Tallinn You About Estonia

Prior to the big adventure on the Trans-Siberian Express, I ducked into Estonia for a few days. You can hear my radio review of the trip at www.aroundtheworldradio.com this Saturday at 10:50 AM EDT. If you miss it, the segment will be hanging in the site's archives  It's the last segment of the June 6th show.  Also, you can discover more at www.visitestonia.com.

Meantime, a colleague who traveled with me wrote a terrific piece of poetic prose at http://www.everettpotter.com/2013/06/estonia-lithuania-past-tense/. I have excerpted part of the story here, and added my own pictures and links. Marc Kristal echoes precisely my feelings about traveling back to places after they have changed from a former state of being.  Not only that, his coverage of Tallinn is spot-on; his words painting a far greater masterpiece than I could ever expect to fashion.

In addition to the sites Marc mentions below, I highly recommend a visit to the Museum for Puppet Arts. It illustrates the rich history of puppet theater in Estonia, which, ironically, was especially prolific when the Baltic nation was a puppet of the Soviet Union. 

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A few months ago, I visited Rome, a beloved city in which I have long followed, like many tourists, a particular, equally beloved routine. One of the high points is a first-day visit to the Forum – where I was very surprised to discover that admission to this fascinating monument, one of the essential archaeological sites in the west, was no longer free.

I was, of course, shocked, shocked by this change of policy – but, really, why should I have been? As the history of Rome itself so eloquently demonstrates, everything is a moment in time, and even the things that seem immutable are fugitive. Still, I was struck by my own reaction, my feeling that this small transformation – the installation of a ticket kiosk – had drawn a line in history: suddenly the ‘old’ Rome, the Rome in which you could stroll down the steep stairs behind the Piazza del Campidoglio and into the seat of ancient empire, was gone. This led me, in turn, to consider how particular and personal experience can be, how the absence or presence of knowledge or context can powerfully influence one’s perceptions. To wit: If your first Roman holiday came after the installation of the turnstile – AT, as it were – Weltschmerz for Rome BT is inexplicable, even absurd: So they’re charging admission. What’s the big deal?

What’s interesting is that this disconnect can exist even if the line in the sand of time is epoch-making – for example, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent independence of its vassal states. In Prague, Warsaw, or anywhere else behind the Iron Curtain, the difference between Then and Now is quantum (LAURA's note--Berlin is the prime example of this phenomenon, IMHO) . Yet if you have no memory of what life was like in the Eastern Bloc prior to 1991, then freedom there is your reality, and you can be as mystified by those haunted by the ghosts of the Soviet years as someone who’d never known a Forum without turnstiles. Thus it can be invaluable, when visiting places where, to paraphrase Faulkner, the past isn’t past, to be made aware of significant recent history: the better to understand what shaped the seemingly eternal everyday-ness of the place you’re experiencing, and to perceive that you are in fact in a kind of chrysalis, a city or country emerging from a previous state of being into a new condition traced by, but separate from (hopefully, someday), the dark past.

A recent visit to Estonia and Lithuania brought this home to me sharply, the former especially, as Tallinn, Estonia’s enchanting capital, is in many ways a typically ‘modern’ European city – which is to say that it can comfortably put forward both the historic and contemporary. Tallinn’s Old Town, comprised of upper and lower districts, began life in the early 13^th century and is today a picturesque mélange of Danish, German and (to a lesser degree) Russian influences; from my base at the Hotel Telegraaf, a chic hostelry installed in the city’s old telegraph building, it was a pleasurable stroll to the district’s greatest hits: the best-preserved medieval town hall (dating from 1404) in Europe; on Town Hall Square, the oldest continuously-operating pharmacy (dating from 1422) in Europe (be sure to check the expiration date on your prescription of Eye of Newt); and   handsome churches.  

