Tallinn - Build it and they will come

Tallinn (Estonia)

09 AUG - 10 AUG

One thing that I didn't know about Tallinn was that it was actually an Olympic City, not in the prime hosting sense but in the fact that little old Moscow didn't have the capacity to host yachting events and thus Tallinn was given the honour. Thus it was with that infinite sense of Soviet purpose and grandeur that they went to work on constructing a monolithic Olympic style dais which also doubled as a promenade, one that opened up right onto Tallinn Bay from its pride of place in front of the old town. The hope, it was said, were that tourists would come to Tallinn and bare witness to how grand, wonderful and intriguing a city it is and how this particular representation of the Soviet Union was so different from the Western propaganda that had infiltrated the minds of these foreign Big Mac merchants. And then, the good 'ole Soviet Union made a slight faux pas and in 1979 invaded a little country to the south called Afghanistan. Can someone say 'Oops' and can someone also add to that,  'ramifications'! In response what most western nations therefore chose to do in terms of showing their anger and the contempt of the Soviets in invading The Ghan was to boycott the their prize piece, the 1980 Olympics. For Tallinn therefore the expectation of a tourist influx and the chance to show itself off never really eventuated. Also it should be remembered that they were only hosting the YACHTING for goodness sakes, who the hell was going to sit on the shore for hours of a day and watch boats 2kms off the promenade hit their marks against an imaginary course!? In any case the mighty promenade, the sign of Soviet strength, grandeur and supremacy became the classic white elephant, and that as they say 'is all folks'. There it now remains in front of the old town walls of Tallinn, an old Eastern bloc style construction that stands starkly on the bay with no heart, no soul and no sign or intention from the Estonians of ever really utilising it or ever doing anything constructive with it. Still, I'm surprised that the young Estonians haven't rocked it as yet, perhaps they will. An outdoor Eurovision one year? Just a thought!

View of Tallinn old town from St Olaf's - at one time the tallest structure on the planet

Old town - Tallinn

Estonia has been an independent state for going on twenty years now. Russians comprise approximately 20%-25% of the population and it appears from chatting with some of the people around the town that there's no love lost between the groups. From the Russian side it seems that they feel, or at least try to convince themselves that the Estonians accept them. It sounds like the typical head in the sand type of philosophy to me. The Estonian perspective seems to be quite different and whilst there's not any real outward aggression the consensus is that they wish these guys would just buzz off, go home, and leave this little big country to find it's feet in the EU.

So let me get this right, with a seat belt or not, it's still going to be a bloodbath

View onto the bay of Tallinn- was kind of trying to get the colours of the Estonian flag in the photo...can you see it, can 'ya!?

Enough of the facts now, back to what I've actually been doing. Over the past few days I've been crashing out at the Dancing Eesti, a hostel run by an Australian, located practically in the middle of the old town. What is starting to both amuse and frustrate me a little bit on this adventure is the number of my countrymen that I keep running into. I heard a saying recently, in Estonia of all places, that goes something like this, 'You find Germans everywhere and you find Australians anywhere'. It's incredible and amusing but it also appears to be the case that everywhere you turn in Europe, (and it's true for other places also), that you will inevitably hear a familiar accent. I was in a bar called the Hell Hunt with a group of mostly Australians a night or two ago, some Germans, English and a smattering of a few others national denominations. I then managed to tack onto the end of a conversation that I could hear emanating from the bar which sounded like it was an Australian Lawyers Convention in full swing. I jumped in on this one and found out that the guys were in fact lawyers, a few years out of uni and two of them had just worked out that they'd done the same degree at UWA. Kind of amusing, kind of small world-ish in its outcome, and as I said earlier, a little frustrating to be truthful. It's almost as if there's more Australians outside of Australia than there are back at home, why are we all travelling people? What is wrong with us? LOL ... I think the way we Aussies figure it, and the way we explain in to everyone that asks us is, 'Hey, we're so bloody far away from everything that when we go, we need to go global!'. In addition, and with no disrespect to New Zealand, because it's a great destination, there's only so many times that you can jump the Tasman and go mental in Queenstown before figuring out that going mental in other places might be equally as amusing, and the Kiwi's are so damn nice, really, sometimes you just need some vodka inspired fury to get those endorphins going!

