16.08.2009: baltic trivia lord meets caffeine killer

Hi there!

Erm ... I've been trying to make these entries a bit less epic lately, but I think this is going to be a long one. You might want to put the kettle on. I have lots to tell you, and you know that brevity isn't my strong point ;-)

Thought I might start the ramble on July 24th at around 9am ... about six hours after waking up in a daze, with less than an hour-and-a-half of sleep under my belt. Our Air Baltic flight to Riga had just taken off and was climbing over the towering peaks of the Zailiskiy Alatau, commencing the long haul over the Kazakh steppe. In other words, I was leaving Almaty for (probably) the last time.

In these big ‘departing moments’, I often catch my brain being distracted by little things which have nothing to do with the occasion. I guess it’s because, when you know you’re going to leave a place that’s significant to you, you’ve already thought it over from every possible angle by the time you actually get on the plane (or train, ferry, catamaran, donkey ... whatever else you happen to be travelling on). And so, as the aircraft lifted us over the mountains, I suddenly found myself intensely interested in a quiz about the Baltic States which appeared on around page 70 of the in-flight magazine.

Not sure why I opted for this specific diversion over any other, but if I had to guess I’d probably say that it was intellectual vanity – I mean, everyone likes quizzes full of obscure questions to which they happen to know the answers … don’t they? Surely it can’t be just me.

Is it just me?

Anyway ... of the ten questions, I got the first seven right without having to think much at all. (Sample question: “In which country can you travel along the Curonian Spit and swim in the Curonian Lagoon?” Answer: Lithuania.) Tania* asked: “How do you know so much about the Baltics?”, and I replied that the answer was twofold – which is one of those annoying things that I sometimes do.

(In my defence, though, “twofold” is a pretty cool word, don’t you think?)

To explain said folds in all their glorious twoness: first, I’ve planned several holidays in the Baltics over the last few years – some of which have actually happened, while others haven’t even come close. And second: I really like Estonia. I think most people reading this are aware of my Eestiophilia** already, but I'm mentioning it just in case, because – as you can no doubt guess from the photos – it's kinda relevant to the rest of this entry.

Anyway ... I’d landed in Riga and kicked around there for a day, before catching a bus north to the Estonian (see?) town of Pärnu – basically a one-night stopover en route to my eventual destination of Saaremaa island off the Baltic coast. This part of my summer more or less mirrored the previous one, because in both years I’d accepted a summer job in Finland and travelled there from KZ via the Baltics. So to keep it interesting, I’d decided that I should take the long way ’round this time.

I arrived in Pärnu in the late afternoon, and pursued my usual policy of approaching the nearest punk to ask for directions. (They’re always so helpful!) On this occasion, the guy not only knew exactly where I needed to go, but offered to walk me there. Gotta love the politeness of the pink-haired folk :-)

On our way to the hotel, the guy pulled out a handbill and invited me to a punk/HR gig that was taking place later that evening. So I walked around the town for a bit, appreciating the beautiful, typically Estonian wooden houses, and then went along to hear some guys screaming over noisy guitars while audience members bounced off each other like numbered balls in a lottery barrel. It was fun!

All this time, I was thinking "Wow, it’s so good to be back in Estonia." It's just a cool place, y'know?

When I finally made it to Saaremaa, I had a very specific mission in mind. I’d read on a travel website that you could hire a Moskvich*** and drive northwards through the Baltic archipelago, island-hopping by causeway and car ferry. So the plan was to get hold of the car, then make my way as far up as possible before the sea stopped me and I had to return to the mainland.

Unfortunately this turned out to be an impossible dream. I asked everywhere, but no-one seemed to know what the Hell I was talking about. At one point, I even randomly approached a guy standing next to a Lada in a little courtyard, and asked “Is this car for hire?” Sadly the answer was “No”; he owned the car. So I complimented him and moved on.

(Btw, I love giving compliments to the owners of Soviet cars. They never expect it, and while the usual reaction is a look that says “You’re a bit weird, aren’t you?”, occasionally you make someone’s day by allowing them to admit how much they love their rusty old machine.)

