Estonia Birthday

Long story short: our home network drive died earlier this winter. It plays an integral role in storing and backing up all our computers, including management of our digitial pictures and movies. The long delay in getting caught up is due to the time I had to spend first trying to repair the drive, which ultimately led to getting a new one, installing it, and getting it fully loaded with all our stuff. (I have two rotating backups of our network drive, so there was never any risk of losing all our old stuff, but I didn’t like the idea that none of work was being backed up at all.)

So that’s all behind us, but in addition to that it’s been a very busy period. No so much in February or early March, but from my birthday forward things have been a little hectic. There’s a lot to catch up on. It’s not gonna happen in a single post.

So we’re gonna start with my birthday present: the three-day getaway Trine gave me for my birthday.

No pictures of the stars of our blog in here, so if that’s what you’re after just move long, but there are some good shots of Tallinn (and me and Trine).

She’d asked me early in the winter what I wished for my birthday, and I’d told her my wish was for the same thing I always wished for: a trip somewhere I’ve never been or an experience I’ve never tried—but a surprise either way.

I reminded her that Eastern Europe was pretty cheap: that my weekend trips with the boys usually came in at under 1500 kroner per person—about two hundred bucks—for transportation and lodging.

“We’re not going anywhere near Russia right now,” she told me.

A few weeks later she told me I’d have to take March 13-15 off from work because we were going on a trip for my birthday. I was pumped.

I don’t understand the mechanics of the logic, but for whatever reason my favorite thing about a surprise is trying to figure out what it is. That’s the fun of it for me. That’s why I like knowing I’m going to be surprised long in advance rather than just surprised on the spur of the moment: the anticipation is my favorite part.

Trine gave me no hint as to where we were going. As late as the Friday before our Sunday departure I was still baffled: I was asking GPT to make lists for me of all tourist-worthy cities within a ninety-minute flight of Copenhagen and cross referencing it against places I had been and the relative interest Trine might have in it. I had to drive Molli to Birkerød for something on Saturday and I drilled her the whole trip. She was Sphinx-like in her answers. Saturday afternoon Trine told me what I should pack: pack for cold weather, she said, but bring a bathing suit.

That didn’t narrow things down much: the only cities I’d considered candidates that it might have ruled out (Milan, Barcelona) were showing pretty dismal weather reports, and any hotel can have a pool.

Spring still hadn’t arrived in Denmark—in fact we’d just had a couple of little snowstorms.

And the lakes in the forest were still frozen over.

Most of the rest of northern and central Europe was experiencing the same, and southern Europe wasn’t a whole lot warmer.

Long story slightly less long: by the time we were in the airport on Sunday I was still none the wiser, even though I knew by then that our flight would be somewhere between 16:00 and 18:00 and could review all the outgoing flights in that time slot.

The last thing I did before leaving home was leave the girls a checklist with a couple of minimal rules:

We had the most effortless airport experience I’d ever had in Copenhagen: Trine had checked us in online, we had no baggage, and there was no security line at all. So we had time to settle in at O’Leary’s (the Boston Sports Pub so inexplicably in the middle of Copenhagen airport) for a couple of scotches, and Trine gave me one last chance to guess.

After her answers to a long series of questions I could think of only one city that met the criteria I’d learned: a continental European city located on a sea or ocean, a capital, a place neither of us had ever been, and a place with a strong historical tie to Denmark (but not a Danish territory). Reykjavik came close, but we’d been there together too many times and it was too far away.

“We got our flag from Estonia,” I said, “but it’s butt-up against Russia and you said you wouldn’t go anywhere near Russia.”

“I lied,” she said.

I spotted this island and assumed it was Bornholm, but it turns out to have been Gotland:

We were flying north and looking east, so that’s the southern end of the big island.

I also got the northern tip:

It was just a ten-minute taxi ride to our hotel, the Metropol Spa Hotel in the Rotermann neighborhood right on the edge of Old Town. (Spa: hence the bathing suits.)

We got ourselves settled in, then went out to have a look around.

It was a Sunday night and bitterly cold, so there wasn’t a lot of life in the city. We ended up just tucking into a Unibet sports bar and having a couple of drinks while Trine kicked my ass at some variant of billiards I didn’t remember ever having played before. (Trine says of course I did, we used to own such a table. I have no memory.)