St Olaf's Cathedral - Tallinn

Alexsander Nevsky Cathedral - Tallinn

There's no perfect blue buildings here

Night view of Tallinn from the 'grand' Olympic dais

In any case our bar hopping turns into a one stop shop and I start chatting with this cool American girl that works as a masseuse on the European Poker Tour. She has as one of her clients, amongst others, Daniel Negreanu, who is an absolute legend in the poker world. A dude that is shrewd, witty and can basically read your thoughts even before you've fully formulated them yourself. She is an employee of a company that is employed by the tour and basically she travels from city to city, working on the guys whilst they're in tournament play. So, at the end of our drinking session we all ended up making it back to the Dancing Eesti digs at about 2am after a great night out, I then discover that this girl is a pretty damn good salsa dancer and has salsa, bachata and merengue preloaded onto her iphone just ready to go. It wasn't a difficult decision at that point, as the young Estonians would say, 'lets rock it'. We cut up the hostel floorboards until the sun came up, finishing up somewhere close to 6am, it was freakin' awesome.

Tallinn - If you can't fix it, rock it!

Tallinn (Estonia)

07 AUG - 09 AUG

Recycling was the way of the old Soviet Union, it was their methodology and in some ways it made a lot of sense, well now days in any case. If something could be used for another purpose, changed, altered, melted down, cut up, taped, glued, whatever, it was done so without even a hint of sentimentality.They were the atheistic McGyver crew. On the other hand this was not typically the Estonian mentality but a borrowed one.

It can be visibly noticed around outside the old town of Tallinn and it's the reason why in old factories, powerplants, nuclear silos etc, if they can't find a way of fixing the space, morphing it, or using the spare parts for anything particularly interesting, well then it's free game for concerts and dance parties. So the saying in Estonia goes, 'If you can't fix it, then rock it!'. I really like that philosophy. There's something a little indie or punk about the whole thing but I like the attitude. 'So it won't work, yeah, why don't we rock it!'. Something that we should learn to adopt back home rather than building grand car parks or deliberating for 30 years as to Sydney needs to upgrade it's rail infrastructure. Imagine 'rocking' a train! How damn good would that be!

Tallinn Old Town

Alexsander Nevsky Cathedral - Toompea Hill - Tallinn

Tallinn Old Town - with the town hall spire in the middle

Onto something else, another amusing story that was told to me the other day. I was in a discussion with a guy that explained to me that people from the northen part of Estonia are strangely particularly adept at speaking Finnish, or at least, have the capacity to understand it to a reasonably complex high level. Let me also add that Finnish is not the easiest language in the world to understand or speak, it ranks right up there with Chinese and Hungarian. As for the Finns, well the same does not however work in the converse, meaning that Finns will usually not understand a word of Estonian, no matter how slowly the poor Estonian pronounces their words or how widely they gesticulate. The hypothesis for 'why this is so' is a little amusing and works a little something like this. Back in the middle to late 60's the Finns built huge television towers on their coastline to transmit TV signals within a predetermined circumference. This capital investment,not just inspired by Finnish ambition and power but also sponsored kindly with the aid of CIA dollars also meant that the TV signals transmitting from TV central Helsinki could also quite easily traverse the Gulf of Finland via the Baltic Sea and make it to a little place 60kms to the the south called Tallinn in Soviet occupied Estonia. The Estonians, picking up on this little oddity were able to point their sattelite dishes in the direction of Helsinki and receive news of the western world in the Finnish language, thus allowing a generation of Estonians to easily pick up on their Finnish language skills...this however is not where the story ends....