Having failed to locate the Moskvich, I basically found myself stuck in the town of Kuuresaare. Aside from a few highlights – the funky name, the giant old windmill converted into a café (why didn’t anyone think of it sooner?), and a couple of nice meteorite craters not too far from town – it was basically seeable within two days. So after exhausting the possibilities, I did the only thing I could think of: I leapt on a bus, hopped across to the mainland, and headed for Tallinn.

Now, I know some people are turned off Tallinn by the tourist throngs and the stag nights, and I can totally appreciate why. As you walk through the Old Town in summer, you frequently come across packs of obnoxiously drunk Finns and English yobs, and they can be rather unpleasant. (Apparently the Estonian govt commissioned an ad campaign a few years ago to attract more Brits, but after seeing the results of their efforts they discontinued the campaign.) However, if you can find a way to ignore that and just appreciate the city for what it is ... well, it truly is a marvel. I think I could get sick of Tallinn, but it would take years and require a conscious effort. In fact, this time around I had the strange sensation that it was totally logical for me to be here – as in "Well, it’s July, so Anthony’s probably in Tallinn now". It almost felt like a kind of summer home that you look forward to returning to throughout the year. Sounds a bit odd, I know ... but I think it’s a feeling I could get used to :-)

Having said that, I’d done all the usual touristy Tallinn things on previous visits, so I felt kind of obligated to find some new stuff to see and do. Luckily there was a ghost tour on offer, replete with stories of haunted towers (perhaps not surprising, when you’ve got a wall surrounding your entire city and 34 towers to choose from if you’re a ghost looking for prime haunting space), people jumping from the top floors of merchant houses to escape malevolent spirits, twin-brother executioners sentenced to behead each other after geno-torturing condemned prisoners, hungry demons living in town wells where human bones were later found, and the usual array of dark'n'twisted tales that spanned Tallinn’s history up to the present day.

Unfortunately, none of the ghosts mentioned by the tour guide (an impossibly tall Baltic woman with bright blue eyes the size of dried apricots) showed up on the night when I did the tour. But that’s ok – the guide obviously loved her subject, and she told me more than enough stories to creep me out in future as I walk around Tallinn at night. Plus I was the only person on the tour, so it was like strolling through the Old Town with an acquaintance who just happened to know all the darkest local secrets, and was keen to share them with someone.

Before leaving the subject of spirits (at least for a while), I want to mention one more thing. My guide told me that, in the days when executions were commonplace in Tallinn, one of the biggest difficulties was finding people who were prepared to do the head-chopping. It wasn’t exactly a sought-after job, and executioners typically became pariahs within the town. To get around the difficulties of recruiting, therefore, the trade was usually handed down from father to son. But this left one problem: given how much they were hated, how was an executioner supposed to find a wife, and hence bear a son to carry on his work?

Luckily, the Town Fathers came up with an innovative solution. If a "woman of suitable age" (my guide’s words) was convicted of a capital crime, she would be given a choice: marry the executioner, or he’ll cut your head off.

I’m not making this up, btw. It’s well-documented. (Or so said the three-storey Baltic woman, at any rate.)

Interestingly, most ‘suitably aged’ women chose the executioner’s axe over his lifelong companionship. Which I s’pose makes sense – I mean, wedding one of these guys would mean being completely rejected by your community and your family, not to mention sharing a small dark room in a cold stone tower with a professional killer. Plus, I imagine the blood would’ve been Hell to wash out of his clothes, in the days before stain remover was invented ;-) However, a few did opt for marriage, and that’s how the town remained well-supplied with executioners for many generations.

Don’t know why, but that story really stuck in my head. Even now, as I re-tell it for something like the third time, it makes me shudder a bit and go "Eeeuugghhh!!"

