Diary of trip to Tallin.

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Tallin, Estonia

Saturday, July 28, 2000

Dear Friends and Relates,

First quiz question: Where's Tallinn?

Second question: Why Tallinn?

Third question: How's Tallinn?

First answer: Tallinn is a city of about 500,000 people that is the capital of Estonia, a Baltic country with about a million-and-a-half folks altogether. It is across from Finland's capital of Helsinki. Keep in mind that our fair city of Kyiv is a couple or three million people, so Tallinn and Estonia are very small in comparison.

Second answer: Why not? It's a 90 minute flight from here and Air Estonia offers a great package deal. There may be some of you who question the wisdom of flying something called "Air Estonia" but it was a fine trip on a modern Boeing 737. The company has 2 or 3 of them, I believe. (The company IS 2 or 3 of these planes actually.)

Third answer: Great.

Tallinn is centered on an Old City from the 13th and 14th Century. Two-thirds of the original city wall still stands and many of the old churches and homes remain as well. The old part is surrounded by ordinary ex-Soviet architecture including the big apartment blocks that make us feel at home. But it wasn't ex-Soviet. More like pre-Sweden. The people generally looked like my Norwegian relatives in the Ballard district of Seattle. The food was ... well, it was a bit of a combination of Russian and Norwegian. So we ate meals at Italian restaurants and saved our local eating for desserts. Any American-Norwegian knows the difference between lutefisk (main course) and lefsa (dessert). Scandinavians know hors d'oeuvres and desserts but we haven't a clue with main dishes.

Marianne and I flew up on Friday afternoon and back Monday morning. I'm not sure I can give you an event by event story - because there doesn't seem to have been any events recorded in my memory. There are generally good impressions but no remarkable events. I'll let others comment on the great cosmic meaning of such a vision. For now, I'll just show you some pictures and see if they leave you with an impression as well.

First, we found our modern hotel. Quite nice and with a feel much smaller than it's actual 24 stories. But the best part was the view from our 21st-floor room. We looked out over the lower old city, the upper old city, and beyond to the Baltic Sea. The light was magic: soft sunset an hour or so before midnight and a slow, glowing sunrise two or three hours later. We ended up with lots of pictures from our windows but nothing captured the in-person feeling.

Saturday morning we started wandering. We took the ten-minute walk to the Old City with no particular goal. I can't even say we brought back memories of one, or two, or three truly inspirational places. Maybe the 13th century church in the Upper City, where the floor stones covered 500-year-old crypts: this was a special place. In our travels "over here" we've SEEN older churches , but I've never SENSED older. Beyond that, the wall was everywhere. At about 700 years, it gives an historic context to the place, whether it's shops, streets or spires.

Not everything was old. One particular courtyard in the upper Old City was wonderfully colorful. The irony is that for most of the last half-century this was within a Soviet compound that used the nearby church steeple to mount antennas to listen to the West. Times have changed. Now they just tune in CNN-International and get their news like any other government.

Speaking of old, Soviet stories.: Sunday morning, we took a city tour bus to look a bit beyond the Old City. The guide spoke in English (the universal European language) and Finnish (for the invading hordes across the Baltic Sea. Prices are cheaper in Estonia.) We saw a wonderful old residential part of town with houses we would call "Victorian" in California. Turn of the century (the one before this) wooden structures showing this was once a gracious port with individual wealth.

Two wars and fifty years of Soviet rule changed the flavor of the buildings but the Baltic States never settled easily under the hammer and sickle. We visited one site, called (roughly) "Singing Stadium", where, in the late 1980's, 300,000 Estonians gathered and sang nationalist songs in demonstration for an independent nation. That was approximately one-third of the country's Estonian population. Today they have their independence, except from the Finnish tourists.

Back in the old town, we found a number of vantage points to look out and see the narrow old streets under the wall's 28 remaining towers. Some towers even have names with Fat Margaret being the most famous. It was named after a massive cannon it housed before it became a jail for prostitutes. (There's a ribald joke in there somewhere but I'm not interested.) Somehow, from our various vantage points, we ended up with a series of roof pictures and here's a couple. Maybe roofs aren't your thing but when we saw them in person they were ideal photo subjects.

Not everything was building of course. We have to end with a couple shots of Marianne doing the things that make us who we are. Here she is looking at an old stone carving from a 13th Century Dominican Monastery. She's partial to this religious order because of her grade school and high school years where the Dominican nuns taught her everything she knew. Or, at least everything they thought she SHOULD know.

Last but not least, my wife the artist woked at taking a close-up of a tough Estonian steak. Tallinn is nice but it's small, and after awhile one has to work harder for entertainment.

But we recommend it nonetheless.

Regards and write if you get work,

John and Marianne.

ps: The last line is in honor of someone whom we actually hope doesn't get work - until he's visited his father anyway.