MJ jerseys are apparently a commodity: in looking over old photos recently, I found a shot almost identical to this one from a sports bar in Rome back in 2015:

We had a nice conversation with the young bartender about Tallinn and what we should see. We also asked a lot of questions about the war: she gave us the sense that Tallinn was second to no one in its hatred of Russia, but that Estonians were working extra hard to be sure their Russian-speaking minority was still loved.

I would later learn that wasn’t entirely accurate—the Russian minority isn’t being persecuted, but they are being treated differently than the majority population, and in fact the prime minister’s coalition had just won re-election mostly on a platform of doing everything possible to help Ukraine and getting the Russian language out of Estonian schools and public institutions.

Now, I’ll try not to talk too much as we go through my travelogue of Tallinn, which began Monday morning with a stroll into Old Town, but I want to note up front that because I used the Olympus and my own phone, and also got some photos from Trine’s phone, and because I sorted them all by the timestamp of when they were taken, and because the Olympus was still on Copenhagen time, you’ll notice that the chronological order is frequently disrupted. What’s happening is the Olympus pictures are showing up in the “feed” an hour after the iPhone pix.

We’ll agree that that’s an annoyance but we’ll also agree that it’s not worth my investing extra time in moving the pictures around to get the order just right. We’ll roll with it.

Those are the old city gates. More accurtately, they’re what remains of the old city gates: you can see a drawing of how it once looked (about 700 years ago) below:

You may have also noticed a strange-shaped opening in the bottom of the tower on the left. We’ll take a closer look at that when we get to the Olympus pix in about an hour.

Meanwhile, the 700-year-old city wall, and our tour of its ramparts:

We were intrigued by the ribbons: there was nothing to explain what they were or why they were there: it was just hundreds (maybe thousands) of brightly colored ribbons tied around the railing of one end of the ramparts.

On the way out we asked the little old man in the ticket booth on the street what the ribbons were about, and he was like, “What ribbons? What are you talking about? No idea.”

Reminded me of my experience at the Kafka museum in Prague.

An hour prior to our walking the old city walls (having strolled around the Agora and along the Acropolis I can no longer call something a mere 7-800 years old ancient), we’d walked by the (closed) Russian cultural center, whose garden featured a bust of Dostoyevsky.

I was pleased that the great Russian Dostoyevsky hadn’t been vandalized or defaced in any way, and that there weren’t posters plastered to his obelisk accusing him of war crimes. Estonians are evidently a little more historically literate than Americans.

Meanwhile, in real time, we’d moved into what was apparently a wealthy neighborhood of Old Town: there were a lot of expensive-looking shops and restaurants, all the old buildings were beautifully maintained, and there were embassies galore.

The Swedish Embassy, like just about everything else in “official” Tallinn, was bedecked with Ukrainian flags.

We couldn’t figure out why Texas had its own Estonian embassy:

On closer inspection it turned out to be a Tex-Mex restaurant, but I liked the idea of it being the Lone Star State’s embassy, so I’m gonna hold onto that false memory.

This was all apparently an hour after our entry into Old Town, so the Olympus pictures of the gate start appearing here.

… even as we reached the Russian embassy, which was obviously having a bit of a PR problem.

An hour ago I told you about the opening in the bottom of the left gate tower. Here’s a closeup.

Trine very cleverly determined that this was the keyhole to open the gate.

It makes perfect sense: it looks like a keyhole, it’s in a tower forming one side of a gate, what else could it be? (Don’t tell us if you know. We’ve got our theory and we’re sticking to it.)

There’s a vast square in the middle of Old Town right in front, or alongside, city hall.

We stopped at a cafe on the square to have hot drink and take a load off for a few minutes. All of this was an hour after our having walked the ramparts of the old city wall.

I want a room for wage war in my house!

Speaking of houses, though, how would you feel touring this “room for wage war” and discovering there was a cannon aimed straight at your bedroom?

Olympus shot of the mystery ribbons:

Now we’ve had our hot drinks and are moving on through Old Town.