...It was however an offence in Soviet Estonia to be caught with your 'Finnish pants down', so to speak. Meaning that you weren't legally allowed to tune into Finnish TV and the accompanying western propaganda that these infedels transmitted . Whilst punishment for covert tuning into Finnish broadcasts existed, they (the punishments), weren't actually as extreme as some people might have imagined. Meaning that you weren't going to end up in the gulag somewhere in the middle of Siberia for catching Juka and Silvie discuss their finances in a home made sauna.The reasoning behind this however was more interesting than the actual circumstance. Apparently the KGB used Tallinn as a type of 'test environment', a rat laboratory if you will, in order to see how 'Soviets' would behave or respond to western influences, ideas, etc. Whilst there were 'poxy' attempts by Moscow to scramble incoming Finnish TV signals, over time the Soviets accepted its existence and did not crack down on households as stringently as one might have expected of the state. In an even more interesting and kind of odd sidenote to this event, which stangely enough relates back to THE HOFF!, doesn't everything!? The local Tallinn police, during the time that Knight Rider was being aired, were asked to keep a look out for kids on the street talking into their wrists near 'good looking vehicles', aka, in 'THE HOFF' Knight Rider fashion. In those instances they were then asked to follow the kids to their homes as those residences were 'more than likely' to be the ones pointing their antennas/satellite dishes to the north and tuning into good 'ole Finnish broadcasts. Seriously, I think just busting kids with light sabres would have been far easier, or even just listening particularly intently for Wookie impersonations!

Apparently it's quite continental, and a little sado-masochistic

In another, totally unrelated Estonian story that I found as amusing, apparently the CSI equivalent here in Tallinn, the Crime Enforement Agency or something close to that has been storying drugs form various busts over a number of years. It had somehow leaked out that in a certain amount of time, call it 3 yrs or so, that over 100kg of drugs had gone missing. When the agency were asked to provide an explanation to the media

as to what had eventuated their 'official explanation' was that 'it had simply vaporised'!? Man, imagine working in an environment where that quantity of drugs was just floating in the atmosphere around you, how off your head would you be? When the director of the agency was asked to provide a more detailed explanation his successful spin doctoring turned up this little gem, 'There's far more serious issues to be concerned about then 100kg of drugs disappearing from our agency'!? Who the freakin' hell are you dude!? Muhammed Saeed (Iraqi Information Minister during the early days of the USA occupation). He'd say such ludicrous things that you couldn't help just be amused!

The old and the new

Town hall

There's something a little 'Pink Floyd' in this

All this somehow brings me to my time in Tallinn, which has been amusing, fascinating and a lot of fun, which thus far on this trip I've had a lot of luck with. The Old Town of Tallinn, whilst being a tourist mecca, is beautiful and one that you can easily stroll around for hours and not get bored with its cobble stone streets and 14th-15th century medieval feel.. What's more, the prices in Estonia ,(well in Tallinn at least) , are significantly cheaper than those in other Scandanavian countries. EverywhereI went in Helsinki I felt that there was some Finnish guy in a backroom laughing hysterically and saying in Finnish, 'He paid what for a cappucino!?'. Admittedly I've a caffeine addict and habits like that are hard to break but when some geek throws up 5 euros for a coffee then he bloody well need to explain his way out of it! The only way that I'd accept a coffee at that mark was whilst sitting on the Champs Elysees, that I can't understand, but if I'm in downtown Helsinki with nothing on going around me except a drunken Finn called Niko telling me Australian jokes, well, I need to know, WTF? ANYWAY, Tallinn is not Helsinki, it's got it's prices in order and head screwed on and I'm liking it.

In'spired'

Cool little place in the town hall

It's my shadow dedication to Brett Holman - yeah, it's all good Brett

OK, so now to the last of the Tallinn oddities and one that I believe it generally well known. It's fair to say that when God decided upon conceiving the Estonian race, he messed with genetics, BIG TIME. All the genes for the good looking part of the population went to the females, I mean seriously, out of all the countries that I've been to they outrank all comers on the looks scale by a fair margin. How these poor females put up with their skin head ,flat headed, mutated, bright polyester suited partners, I have no idea! I mean, it's not even a secret that's 'generally' known, this is discussed out in the open. For some reason the Estonian or Soviet male feels that to show his masculinity he needs to crop his hair to army regiment levels, suit himself up in the gaudiest garb possible, and then all of a sudden he's Riko Suave...(perhaps Riko Suave of the Albanian mafia). I really 'get' why this town has been 'invaded' by males of all other nations, their of picking up something very attractive increases 100 fold once they touchdown on Estonian soil. I have to say from a completely biased perspective, Estonian men, keep doing what it is you're doing, the rest of the world love you for it!!

