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…
One thing we
found out very quickly was just how non-speaking-focused our crash-course in
Russian grammar had been last year. I confidently greeted Olga (the mum in the
Russian-speaking host family I’m living with) good afternoon/добрый день at approximately
8am on the first morning as I came down for breakfast, and if that could be
blamed on a slightly too literal translation of the French bonjour I had got so
used to saying over the summer, then what turned out for me to be a chronic
mixing up of the words for yesterday/вчера and tomorrow/завтра couldn’t be explained away
so easily. I’m sure it did at least lead to some funky unintentionally time-travelling
stories for Olga to listen (very patiently) to me telling, about what I will be
talking about in class yesterday, and what I saw at the museum tomorrow…
Linguistic difficulties aside (they’re all part of the fun really), here are
some of the things that have made the biggest impression on me so far in Estonia, the
land of…
Swinging
babushkas
Estonia is the first country in which I have seen more adults than children on swings. On the beach, in the parks, at the ferry port, in the forest, these swings really are everywhere, and I can only assume that such high supply means there is equally high demand. During the first couple of months (before I gave in to the cold temperatures) I cycled from the house where I was staying with my host family into town for classes, hugging the coast all the way into the centre. I would, without fail, every single morning, see a babushka (or a babushka-in-the-making if they hadn’t quite reached babushka age yet) swinging on swings specially built for the purpose. At least twice the height of a usual children’s swing, and with only one swing in each frame, this is clearly a construction built with one goal in mind: maximising babushka happiness. Maybe the town council relies on babushkas voting for them in elections, and so are forced to please them in this way, or perhaps the Estonians just value the joys to be had from swinging more than any other country on earth.
The
Estonian stare
I sometimes
wonder whether the buses in Tallinn are specifically designed to facilitate and
encourage what is known as the Estonian stare. Safe to say I’ve now got used to
it, but it was clearly noticeable following our arrival. There are a certain
number of seats which face backwards, and if you find yourself sitting on one
such seat, I can guarantee you that there will be someone sitting in a seat
facing the opposite way (even if they’re right at the other end of the bus) looking
straight at you. My initial response was to stare back at them, but that only
worsens the situation, and now I have decided that the best plan of action is
to ignore their presence altogether. Apparently it’s just the Estonian way of being
polite (they are reserved people, and would rather look at you from a distance
than break your personal boundaries and, God forbid, speak to you), and maybe
after all it’s just because I have got too used to avoiding eye contact in
Britain that alarm bells start ringing when I see someone staring into my soul
from the other side of the pedestrian crossing or the other end of the bus in
Tallinn.
No customer service
You’re
unlikely to be stared at by a shop assistant, but you shouldn’t expect to be
smiled at. For them, the only important things seem to be whether you need a
bag and if you’d like the receipt – I suppose it’s an efficient way of doing
things. Unless, like me, you don’t have the Estonian to understand and respond
to such questions, but the shop assistant hasn’t yet realised you’re not
Estonian, and the whole exchange becomes a lot more awkward. Speaking of which,
it’s always worth hanging around near the till in a shop before making your
purchase while you decide which language to choose. Given that Estonia was part
of the Soviet Union until 1991, their relationship with the Russian language today borders on hostile, and although around a quarter of
Estonia’s population are ethnic Russians (and everyone who went to school
during Soviet times would have learnt Russian there), the government is doing
its best to make Estonian the language of communication in all spheres of life.
Whilst I always hear Russian being spoken on the street by people of all ages,
when in a shop, it’s always best to stick to English when talking to the shop
assistant. Unless, of course, you know that they themselves are Russian, which
you can only find out by hanging around the till and listening to see if they
are speaking Russian to other customers (or by looking to see if they have a Russian
name on their name badge, but by then it’s usually too late). Maybe I overthink
it, but it definitely pains me less to try and make myself understood in
Russian than it does to say the dreaded ‘Sorry, do you speak English?’, so I
reckon it’s worth the extra few minutes hanging around. You can see why I make straight
for the self-checkout when I see one in a supermarket…
Soviet
Ghost Towns
In mid-October I went with friends for a weekend to Narva, the eastern-most town in Estonia. It was quite something to look across from the wall of Narva’s castle (one of the few old buildings left in the town after it was bombed in WWII) over to the castle in Ivangorod, Russia, just a hundred or so metres away on the other side of the river.
More than 95% of those who live in the town are native Russian speakers, and more than 85% are ethnic Russians (no need to think twice before speaking Russian in shops and cafés here). It thus makes sense why an ice hockey match we went to in Narva (part of an inter-Baltic league) was the only event I have been to in Estonia where the sole language used over the PA system was Russian.
What you gain in terms of Russian-language practice over Tallinn, you lose in terms of architecture – Narva is essentially a mix of Soviet apartment blocks and massive shopping centres built following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the streets were deserted when we visited. Since we've been in Tallinn, the Estonian government has decided to set in motion the transition of all Russian-language schools in Estonia to Estonian-language ones, and it’s clear to see why they are having to offer substantial bonuses to encourage Estonian-speaking teachers to go and teach in such an area of Estonia as this, where Russian is so deeply rooted as the language of daily life.