Seaplane Harbour Museum

At the same time, contemporary Tallinn is palpably present, in cultural attractions such as the design-forward Kumu Art Museum (in Peter the Great’s Kadriorg Park) and the superlative fun-for-all-ages Seaplane Harbour maritime museum. It is contained within what is surely one of the great interior spaces to be found in the Baltics, a three-domed concrete-shell airplane hangar dating from the early 20^th century. The Rotermann Quarter, a former industrial district near the waterfront, has been reinvented via the alchemy of that ubiquitous urban revitalization model, an interleaving of historical and contemporary architecture, as a hip business, residential and leisure-time destination. 

Yet the years between the Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1944 and 20 August 1991, when the nation declared its independence, make themselves felt in large ways and small. Nowhere is this more transparent than at the KGB Museum atop the Hotel Viru, a 23-story modernist pile built by the USSR’s Intourist agency to attract foreign customers (and currency). It opened in 1972.

Former KGB Headquarters

Radio Room in Hotel Viru

The museum, which debuted in January of 2011 and has drawn some 75,000 visitors to its relatively cramped quarters, is difficult to characterize, in large measure because there’s not much to it. Overlooking the former headquarters of the KGB in Tallinn, the outpost occupies the hotel’s top floor. It remains unreachable by elevator, as was the case during the Soviet years, when it officially didn’t exist (nosy questioners were told floor 23 held ‘technical rooms’. There are displays of vintage photographs and documents, an office with telephones and technology that, though only four decades old, own a primitiveness worthy of the Flintstones, and a KGB ‘radio room,’ used for sending messages and eavesdropping on guests. The place exerts a weird fascination, which derives (for me at any rate) from its almost perfect conformity to a 1950s Hollywood-style laff riot vision of utter Commie incompetence – the kind of comedy in which the Red agents are depicted as bumbling,  bushy-browed buffoons booming out party platitudes but all too susceptible to Jack Daniel’s, Chiclets, and other classy American blandishments.

The mirthful mood is abetted by my group’s tour guide, Jana, a fast-talking, high-energy gamine in a red warm-up jacket with the museum’s logo emblazoned on its back, who calls to mind a blond, pixie-cut version of the impish Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut, and sustains a non-stop monologue that is at once richly informative, deeply sad, and laugh-out-loud funny. Indeed, it is not too much to say that Jana is the KGB Museum, as she animatedly fills its dreary rooms and corridors with the bizarre up-is-down world of Estonia under the pathetic, vicious Soviet thumb.

What do we learn? That the Viru, Tallinn’s first skyscraper and most prestigious hotel, required a mere three years to construct (using Finnish labor), as opposed to the decade or more it typically took the unmotivated local talent to finish a comparable job. That, out of 460 rooms, 60 were bugged – the joke was that the Viru was built from “micro-concrete – 50 percent concrete, 50 percent microphones.” That only the best rooms, the ones with views, were wired, and that guests such as journalists, who were most likely to divulge useful information, received the same bugged accommodations over and over again. That the KGB went so far as to insert microphones into butter plates in the dining room (while cautioning the waiters never to put them in the dishwasher).

We learn as well that the spy agency’s omnipresence, which it took great pains to conceal, was an open secret to one and all. Mischievous guests would often write ‘KGB’ in the elevators where the button for the 23^rd floor would have been, and a museum visitor who’d been at the Viru pre-1991 told of standing in his wiretapped bathroom and loudly complaining of a lack of toilet paper – after which a bellman immediately showed up with a fresh roll.

Despite the promise of the risqué floorshows, in which scantily clad Eastern Bloc Amazons posed provocatively (though with the high-minded froideur of magistrates), the Viru was a tough place to relax and have fun. The bar didn’t stock bourbon – too American. Local people, even if they were blood relatives, were not allowed above the ground floor. Prostitutes were prohibited – the museum displays a list of banned scarlet women, their names chivalrously blocked out – and those who managed to get in the door had to write the price of their services on their shoe soles, which they’d display discreetly by crossing their legs. And, showing us a vintage photo of a matron armed with a pencil and a stern, eagle-eyed glare, Jana tells us about the Viru’s 68 ‘guardians of the floors,’ whose job it was to write down the activities of the guests (one night, to induce writer’s cramp in these unfortunate old ladies, a visiting dance troupe spent hours scampering back and forth between each other’s rooms).