...and finally, the JJ guest book bombing serious continues, this comes from the funky Tallinn bike tour

BOOM!

Helsinki - Niko - you were trashed bro!

Helsinki (Finland)
05 AUG - 07 AUG

Something that I noticed in Helsinki was that come 10pm the number or people that were monumentally trashed and wondering the streets increased exponentially. I didn't quite understand that little oddity until it actually dawned upon me until one evening whilst I was making my way back to Suomenlinna island, it was a little after 11pm. I was sitting in the ferry terminal having missed the last ferry back by a manner of minutes. Sitting in the terminal for about 5 mins a tall lanky Finn stumbles around one side, pointing at who knows what, talking to the images in his mind. This, fortunately or unfortunately is the type of person I tend to attract, for better or worse I knew that he'd want to strike up a  conversation the moment he located the door (it took a while for him to work that out). I'm sitting in one corner of the small terminal, this guy sits diagonally across from me having an animated conversation with the ticket booth. He then rips out a packet of cold frankfurts and battles with the pack for about 2-3 mins. Sitting there, watching him, somehow I felt a little hungry and wondered if he'd offer me one, and the pissed bastard does. He gestures in that over animated drunken way like 'Hey mate,come and get it'. I politely refuse but find it strange that he offered. At the point I knew that once he'd 'sighted' me that a conversation would ensue, whatever the hell that was going to involve. I discover that Niko doesn't know a lot of English, conversely I don't know a hell of a lot of Finnish. He asks me where I'm from and I tell him I'm Australian, then out of left field in perfect English Niko rips out this line, 'What do you call an Australian taxi?'...'I don't know Niko, what?'...'A kangaroo!'. Niko LOVES IT! He literally LOVES his own joke and starts up into hysterical fits of laughter. He laughs so hard that an aneurysm would have been on the cards and because of that, I start up into fits of laughter, it's freakin' contagious because I think that line was the only perfectly constructive line of English that he either knows or could have ripped out from his inebriated mind at that moment.

Catching the ferry home - view to Helsinki

Market Square - Helsinki - Finland

Fast forward a couple of days later and I'm waiting for the line 6 tram down to Helsinki west harbour where I was going to jump Tallink Express ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn. The 3B tram pulls up in front of me and there in the tram I see a familiar yellow vest, beaten hat and weathered face of Niko. I yell out to the guy, 'Hey Niko!', he looks at me in that manner that you normally reserve for occasions when you see a strange Spanish/Uruguayan/Serbian or whatever the hell I am, call your name out, he gives me that 'Who the f*** are you look'. Niko, at 11am on this morning is still trashed and I believe that to be his perpetual state. The tram pulls away from the stop and I give Niko a Brett Holman for his troubles, for the unlearned this is either one or two thumbs up, aka Brett Holman that plays football for Australia, (well, apparently he plays football, I'm still a disbeliever). All I could think at that point was 'Niko, you're still trashed bro!'.

Centre of Helsinki - Hakaniemi

Then there's Petteri, the morning that I wake up and start packing my gear for Tallinn good 'ole Petteri hands me a Koff which is a Finnish beer. It's 9am Petteri, what's you're problem mate, are you Australian or something? Petteri has also been drinking for most of the night, he's got a few days off from his excavation job and is getting trashed, again. I met Petteri a few nights earlier also, his English is equivalent to that of Niko. We try and converse but we struggle badly. For a man that was hammered however he comes up with the ingenious notion of calling his wife at 1am to translate the conversation. Obviously she thinks this is a brilliant idea and I can hear the anger and frustration in her voice, and yet she persists for somewhere close to 10 mins, allowing a drunk Petteri to get to know me a little better. From what I could figure Petteri does excavation work and travels down from his hometown of Kuopio in the north to work in Helsinki, he does three weeks stints om and then heads home for a week, or something along those lines. He's a nice guy, but ranks as one in a list of hammered Finns that I witness in the days that I was there...which brings me to the original point...Supermarkets sell cheap alcohol readily and freely at prices significantly cheaper than one would pay for them in a bar. The issue is that they stop selling alcohol relatively early, I think somewhere close to 7pm or thereabouts, which means that you get quite a few hammered Finns wondering the streets once their golden purchases have taken affect. The devils hours between 7pm and midnight are something to behold.