Cheap
flights to Georgia
Having spent nine weeks in Tallinn, we decided to escape the increasingly grey skies of Estonia for some time in Georgia during our reading week (during which there was, rest assured, no reading to do). Having originally booked to fly into and out of Kutaisi, Georgia’s second-largest city, Wizzair (hope you hadn’t forgotten about them) decided a week or so before we were due to go that they actually had no choice but to drop us off in Tbilisi (Georgia’s capital) and pick us up 6 days later from Kutaisi airport. It turned out to be a stroke of luck for us, because it meant we could discover two different cities, taking a train between them halfway through our stay.
The night of our departure turned out to be more of an adventure than any of us was expecting… First of all, a two-hour delay to our flight meant that all the Estonians on their way to Georgia had hit the Tallinn airport pub hard, and so you can imagine the antics which ensued on the four-hour flight over much of Eastern Europe (carefully avoiding Ukrainian and Russian airspace). My friends tell me there was a one-woman performance of Gangster’s Paradise coming from the toilet at one point: sadly she can’t have been singing loud enough to wake me up from my sleep… When we eventually landed at 4am at Tbilisi airport and waved goodbye to our drunkards (I’m fairly certain one of them got a stern talking to by Georgian police), it was time to book an extra-large Bolt and head to our hotel. If I thought that the monk’s speedy driving in Conques was dangerous, then my experience with Bolt drivers in Georgia has very much changed my boundaries of tolerance. Our driver arrived and we all piled in – I think this was possibly one of the only occasions when there were as many seatbelts as people – and before we knew it we were speeding down (and drifting across…) the road into Tbilisi. Our Georgian driver’s radio display was in Japanese, and all that was coming out of it was white noise. White noise which was soon turned up in volume to conceal a slightly worrying beeping sound coming from the dashboard. We slowed down, turned off the road and into a petrol station forecourt. This didn’t look like the hotel we had booked… The driver got out, apologising to us as he did so, shook hands with a mechanic who had appeared, as if on cue, from his petrol station (as you do at 4:15 in the morning), and this mechanic proceeded to knock on all the car windows and gesture for us to get out. We got out of the car (probably the number one thing not to do when you are suspicious you might be about to be kidnapped) but thankfully we were not, it gradually became clear, in the middle of a highly dangerous kidnapping operation, but the mechanic was simply adding more air to the tyres because the car couldn’t cope with the combined weight of having so many of us in it. We were swiftly on our way, and if any suspicions about our driver’s intentions lingered, they were immediately dispelled when he slammed on the brakes to let a hedgehog cross the road in front of us and commented on how cute it looked. If you wouldn’t run over a hedgehog, you wouldn’t kidnap a British tourist, right?
Bolt experiences aside (most of which were variations on the high-intensity theme of the first, including one ride which involved some high-speed dodging of pigs and cows which had strayed into the road), both Tbilisi and Kutaisi were fascinating cities at the crossroads between East and West – the streets were full of life, music and conversation and if crossing the road proved to be a chaotic experience at times, at least it made a difference from waiting and waiting for the little red men to turn green in Tallinn.
The food was delicious – we sampled khinkali (Georgian dumplings), khachapuri (a diamond-shaped flatbread with egg and cheese) and lobiani (a circular flatbread stuffed with beans), washed down with the wine for which Georgia is famous. Eating out was extremely cheap (as was travelling by Bolt, incidentally…) and, Russian being the main language spoken by tourists in Georgia, we could speak it freely in shops and restaurants there, without the same taboo which exists in Estonia.
Our Russian teachers in Tallinn had spoken very highly of the Georgians as friendly and welcoming people, and they lived up to their reputation on the 5-hour (Soviet-era) train we took from Tbilisi to Kutaisi halfway through our trip. Two men sitting near us struck up a conversation with us in Russian – where were we from? where were we going? were we liking Georgia? – and later on, another man (who had spent the majority of the journey cracking open walnuts with a knife and eating them) laid down his tools and started talking (in Georgian) to a babushka sitting with us whom - it appeared - he had never met before in his life. I must admit it sounded worryingly like an impassioned shouting match, but I think in actual fact it was just a lively discussion… Certainly no cold Estonian stares on that train!
When it was time to fly back to Estonia and re-acclimatise to the cold, who should be on our flight but the Estonian drunkards, who had clearly been making the most of the Georgian wine-tasting opportunities over the past six days. The flight attendants (who were also the same as on our flight out) did not look happy to see them again…
Snow
Not long after our return from Georgia, the snow began to fall – first English-style stuff which melts after a couple of days...
...and more...
...and more!
The
sad thing is that snow makes a guaranteed annual appearance in Estonia, so the
Estonians don’t get at all excited when it starts to fall, not even the
children, it seems. I remember Olga telling me that Estonia was a lovely place
to live between the months of May and October – I’ll be leaving the country in
the middle of May, so I guess we had our dose of ‘nice Estonia’ long ago, and
what we’ve been living through more recently is ‘awful Estonia’ (her words, not mine!).
Perhaps it’s awful if it happens every year, but there’s no denying that it’s
also very pretty. The cold can definitely be (gradually) acclimatised to, you just
have to be prepared to get caught up in a snowball fight on the way home from the
bus stop…
New Year's Resolutions? Learn some Estonian, learn how to cross-country ski (the snow sadly makes cycling and running nigh on impossible) and learn some Russian recipes from Olga: will need some means of satisfying my recently developed Russian food addiction when I get back to Oxford next year…
Comments
Post a Comment