As this story suggests, to work in such a place was to be more than a prisoner in name. Jana shows us a trick purse that, when opened, set off a paint bomb: the idea was that a hotel employee who might find a lost wallet and try to secure some foreign currency would be busted by the colorful splatter. That this was no laughing matter is evident from the story Jana tells of two waiters. One who was caught drunk on the job was sent to work in the hotel’s storeroom for three months. Another, found with a pocket full of Finnish money, was sent to jail.

For the entire, unedited (by LP) story, visit http://www.everettpotter.com/2013/06/estonia-lithuania-past-tense/

Marc Kristal is an architecture, design and travel writer. Kristal, a contributing editor of Dwell and a former editor of AIA/J,The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, and numerous other publications. His books include Re:Crafted: Interpretations of Craft in Contemporary Architecture and Interiors (2010) and Immaterial World: Transparency in Architecture (2011). Also a screenwriter, Kristal wrote the film Torn Apart.  He lives in New York.

A Trans-Siberian Postscript

June 1
Washington, DC

Good Morning, Comrades. I am back in the US(S)A, after three weeks of adventure, absurdity, love, sickness, weight loss and innumerable travel tales.

In brief, here are a few highlights, in chronological order:

Part I (best forgotten)

A Great Wall
A Summer Palace
Heat exhaustion in the Forbidden City
An overnight at a Chinese hospital
The Chinngis Khaan Airpor/Ulan Bator at midnight
The Mongolian steppe
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Part II

My first step in Russia

A giant Lenin head in Ulan Ude

One of two odd encounters with bears

Wading in 30 degree Lake Baikal

Studying the Siberian countryside for hours a day
Studying Cyrillic one hour a day
More Lenin statues (full-size, but not life-size--dude was a midget)
Several babushkas
Countless Russian Orthodox churches
1 mosque
2 Kremlins
10 pounds lost weight
1 case of the flu
1 Red Square
0 Monopoly games

Soviet Style

I don't even know if Psy could do Soviet style justice. Yes, my friends, it still exists, 20 years after the Soviet Union ceased to exist (on the map, but maybe not completely in the Russian mind).

This morning, I dined with a stuffed bear over my shoulder. I am staying in the Radisson Slavyanskaya--a property surely converted from an old-school Soviet hotel. The public areas are immense, but dark and ill-decorated (note the bear). The staff is generally unhelpful and looks at you as if every question asked is the stupidist query in the world. For example, this morning, I asked a concierge and two bellmen where to find the AeroExpress ticket booth in the neighboring Kievskaya Train Station. This question seemed like a no-brainer--I imagine half of the people staying here do so because the hotel sits adjacent to the rail station, from which the express train to Vkunovo airport departs. Not one of the three had a clue. Now, to be fair to Radisson, it's not the brand. For the two previous nights, I stayed at the Radisson Blu Belorusskaya, a new-concept design hotel, and the visit, from the decor, to the staff, to the food, was just lovely.

(I would have stayed on, except the Belorusskaya did not have what the Slavyanskaya has....location, location, location...by the Kievskaya train station. Plus, for an English speaker laid up in bed for 24 hour straight (namely me), the Slavyanskaya certainly had more options on TV, including CNN, CNBC, TCM, BBC, and English versions of NHK, RT and CCTV, plus Eurosport. That said, I found myself drawn to a game show on the Italian RAI. My understanding of the wacky goings-on seemed to prove that the part of the brain that translates languages, once stimulated in a foreign environment, brings to the forefront previouly learned information. Look at me, a writer doing scientific experiments on the fly.)