I also visited Kumu, which is Tallinn's equivalent of the wonderful Kiasma gallery in Helsinki. It's kind of a poor cousin, but it did contain one of the coolest artworks I've seen in recent times: an installation called Wave. This was an enormous collection of old speakers on metal stands, occupying an entire room and arranged to look like an ocean breaker. The speakers were broadcasting the sound of a wave, but not all at the same time - rather it swept from one end of the installation to the other, as if planning to crash on the far wall. Standing in the room, surrounded by this forest of cords and cones, I became totally caught up in the aesthetics and the music of it all. So that was well worth the admission :-)

Anyway, as per the plan, after Tallinn I hopped on a ferry and headed over the pond to Finland, to start my summer job. Summer camp was pretty much as I remember it, both in good and bad respects. The ‘bad’ was that we had to work like machines. (Those of you who teach will appreciate how difficult it is to pull five academic hours’ worth of lessons out of thin air each day, when you haven’t got a course book to work with.) Also, most of the students**** weren’t really there to learn anything – they wanted to hang out, go to discotheques, stay up ’till five every morning strung out on gallons of Red Bull, and generally do what 45 young people will do when you put them together in shared accommodation, far away from their parents with only three ‘authority figures’ there to supervise.

The plus side, though, was that ESL teaching did its usual neat trick of allowing me to meet some extraordinary people. This time around it was Natalya Safyannikova, a.k.a. the ‘Miracle Girl’. At the advanced age of 13, Natalya speaks three languages, plays two musical instruments, is quite an accomplished photographer, paints, draws, prefers Ken Keasey to Harry Potter, and knows loads of stuff about .. well, about loads of stuff. (Example: one of the things she enjoys in her spare time is researching the causes of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.) Aside from which, she’s just an extremely charming and cool individual.

Btw, there’s a specific reason why I refer to Natalya as ‘The Miracle Girl’, and I think it’s a story worth recounting. She told me about it on our last night in Finland, just before we went outside to take photographs of a playground swing which was rumoured to be haunted. (She was hoping that, even if we didn’t actually see the ghost ourselves, some spectral images might show up on her camera.) I asked about a dark red mark I’d noticed on her right temple, expecting her to tell me that it was a birthmark or something similar. Instead, she told me that on April 22nd this year, she was walking across a pedestrian crossing in St. Petersburg when she was hit by a truck travelling at 120km/h. She flew up onto the windscreen, and was then thrown three metres along the road.

I don’t know how anyone – let alone such a small and delicate person – could survive a collision like this. But somehow she did ... though only after spending nine days in intensive care. Now, I’ve been in a Russian hospital, so when Natalya told me the doctors didn’t even notice that her nose was broken, and that the police actually had to point it out to them, I wasn’t entirely surprised. I was, however, appalled. At the same time, it made me feel even more fortunate to be standing in a corridor with this Little Miracle, talking about ghosts and cameras and lucky escapes.

I know I've said similar things before, but at the risk of becoming repetitive, I'm still blown away by this particular aspect of my profession. These 'top-shelf humans' really ... er, I’m not sure how to put it. Inspire me, perhaps? Stop me from becoming bitter and jaded? Offer some hope that the world is a) going to be ok and b) will always throw new and interesting folk my way if I let it? I don’t know – maybe all of the above. Anyway, meeting one more made the trip worthwhile :-)

Unfortunately, though, when I meet people like Natalya (who's from St. Pete's) in Finland, they tend to throw the local people I meet into sharp relief. Example: our summer camp was located just outside a tiny town called Anjalankoski, in an area described by one teacher as ‘The Deep North’. So of course, when we (i.e. the teachers, including Tania) went to the only bar in town, we weren’t expecting to meet dazzling, arty, intellectual folk. And sure enough, we didn’t. In fact the only person I met was a worrying character called Niki, who came over to our table to find out why our glasses were almost empty. He then decided to join us, despite the lack of an invitation. And to be fair, Niki seemed like just a harmless drunk at first, so we didn’t really mind – until he started telling us that, due to a head injury he’d sustained some years ago, he can’t drink coffee because it always makes him want to kill people.