This seemed to be the big main church of old Tallinn:

I liked the old onion domes in the background.

And I swear to god, there’s a street like this in every Nordic capital I’ve been to. This picture could be from Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Riga, Kaunas. There’s always some expensive neighborhood on a hill with these Nordic brownstones facing out against some big church or public garden or something. Always.

Danish embassy: also easily mistaken for the Ukrainian.

Meanwhile, an hour earlier, the Olympus was following in our footsteps.

(That’s Trine seated lower left. I only now realize there’s no possible way of knowing that.)

After milling around the old church in the fancy neighborhood, we pressed on another block and found ourselves in the middle of vast public square.

This was just a note for the permanent record: Jaan Kross is the big 20th century literary star of Estonia and these books looked excellent, so I need to read them.

Back to the big modern square.

Between that square and the pictures you see here we had lunch at a traditional restaurant, so I don’t know why we’re advancing up the hill toward the Peek-in-the-Kitch fortification, but here we are.

Ah, now we’re back to lunch. Can’t remember the name of the place, but we asked for the most traditional dish and we had some vodka with it.

After lunch we found our way to the Peek-in-the-Kitchen fortification. We were there a while, so the Olympus pictures of our lunch arrive after the after-lunch iPhone pictures of Peek-in-the-Kitchen (and the spot where the Dannebrog landed on Estonian soil, and where the Danish Queen’s Garden was established in 2019 for the 800th anniversary).

They’re supposed to be monks and have a kind of sanctifying flavor, but the statues of robed faceless men freaked me out a little. I got flashbacks to the Ghost of Christmas Future in the Mr. Magoo version of A Christmas Carol. I didn’t want one of those bastards raising a bony figure and pointing to a grave.

Nope, not gonna look.

And here it is: the statue commemorating the descent of the Dannebrog back in 1220.

Seriously, this gull kept following us around and checking us out.

Russian spy?

Better pictures of the statue:

Here’s what she’d reading: the legend of the Dannebrog.

Lunch has been served back in the Olympus time zone: we got what amount to Estonian schnitzels with potato boats, and despite the obvious redundancy at the waitress’s suggestion we got traditional potato salad. “We always have potato salad,” she told us, “weddings, funerals, birthdays, picnics, always.”

The potato salad was in fact pretty tasty. The half-cooked bacon on top wasn’t a peculiarity of that restaurant: everywhere in Tallinn that we encountered bacon it was (to our tastes) undercooked like that. Chewy bacon is nice, but only when it’s also got some crispiness going for it. Estonian bacon was always like someone took it off the grill a few minutes before they should have.

(That was the biggest disappointment with our hotel’s breakfast buffet, was their warm tin of limp, saggy, crunchless half-cooked bacon.)

The Olympus has finished lunch and is on its way to join us at Peek-in-the-Kitchen:

On the outside of the fortification was this plaque comemmorating the visit of Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II (or, as we call her, the queen). In her honor, there had been planted a garden of 800 roses, called “The Danish Queen’s Rose Garden.”

It wasn’t a very impressive sight in the middle of March.

Seriously unimpressive:

I thought this little tourist plaque about the Danish King’s Garden (the garden you’ve seen, where the statue of the descending flag was) was interesting:

So the garden is the birthplace of the legend, not necessarily the place where the flag actually fell. An important distinction!

I keep talking about the Peek-in-the-Kitchen fortification as if you already know what that means. I haven’t explained it to you. I did on one of my blogs, so I’ll quote myself here:

These tributes to Denmark are located alongside the Kiek in de Kök fortification. The name translates to something like “Peek in the kitchen.” That’s an unusual name for anything, much less a military installation. The name is reportedly derived from the fact that the fortification was built upon a hill and soldiers were therefore able to look into the kitchens of all the neighboring homes. Obviously that was quite a thrill—ah, for the blessed life of an Estonian military man!

Kiek in de Kök is apparently one of the city’s prime draws. It offers guided tours of its underground casements or bastions (kiek in de basement!). There are also legends of the ghosts that haunt it to this very day. None of that’s relevant, however, because by the time we got there we’d already been walking around all day and were ready to get back to our hotel’s saunas and jacuzzies. And bar.