But, after that digression of a parenthetical paragraph, you, dear reader, may question whether I am actually a writer. Back to our thesis. While you might not realize it from walking down Moscow's main shopping drags, now lined with the stores of luxury brands ranging from Hermes to Mikimoto, or by walking through GUM, the formerly glum shopping mall of chronic Soviet shortages, which is now a deluxe capitalist mecca, but Soviet style still exists, mainly in the form of the service mentality....or lack thereof.

Back in the days of the USSR, yessir, you had a job for life, regardless of your attitude. So, whether you were a hotel clerk, a waiter, or a flight attendant, it didn't really matter if you did your job well...or with pleasure. In talking with some Marriott executives in Moscow, they acknowledged that training staff to have a Western manner of hospitality is still a challenge. Actually, it wasn't a direct acknowledgement as much as a chuckle of agreement when I mentioned the rather dour attitude of the Russian staff that served the Trans-Siberian Express. Indeed, the representative from Lernidee, the operator of the tour, said that the German company does try to train the Russian staff it is handed at the beginning of the tourist season. But old dogs (even if they are young) don't easily learn new tricks....or new mentalities... overnight. With centuries of oppression, current day challenges and a Debbie Downer DNA working against them, it is not, as our tour guide Valeri pointed out, in the Russian nature to be smiley or effusive--especially if not fortified by vodka.

The Packing List

People often wonder how I can pack so light. True, I was unable to fit my gear into a carry-on for the three-week trek from Beijing to Moscow, but I still had less baggage than my fellow passengers. And I am heading back to the USA lighter than I started (suitcase--3 pounds lighter; body-10 pounds lighter) largely because 1/4 of my suitcase was reserved outbound for gluten-free snacks. All needed to be consumed for sustenance. And because I purchased no Monopoly games on this jaunt (more on that disappointing development in another post), I am heading back with space to spare.

Here's the packing list:

3 pairs of pants
2 pairs of shorts
3 dresses
2 pairs of sandals
2 pairs of loafers
1 pair of heels (necessary for one 2-hour business meeting-ouch)
6 T-shirts
2 long-sleeve tops
2 sweaters
1 windbraker
1 leather jacket
1 silk robe (not worn during trip--robes supplied on train and at hotels)
1 bathing suit (not worn)
Socks, underwear
2 pairs of comfy yoga pants

I also brought a shoebox full of hotel-sized amenities like shampoo, body wash and conditioner, most of which I didn't need to use.

I had 5 books with me--a Russian language book, which I studied diligently for an hour a day; Lonely Planet Moscow (albeit circa 1993); Lonely Planet Trans-Siberian (a new edition--not LP's greatest work); Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (my plane read on the way to Beijing); and Travels to Siberia by Ian Frazier. The latter was my train read and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Other than that, I had an umbrella, sunglasses, glasses, drugs and potions, a neck pillow, a butt supporter, mini-headphones, and a few notebooks....plus iPad,cameras, batteries, chargers, adaptors, credit cards, an ATM card, and my passport.

All were packed in a 26" Biaggi foldable suitcase, a small rucksack, and a purse.

Yes, I did break my three-pairs-of-shoes rule, largely due to my two-hour need for heels (I actually could have done without one pair of sandals--but they don't take much room, anyway). But other than that, I have to pat myself on the back for another packing job well-done.

Housekeeping Notes

Thursday/Friday

Shower, no towel

When will I get a new towel? I started this train journey on May 16th with four towels--two hand-size and two bath-size....if you are a size two...which I am. During the past week, towels have fallen by the wayside, variously being used to clean me, to mop up the floor after a shower (the bathroom does not have a separate shower area), etc. I am now down to one towel (plus the one I "borrowed" from the Beijing Kempinski in anticipation of a towel shortage on the train). Because I packed a silk robe bought in China years ago (and rarely worn), I am now contemplating using the terry-cloth robe supplied by the train company as a fifth towel.

