Last Few Days in Tallinn
The taxi-driver who took us to our accommodation in central Tallinn
apologized for his English. I told him I didn't speak Estonian at all,
and he said, 'It is normal.' He was a great admirer of the British sense
of humour, he said, particularly hyacinth. Hyacinth? Ah, Hyacinth Bucket
(from the TV series Keeping Up Appearances). 'Yes,' he said, 'Hyacinth
Bucket,' and chuckled. He added, 'Estonia has Chinese President.' I took this to mean
that the President of Estonia was of Chinese extraction,
another sign of an increasingly multicultural world. In fact, the President
of China was visiting Tallinn, so there was a large police presence in the
Old Town. The street where we were staying was full of embassies, and at
one point we saw a Russian General leaving in his official car, surrounded
by officers, all of them wearing those extra-large caps they have.
The fine weather was over. For the rest of our stay we had grey skies and rain.
We didn't much mind this, except that all our photos of Tallinn had been
wiped from the memory of my digital camera when the batteries gave out
(it took me about two months to work out this was what had caused it,
so you can see how technical I am), and we had to photograph it all over
again in less flattering conditions. It is still a stunning city in any
light. But we didn't do much sightseeing from now on in any case, just a bit
of shopping and a lot of eating and drinking. We were looking for amber for
souvenirs, and were at first put off by the prices. The shops have magnificent
amber necklaces in the windows, strung with huge polished beads
in yellow, red, green and black amber, clear and opaque, with or without
inclusions (the little bits of prehistoric leaflitter and animal life that
got trapped in the pine resin when it was fossilized). They were all far too
expensive for us, and we concluded the market was geared to rich tourists
on Baltic cruises. But when you go inside and make it clear what your budget
is, the shop assistants start opening drawers and taking out the amber
mis-shapes, the equivalent of the deformed chocolates you used to be able to
buy cheap. Arguably, these have more character than the perfect beads -
Creina, for example, ended up with a necklace of what look like amber
shark's teeth.
The other thing we did in the last couple of days, was to meet a couple of
people who could tell us more about the literary and cultural life of
Estonia. The British poet Philip Gross, whose father is Estonian, had put us
in touch with them. We talked to Mati Sirkel of the Writers' Union
over a beer on the pavement of a cafe called Pegasus, which turns out to belong to
the Union itself. He told us that, despite Estonia's high literacy rate and
impressive literary tradition, academic creative writing doesn't exist
there and public readings have only just got started. He has been organizing regular
readings in Tallinn, but it's a struggle to get the audiences. He gave us a book of
Estonian poetry called Windship with Oars of Light, featuring in parallel text the
work of Jaan Kaplinski, Doris Kareva and other leading poets.
Our second meeting was with Tiina Laats in the pleasant, airy offices
of the Estonian Institute. She confirmed all that Mati Sirkel had told us:
two British novelists had recently been on a tour of Estonia, and audiences had been
disappointing, simply because there's no tradition of this kind of
entertainment. The Estonian Institute publicizes Estonian culture
internationally, and Tiina gave us a selection of their pamphlets and magazines,
which I've drawn on in compiling these pages. She told us about the rural
farmhouse where she would soon be going with her family for the summer:
very basic, with no running water, just a well. St John's Day, 24 June,
is the big summer festival, when many Estonians retreat from the city
to spend six weeks in the country.
Standing outside the small airport on our last day, I could just see a glimpse of
blue on the other side of the road. It occurred to me that in our ten days in this
Baltic country, we'd forgotten to go and look at the Baltic itself. In fact there
are many more things I'd like to do - visit some of the islands, see some
more of the forests and wildlife, and the bits of Tallinn we missed.
We hope we'll go back some day.
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