We will in fact be moving on shortly, but the Olympus just caught up to us and has some more to offer.

We’d walked a great big circle through Old Town, so once we decided to call it a day it didn’t take long to get back to the gate where we’d started.

There we saw something I’d never seen before: a seagull eating a dead pigeon.

And then it was spa time.

Meanwhile, in Denmark, it was dinner time, and the girls sent us proof of life (and proof of dinner).

After our spa and a brief nap, it was evening.

The guide books and a lot of people we’d talked to were saying the hot and happening part of town was this neighborhood to our northwest—Kalamaja. I had to look that up just now to refresh my memory, and I learned (or re-learned) that the word itself means “Fish House.” So it’s the fish house district. Right up against the harbor, so I guess that makes sense.

So many people had told us what a wonderful bohemian district it was that we figured it would be a great place to have dinner and maybe a couple of drinks. It was only about 1½ kilometers from our hotel, so we decided just to walk.

Which is probably why the Estonian sky decided to hit us with a snowstorm just about five minutes after we walked out the doors of our hotel.

This is a picture of Fat Margaret, situated about halfway between our hotel and Kalamaja. We never got any closer to it than this, but it’s one of the big Tallinn attractions. It’s a fortification. At least it was: now it’s a museum. I think.

At one point on our journey we had to walk through a little park, and all of a sudden this weird robot vehicle came rolling along.

It was clearly some kind of municipal thing—you can’t read the text in the next photo because of the blur, and I don’t remember what it said, but something about it made it very clear to us it was a city thing, not some rogue remote-controlled toy. It was about the size of a small microwave oven, or a big toaster oven. And it moved pretty quickly.

I don’t know what we did wrong, but Kalamaja was dead to us. We wandered through what looked on Google Maps like it ought to have been the heart of the district, but it almost entirely residential. We finally stumbled over a restaurant—really a sign pointing into a residential apartment building’s parking lot and saying there was a Mexican restaurant this way—and sure enough, there was. And it was indeed in the basement of an apartment complex.

But it wasn’t bad Mexican and the margaritas were just fine.

…and the join was as jumpin’ as the rest of Kalamaja:

Two signs caught our eyes on the way home:

Another sign caught Trine’s eye.

I hope Deb sees this and can comment, but if I remember correctly then… no, I can’t get it right in my head, but we seem to believe these people are our Kaunas relations. Like the old woman there is Si & Anna’s grandmother or aunt? It’s all lost to me.

The next day, our second and last full day in Estonia, we decided we’d seen enough of Old Town. We thought we’d up toward the harbor to the Seaplane Harbor museum, which was another one of those things the cursèd Guide Books insisted was one of the must-see things in Tallinn.

It was directly on the harbor just north of Kalamaja, so the walk there was mostly the same one we’d taken the night before.

This time we noticed the “Broken Line” monument to the 852 souls lost in the ferry disaster of 1994.

That monument is actually just beside good ol’ Fat Margaret.

Another picture came in from Deb around this point: this is an ancestor of ours, I think, or at least the sibling of one of our ancestors, but I can’t even hazard a guess as to who she is or why she’s tilting a chair covered in flowers.

As we got close to the Seaplane Harbor museum, with the Gulf of Finland visible to our right, we encountered the same kind of slatternly hovels that always surprise us down in Faro. This is prime real estate in a developed country with a booming economy. And yet… they haven’t yet razed this crap to the ground? Maybe it’s historically significant? No idea.

We didn’t know what to expect, but the Seaplane Harbor museum—sorry, Seaplan Harbour museum, I now see—it was actually an amazing place.

This is a private non-linkable blog, so I’ll just go ahead and quote some text I found about the museum without bothering to link the source:

The seaplane hangars at Tallinn Seaplane Harbour is one of the most valuable buildings of the 20th century in the Baltic States. The Danish engineering and construction company Christiani & Nielsen designed the hangars that were built in 1916–1917. The building is remarkable both in terms of construction science and technology, and their uniqueness stems from the structural solution.

The main body of the hangars consists of three concrete shells (thickness 8–12 cm) and the pillars that support them at the corners and joints. This is the first known steel concrete shell construction of this size in the world – 36.4 by 116 metres.