A priceless bottle of voda

Water is another thing. Included in the $10,000-plus price tag is one bottle of water a day. That's right, one bottle. Mind you, the train's water is not potable, so one has to brush one's teeth with bottled water (and a toothbrush, of course), as well as using the liquid for hydration. If you want more water, you can buy it on the train or stock up during stops. Okay, fine. Except that the first three days of the train ride, our first-class cabin wasn't even getting its one measly bottle of water. Every night, we would beg and plead with the cabin attendant, who would look at us askance, but finally cede to our demands. I will say that the past two days, one lone daily bottle of water has appeared without incident.

On a very positive note, these cabin attendants are right on top of things when it comes to cleaning the compartments. The minute you head to breakfast, they are in your room stowing the bed and cleaning the bathroom (albeit without leaving new towels behind). They are very good about cleaning the waste basket throughout the day, which is an especially good thing as you are not allowed to flush toilet paper in the chemical toilets.

Tried to shave my legs this morning as the train was moving. Truly a feat of derring-do. That said, it was one of the few times when I didn't end up nicking my legs. Go figure.

TaTa Siberia, Hello, Tatarstan

Friday, Kilometre 780
Kazan, Tatarstan

After passing the divide between Asia and Europe in the midst of nightfall, we arrive in the capital of the Tatar capital of Kazan one and a half hours late. However, as we have a full day's program here, the relatively short delay causes no distress.

Despite this being our first official stop in the European part of Russia, it feels like we are still in Asia....or perhaps the Middle East. Muslims, who first came to this city in 925 AD, live peacefully side by side with their Russian Orthodox neighbors, as their houses of worship, located in the city's massive Kremlin, compete for attention.

A couple of notable occurrences here in Kazan--I had my first complete conversation in Russian. It went like this:
Me: Kak Delat? (How are you?)
Androgynous Andrei the Local Tour Guide: XopaIIIo (Harasho--Good). Kak delat?
Me: XopaIIIo.

That's it.

We were also regaled with music. At the retro Karavalle restaurant, we were treated to videos of Tom Jones from the 1970s and Madonna circa 1983. Afterwards, a visit to a music school provided the backdrop for a delightful series of impressive performances from young virtuosos. The 10-year-old violinist stole the show, but the other strings, the pianists, and the reeds were equally refined. It was lovely to sit back and listen to the classical music, without worrying about taking pictures or running the video camera. That said, I did capture a few snippets.

Finally, we saw the ubiquitous Lenin statue. In the Lenin slept here category, Kazan's claim to fame is a classic case of foreshadowing. The great revolutionary was expelled from Kazan University for his rebellious ways.

And now, ta ta Tatarstan. On to Moscow.

Tsarry, Tsarry Nights

Thursday Night, 9 PM (again)
Ekaterinburg, 1814 Kilometres

After more delays, totaling five hours, we reach Ekaterinburg or Yekatinburg at 9 in the evening. This time, though, we can actually see it. It doesn't get dark here until 11:30 PM.

Although still on the Asian side of the Urals, this is a very European city. People are fashionably-dressed, in terms of what passes as fashionable here (shorts worn with hose; many women sport stilettos, but unlike the Italians, they haven't quite mastered the art of walking without wobbling). 20-somethings are skateboarding, and at sunset, young lovers stroll the romantic walkway lining the city pond. It seems a very modern city, despite that fact that during the Cold War, the presence of the military and weapons manufacturing made this a closed city over which Boris Yeltsin presided in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At the time, it was called Sverdlovsk, named after one of Lenin's right-hand men.

The country's fourth largest city is best known for its pivotal role in 20th century Russian history. Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, was exiled here with his family after being deposed. The Bolsheviks then knocked off the last of the Romanovs here in 1918.

In the ultimate display of Catholic guilt, Nicholas was canonized after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The impressive Church upon the Blood was built in 2003 as a form of repentance, confession, and remembrance.

The pcitures above: That resembling the Washington Monument is an unfinished television tower. Its claim to fame is that it is the world's tallest unfinished TV tower. The green building serves at Vladimir Putin's home away from home when he visits Ekaterinburg, which happens about every other year.