Freestyler - rock the microphone, straight from the top of his dome

Helsinki streetscape

On the back of Henry's Pub we have Robert's Coffee...now all we need is Julie's tobacconist and we're sorted!

Is this gull giving me a 'Whatchu talkin' about Willis' look...

This brings me to my last couple of days in Helsinki, which aside from meeting amusing pissheads was a little tame but not too bad never the less. I spent most days cruising around the city just checking it out, doing my own little bit of discovery but nothing too extravagent. As per last entry, it's a nice place, no doubt. Not somewhere that I'd want to stay for any real extended period of time, well not solo in any case, but a nice enough place to visit. Typically Nordic, typically conservative and chilled in that restrained Scandanavian manner. That's a tough one to explain, it's chilled, liberal in some ways but still conservative in others. You get the feeling that not too much would phase the Finns but if you pushed them to their breaking point then you'd have a massacre on your hands. Thankfully I didn't irritate too many enough to see an actual trigger on the 'flipout'.

Not the most inspiring photo, I know...but here's the deal, that little courtyard is also tacked onto Helsinki's best brewery, and just behind that is the dock where I'd catch the ferry to the city centre...thankfully this was the view from my room, jump out the window and make it to the brewery in 10 seconds!

On the way out, leaving Helsinki behind and out into the Baltic sea

Helsinki - 'Oujee'

Helsinki (Finland)

02 AUG - 04 AUG

Big love for Helsinki

So ladies, if a nice spritely Finnish man walks up to you one day and whispers the words, 'Miltee se tuntus viela joskas muata meijan sukuhauvass', don't look at him like his downed one to many shots of Findlandia! Get out your Google translators and relish the opportunity to discover what exactly that interpretations mean. I can say this however, the close equivalent is something about - 'How would you feel about lying in the same family grave someday'. It's only then, when you truly understand the core of what the man is saying that you can reply with that kind and underderstanding Australian response that we're reknowed for, 'Piss off you moron!'...but, just in case you need to know a little more, apparently this particular linguistic style is particular to the Savo of Eastern Finland. They also have a manner of describing things or asking things in a very confusing but descriptive manner, so this young buck, the man of your Finnish dreams, has apparently just proposed to you and would like for you to be his wife - a little better than an Aussie, ' 'carn, do you wanna or what?'. I know, it's just a heads up but you never know your luck in a big city, or a small Eastern Finnish town, apparently.

My small love for Helsinki

Flying the 2.5 hours from Paris and landing at Helsinki's Vantaa airport, all I could see around me for miles were tall wooded pine forests, I guess not surprising since three quarters of the land surface of Finland is apparently covered by forest. What's more, the streets were kind of deserted and you could only really assume from that that the 5.2 million Finns were either EasyJet paranoid and hiding in the forests or perhaps in one of their 2 million sauna's,seriously, what's the caper with the 'getting steamed' compulsion? That's the equivalent of one sauna to every nuclear Finnish family - WHY FINLAND? WHY????? What's with that!!?

Enough of the Finnish weirdness for a moment and totally forgetting the length of your arm words with double, triple or quadruple vowels all in a row that make you sound like you're choking on a sack of marbles if you dare pronounce words such as 'stop', 'help', 'cat', or dog. A quick history lesson on where these little Swedish retarded cousins came from, and just before I do, isn't it funny how the retarded cousins of big brother countries are always fiesty and a little competitive, just like the Finns with the Swedes, or with Canadians and the Americans, but the big brothers are always kind of patting them on the head saying 'there, there', and then wiping the floor with their pithy exploits. Anyway, that's a totally different story.

