distributary. Hopefully the extra googlejuice from my main blog will spread the warning wider afield.

Estonian Air, on the other hand, have quite happily allowed me to check in 2 x 25kg without charge on a 1 x 20kg limit. Almost every other bag I see coming off their carousels has a “Heavy” sticker slapped on it…

I’ve just returned from California for the second time in a month, and my body is getting really rather confused. One thing that should help this time is the extra daylight. We’re fast approaching the cross-over point of 12 hours of daylight, and the extra 5 or 6 minutes a day adds up quickly. On top of that, even though sunrise isn’t officially until about 7am at the moment, it’s getting light quite a bit earlier than that. 5am this morning looked similar to how 9am looked when I arrived in December. I’m operating mostly on US time so I don’t notice sunset quite so much, but there’s a few interesting events on over the next few weeks that might manage to drag me out of my apartment of an evening.

Apologies for the lack of posting for a while, but I was in California. This was largely made possible by the extraordinary service of Estravel in Suur-Karja. The trip was arranged at the very last minute (booked on Friday for Monday departure), and Liis patiently sat for well over an hour trying to find me flights that wouldn’t cost an absolute fortune. Eventually she found me business class flights to JFK via Prague for less than the price that most airlines wanted for Economy.

I’d never even heard of Czech Air before so wasn’t sure what to expect. They’re no BA or Virgin, but I usually hate any flight over about 6 hours, and they managed to make a 9½ hour flight quite passable, so I would certainly fly with them again. (They’re probably equivalent to someone like Iceland Air.) Plus they provided the best airline food I’ve encountered in quite some time. (And with real metal cutlery!)

The main disadvantage became apparent on the return trip - the seats don’t recline enough to sleep well. Even though I was ludicrously tired, having had to leave my hotel shortly after 3am to get the first flight to JFK, I got almost no sleep on the way home. Coupled with the 10 hour difference my sleep patterns are now even more messed up then before…

When people warned me about the weather in Estonia I thought they were mainly referring to the temperature. I’m generally quite warm, so this doesn’t bother me too much, although the couple of times it’s reached sub zero not just in °C but also in °F then I’ve been willing to admit that it is might actually indeed be a little chilly.

However, I wasn’t really expecting the snow to bring quite so much physical danger. I’m getting better at judging whether the maniac drivers are actually going to try to stop when I’m crossing the road, although there seems to be at least one every day who decides just a little too late that driving straight into me might not be a good idea, and ends up skidding at me quite aggressively instead. But the real danger seems to be from huge sheets of snow suddenly falling from the tops of buildings into the street. I had foolishly assumed that people were choosing to walking down the middle of the streets in the Old Town because the footpaths were too slippy or had much more snow to wade through. This afternoon, after a near miss just in front of me, immediately followed by a direct hit on a couple just behind me, I decided that it would be much safer avoiding the footpaths entirely and jostling with the cars instead.