He was deadly serious, in case you’re wondering.

I don’t know why, but whenever I find myself in a group of people who are approached by a nutter, the nutter nearly always picks me as his or her target. And so it was with Niki. He was sitting next to me at our table outside the bar, when in mid-conversation – for no apparent reason at all, but with great urgency – he suddenly pulled out his driver’s license and said "Look at the picture!"

I politely commented that it was a good photo, and one of the other teachers (I think it was Tania) asked "Can we see it too?". Without skipping a beat, and in a tone that made it clear that he considered the suggestion utterly ridiculous, Niki said: “No WAY!!!”

Tania decided it was too soon to give up, and tried to shame our new friend into sharing his photo with her and the others. “But we’re nice, aren’t we?”, she said.

Niki’s slow, uncertain response: “Yeee-es.”

Follow-up question: “But he’s nicer, right?” (referring to me)

Niki (with much more certainty than before): “YES!”

And with that, our head-injured, homicidal-when-caffeinated friend leaned over and started affectionately rubbing my forearm. Needless to say, my next thought was something like “Oh Jeezy Creezy***** ... how soon can we get the Hell out of here?”.

And sadly, that’s been not entirely untypical of my social interaction with Finnish people: meaning that, one way or another, the conversations I have with them often turn out to be quite disturbing, and end with me trying to get away.

The thing is, I now know several people who have spent a good deal of time in Finland, and who love it there, partly because of the interesting, quirky, artsy people they come across. Whereas nearly all the Finns I meet (both in their home country and in Estonia) seem to be either monumentally bland, infuriatingly smug, obnoxiously drunk, or slightly retarded … and frequently more than one of these things. I’m definitely not saying that I disbelieve these other people with their positive Finnish experiences, or that I think all Finns are like the ones I’ve just mentioned. I’m just saying … er, what exactly? Not sure. Finland and I evidently don’t get along that well. Or else I'm missing some kind of knack for meeting the right people there. Or, I don’t know, something along those lines.

Estonia, luckily, is another story. And that’s one of several reasons why, as soon as my summer job ended, I decided to make my way back there on the first available ferry.

Actually, when I say “there” I should say “here”, because I’m writing this entry from my hostel in Tallinn. This is now my fourth visit to the capital, making it my #1 Most Visited City in The World outside New South Wales (the state of Australia where I was born and grew up).

Weird, eh? I’ve actually been to Tallinn more times than I’ve been to Melbourne.

Not that I mind, of course :-)

So now I’m closing the skylight in my room as rain begins to fall, and settling down to an evening of quiet study and music listening. Not planning to go anywhere tonight, ’cause I splurged last night on a beautiful green-eyed friend who I met here last month, and then – after three hours’ sleep – got up today to go on a cycling tour that led me to a Soviet prison called Patarei on a rocky sea-cliff just outside the city centre. Man, it was SOOOO creepy! (The prison, not the green-eyed friend.) And yet, in its own dark and gritty way, Patarei was possibly one of the most photogenic places I've ever visited. Shame my camera battery chose that moment to run out, really >:-[ Might have to go back.

Anyway, the point is that now I’m quite exhausted. Just hope I can get enough rest to be ready for embassy ordeals tomorrow. When I finally settle down again at the end of this epic summer, it'll be in another of those former Soviet countries that won’t let you cross their borders until you bury at least one immigration official under a mountain of documentation. I seem to be increasingly drawn to those places, in spite of all the red tape. And so tomorrow it’s into battle with bureaucracy.

Wish me luck ...

(*In case there's anyone going "Who's Tania?" ... she was my partner up until recently. We lived together in Almaty for about nine months, and we also met up and worked together in Finland.)

(**The real name of Estonia is "Eesti".)

(***Crappy old Soviet car of the kind which I dream of owning one day. They’re similar to Ladas, but even uglier and less reliable.)

(****Little ones and teens from Moscow and St. Pete’s, aged 9-17.)

(*****God’s nickname for Jesus in Eddie Izzard's universe.)