So, how this place happened. The first crusade to Finland was led by the Swedish King Eric IX in 1155, and for the next 650 years, Finland was part of Sweden. Then in 1809 Sweden lost Finland to Russia, in turn, Finland became a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire until 1917 when they gained their Independence. As for its capital, Helsinki, it was founded by King Gustav of Sweden in 1550 and was done so to become a trading post and southern competitor to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. These days there's 500,000 Finns living in Helsinki with 1.2 million estimated to be living in the greater metropolitan area.

Facade at the central railway - they kind of look serious, kind of stoic, kind of pansy like also

Now, WHY THE HELL AM I HERE??

I remember dad telling me in repeated stories that my aunty's first husband was 'special', much in the same way that Swedes look upon Finns. During the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki this guy apparently was dismayed by the daily newspaper headlines, 'Helsinki ...blah blah', 'Blah, blah...Helsinki', until one day he commented to a group of people, 'Wow, that Helsinki must be good, I see his name in the paper everyday, he's winning everything'.Ah yes, don't we all love the exploits of the 'special' people amongst us. Never the less, his infamous words resonated down the decades and when I was looking for an oddball place to go for a little while, well, Helsinki fit the bill.

My first few days in this town have been more than enjoyeable. First of all my digs. I'm currently located on Suomenlinna island, a 15 min ferry ride from the main market square. This place is actually a series of six linked islands on which a 200 year old fortress now stands. No longer in military use, this place is UNESCO heritage listed, (lucky, because I was wanted to rip the place up YO!), and is an interesting place to reside for a few days, especially considering that Helsinki's finest brewery is literally across the road from the room that I'm in, or a 2 minute S-L-O-W walk from the front door.

Catching the ferry to Suomenlinna island - my home for a few days - brewery at my front door

Helsinki from the Suomenlinna ferry

As for Helsinki itself, well it's quaint, it's ordered, it's very nordic, meaning that it's conservative but in various places you see that warped Nordic tendency for bad humour or the need for them to break out of their conservative image. It's not that French style breakout, when the French do it it's big and bold, and somehow makes sense, when the Finns do it, it's just odd (see Lordi, winners of the Eurovision song contest a few years back, that'll make my point nicely). Travelling around the city however is a breeze, public transport is reliable, ordered and always on time. A daily pass is 3.8 Euros and will allow you to travel on any line, any mode of transport, for as long as you require for the day. This allowed me to do a little Helsinki exploration of my own and get up to the Olympic stadium and see the place where the world came to play in 1952. It also allowed me to take a lift up to the 11 storey tower that was purposely built for the Olympics and have a birdseye view of this city, and aesthetically, you would have to say that it's a beautiful place. Relatively small, it's open to the Baltic sea and is either surrounded by water from the sea or by one of the 180,000 lakes that cover the land, well that part that isn't covered by forest.

Capital of the sporting world for two weeks in 1952

Olympic Tower

Stadium getting ready for the U2 gig, oh yeah, Athens, you're not that far away now!

View of Helsinki from the Olympic tower

Silja line, Tallinn or Stockholm or St Petersburg bound

Lakes and islands and lakes - Welcome to Finland

Good 'ole Nordic style, neat and ordered

Streetscape - Helsinki

I also took in a European League Champions match between the hometown champs, HJK Helsinki and the team that my dad followed as a kid, FC Partizan of Belgrade. Not much of a game really, two decent goals but the Serbian side had already spanked the Finns in Belgrade 3-0 and were apparently treating them in the same fashion that Swedes do, although without that streak of compassion. Still, a draw at home for the Finns was an ok resulted and the small crowd in the Finnair stadium wasn't too disappointed.

UCL match - hometown team vs my defacto hometown...and a team from there

Game action - HJK Helsinki vs. FK Partizan

..and don't these guys know how to name a bar ! Welcome home!

As for the next few days, will be in Helsinki until the 7th of August and then jumping a boat down to Tallinn in Estonia, as for after that? Your guess is as good as mine :)

I love this shot - it's taken just before midnight, the sun will just not drop!

...Oh, and by the way, I'm starting up a 'Guestbook Photo bomb series' were the object of my fury will be my ex partner in crime, now Sydney resident once more, Janelle Jordan. JJ, this first one in a list of many comes to you from the Helsinki City Museum...enjoy ;)

You still {heart} Paris JJ, no matter where you go :)