“Remarkable” is right. I tried very hard to get pictures that could convey the enormity and, well, weirdness of the space, but it can’t be done. (And the weird colored lighting doesn’t help.)

The most remarkable thing of all, for me, was that it included an old submarine, suspended in the air, that you could actually climb down into and muck around in. Which, as you’ll see, I did.

Here’s the sub… bear in mind that it’s not a small one.

The museum is in two levels: the lower level is just the ground floor: the upper level isn’t a floor but a series of interconnected walkways and platforms. One of the walkways had a panel with buttons you could push to project animations of different events onto the side of the submarine.

Here you see the “celebrating a birthday” animation in which the sailors gathered round, had drinks and cake, and then pass out.

One section of the museum looked like Marblehead harbor during race week: dozens of fully-rigged one-design boats of every kind, like this Laser that brought a swell of memories to my breast.

Also all kinds of canoes, and even buoys. It reminded me of how when we were Pleon kids we’d drop each other off on the buoys outside the harbor—the big black one off the lighthouse was a particular favorite, and they had one that looked just like it.

They also had a lot of interactive exhibits, like this one where you could test your skill as an anti-aircraft gunner. Trine was a much better gunner than me.

But like they say, “Good at gunning, bad at submarining.” I was on my own for a visit into the Lembit.

Photon torpedos: loaded! (Partly. I think.)

This is the “bridge” of the sub: the periscope is right there, pretty obvious, and just below and to the right is the steering wheel. The engine controls are hidden by the periscope.

Here’s the galley:

As a Soviet sub she sailed with 31 sailors and 7 officers; as an Estonian sub she had 4 officers and 28 sailors. And that was their one and only kitchen.

Here’s the engine room: the engines are encased in plexiglass.

And now some close up of the conn:

The next picture is a scale model of the museum. The little planes at bottom should help for a sense of scale.

…and here’s me trying to give a sense of scale from within, but it’s really not possible without a wide-angle lens.

One of the final displays was of old Soviet and Estonian military costumes and a green screen where you could have your picture taken in costume in front of one of several military backgrounds.

I don’t think there’s a dorkier picture of Trine and me in existence, and I wish I had noticed the green screen failure behind me before we took off our costumes and let the big family behind us in line advance. But it’s fun anyway, right? AI could surely flesh that background out for us, but not sure it could make us look any dorkier.

If memory serves this building wasn’t on the waterfront like the others, but was just an interesting house in Kalamaja, which we walked through again on our way back to the hotel. (Kalamaja was just as dead as it had been the night before.)

Old Town was pretty and the museum was interesting, but it was the spa that made the trip.

A spa with scotch.

We had dinner in one of the hotel restaurants that night, then went out on for a few nightcaps.

The bartender was having a slow night so talked to us about a lot of the popular Tallinn drinks. This grapefruit “long drink” was one of them. (That’s the head of a tap in the picture, I think: I only took it to remember the name.) Basically it was like alcoholic Fresca. I kind of liked it, but would only think of having one on a hot summer day, outdoors—and can’t imagine having more than one.

The best vodka he could recommend was 1886:

And he was a big booster of this gin, Junimperium, but I’m not a gin guy and Trine’s not a gin chick, so I just pass this along in case you’re ever in Tallinn and feel the itch for a good gin drink.

Next morning we prepped for checkout and had some time to kill, so we wandered out to the mall out on the harbor. It wasn’t very interesting: it was a mall, and it was next to a harbor. If you’ve seen harbors and malls before, you’ve seen this stuff.

Those are the ferry terminals for the boats to Helsinki, which is very near, and Stockholm, which is a longer trip.

This is The Admiral, an old steamer that’s now a restaurant. Woohoo.

In defense of the proposition that an Estonian mall is not much different from a Danish mall:

That was pretty much that: we went from the mall to the hotel, ordered a taxi, and took the very short, very cheap ride to the airport. (Which, we realized, in nice weather and the right frame of mind, was actually a walkable distance from our hotel… probably not more than 4-5 kilometers.)

I snapped this pic out of the window of the taxi: vegan shoes? Really?