Our man in Tallinn, or Estonia: the land of...
"Ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be landing in Tallinn, where the temperature on the ground is 30 degrees. Thank you for choosing Ryanair”. 30 degrees? These were not the temperatures we had been warned of…or packed our woolliest jumpers for. The heat of the day of our arrival in Tallinn at the end of August now seems like a distant memory – as I walked across the tarmac to board my flight home for Christmas (sorry Ryanair, you’ve now been ditched for Wizzair, but more about that later) it was zero degrees (which felt noticeably warmer than usual), there was snow on the ground, and the bright yellow runway gritters were being rolled out in full force. During the three and a half months between those two flights, I’ve been discovering Estonia whilst following a Russian language and literature course in the capital, together with everyone else in my year at Oxford who started learning Russian about 11 months before our arrival in Tallinn. What were we thinking… Tallinn as see...