TALLINN, ESTONIA, AGAIN
Yesterday we took the four hour bus ride from Riga to Tallinn and spent the night in the same efficient, small Airbnb that we were in three nights before. We rested up a little and then went into the old town to a cafe that Susie and Todd had discovered on our first visit.
I got the most expensive thing on the menu, braised elk roast with oven-baked sweet potato, fennel, zucchini, onion, mustard and black currant sauce four 23.60 euros followed by a break pudding which we shared. I‘ve never had elk roast before and had to try it.
It was bitterly cold on our walk to the Rataskaevu restaurant but the old city was glowing with lighting of all kinds. The waitress took great pains to impress us with the quality of the meal and the room was cozy and filled with people. We were lucky to get an unreserved table because other people were turned away.
Walking back we saw other restaurants, more expensive and elegant than ours, and were impressed with the quality of life in Tallin, which we had not noticed in any way up until this point in our lives. I had always thought of any place close to Russia as being grey and a little grim. But on the Lux bus ride the day before to Tallin Todd has sat next to a young man who was 10 when the Soviet Union collapsed. He said that the shift from the sparse, grey socialist days when the state took care of everyone on a very basic level to capitalism had been very hard for his parents. Suddenly everyone was on their own competing with each other, but that once they got the hang of Capitalism things had become better and better.
When Craig Chippindale, Todd’s brother in law heard that we would be in Tallin he asked us please to visit Depesche Mode, a bar dedicated to the band, Depesche Mode, a rock band considered decadent and off limits during the Soviet occupation, but much played under ground until liberation.
This bar with large screen TV’s loudly playing Depeche Mode in their heyday with a 2023 poster for a world tour on the wall was a garish neon tribute to Depeche Mode, which even Tood hadn’t heard of. And for this 85 year old who missed out on the rock era entirely, married to a German wife who only listened to Bach and Mozart, this Depeche Mode experience was a little overwhelming. We ordered large beers and tried to soak in the experience for Craig, buying him a Depeche Mode t-shirt, and then we walked back to our apartment over the snow packed cobblestones.
The next day after wonderful croissants, plain and ham and cheese, at a small bakery, clear full of people stopping in for a quick breakfast, we walked to the huge and very modern ferry for the two hour ferry ride across the Baltic to Helsinki.
We were only a week in the Baltic states. But our eyes were opened up to the beauty of snow covered endless forests and the mixture of old traditions and the extreme modernity and very civilized current way of living. And all of the time I thought of the people of the Ukraine, who must have been living in exactly this way up until a year ago when Putin brutally attacked them. I felt as if I was actually traveling through Ukraine before the war and marveling at how civilized and beautiful it was. It brought that war home to me. Tallinn is only about three hours bus ride the Russian border six hours from St. Petersburg. Belarus is not far from Riga and Kviv is only a days drive away. It is contrast, between suffering Ukraine and bright and shining Estonia that will stay with me after I return. Menus, historical markers, the voices in the Riga market were all in English, Russian and Latvian. The tensions of the Baltic states will stay with me.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 