Hails In Eesti-land

I went out for my first unsupervised wander last night.

I only went to find something to eat. In the end, I failed and returned with only a tube of crackers and some decidedly odd cubes of paprika-covered cheese, as these were the least frightening of the items that I encountered in the little corner shop I eventually found. I almost bought something that could reasonably have been a rice salady thing, but decided against it as a result of not being able to have complete confidence in it not containing large chunks of seal meat.

As I walked happily through the quaint and quirky streets of Tallinn Old Town, I found myself in the middle of some kind of security operation surrounding the Three Sisters Hotel, where it turned out that Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands was staying during her visit to Estonia. Nervously, I started to back away from all the uniformed politsei, and was cheerfully beckoned forwards by one of them, who saw no problem at all with letting me walk not only past the building, but actually across the red carpet. If I’d done that in Belfast, I’d have been shot and/or imprisoned for life as a suspected terrorist. It’s a different world altogether, over here. I nodded amicably at Queen Beatrix as I passed through.

This is a little odd, I remember thinking to myself as I strolled along a little cobbled street and found myself having to stand back to make room for several Scandinavian guys, who were dancing along with Extremely Large Beer Glasses lifted high above their heads as they waved them around and sang heartily. No sooner had I had this thought than the sound of chanting echoed quite alarmingly along the alleyway, and I turned the corner on to the town square to find myself in the middle of what was presumably a rehearsal of a traditional Estonian music performance for the queen’s entertainment, but what had apparently turned into quite a merry hooley for anyone who had happened to stumble upon it in the midst of their boozing. An incredibly diverse choir was singing/chanting a weirdly wonderful theatrical piece, as the afore-mentioned revellers danced around the square with their oversized drinks. It was completely unlike any scene I have ever witnessed before. I just stood there in delighted silence, occasionally ducking to avoid a shower of beer from an overly-enthusiastic toast in close proximity to my head.

I got completely and predictably lost on the way back, but it was worth the sore feet and momentary panic. I love this city. It is old, new, quiet, bustling, peaceful, noisy, traditional, modern, and a million other things in between. If every city I visit turns out to be even half as fascinating as this one, I’ll be one happy traveller!

Totally Vague

I very much enjoyed my trip to the supermarket yesterday.

What can I say? Some people like museums, some enjoy scenery, some prefer fine art. My favoured method of experiencing a new culture is to wander through a supermarket, marvelling at the wonders contained therein. My frustrating inability to retain any knowledge whatsoever of the local language proved to be something of a setback here, of course, as it was all but impossible to tell what anything was. Fortunately, I do of course know some Estonian: enough to realise that even the milk likes to greet its buyers with a cheerful hello, anyway.

Tere! says the milk. That’s the milk that’s actually sold in cartons, of course - for it seems that it’s much more usual to buy a bag of milk rather than a carton, or a bag of yogurt rather than a tub. I can’t quite get my head around that one yet.

Fortunately, not everything in the supermarket was in Estonian. I discovered a freezer containing a selection of ice-creams, comfortingly labelled in English.

It’s good to be confident about what exactly it is that you’re buying, and I was understandably grateful for these helpfully detailed wrappers. Riho, feeling adventurous, purchased some Yellow. It turned out to be an exotic fruit sorbet covered with some sort of banana flavoured coating. It was interesting, and we became quite enthusiastic about the idea of diving into the unknown in such a devil-may-care manner. After dinner, therefore, we hunted out some more ‘Totally’. And so it was that for dessert, Riho had White, and I had Brown.

We still have Red and Green to go. I am studiously ignoring Black. I don’t think I wish to have Black for dessert, ever.

Holey Ground

Staying, as I am, with Riho in Tallinn, I am fortunate enough to have my own personal tour guide. This is good, as my sense of direction (infamously terrible at the best of times) seems to deteriorate rapidly the more tired I become, and, left to my own devices, I would have no hope of finding anything of interest. Or, to put it more accurately, I’d find plenty of things, but just stumble blindly past them in a pointless attempt to find Tourist Attraction No. 1 from my guidebook.

Today, I was exceptionally impressed by my clamber around what appeared to be a disused old building. It turned out to be, erm, a disused old building. Having said that, Linnahall is actually only a year older than I am, and, not to sound vain, I think I’ve endured the passing of these years with a much greater degree of success. Anyway, it was something of a novelty to visit a building that you get around by climbing about on the roof. It really is falling apart. In some places, it’s overgrown with weeds and covered in extremely impressive graffiti that is nothing like the IRA/UVF variety to which I am accustomed. In other places, it’s literally crumbling away:

Riho is a big fan of Estonia’s right to have crumbling steps and alarmingly uneven footpaths. He thinks it makes quite a statement about the country as a whole, as, were anyone to become injured as a result of this type of thing in the US or UK, they’d undoubtedly sue. “Look at this!” he exlaimed, dragging me enthusiastically towards one of his ‘favourite things in Tallinn’. It was a large hole in the ground, in the middle of a seemingly ordinary public area. If you weren’t looking where you were going, you’d fall right in and break an ankle/crack your skull/be very embarrassed.

“The thing is,” continued Riho, waving his hands excitedly as I dubiously and respectfully observed The Hole In The Ground, “you never hear of anyone falling into a hole or injuring their ankle on a missing paving stone in Estonia. But if this were on a street in the UK, there’d be a constant stream of people falling into it on purpose, so that they could sue!” This is a fair point, but I’m a little uncertain as to whether Estonians just always keep their eyes peeled for hidden hazards, or whether they fall down holes just as often as the Brits and Americans, and the government hastily disposes of their bodies and hides the truth about their disappearance with a layer of lies. I have a feeling that this suspicion comes from a lifetime spent in the UK, mind you.

Carefully, I backed away from The Hole In The Ground. These things are like magnets to me; I must actively pull away. So far, I have only stumbled a few times, but I expect that’ll change before much longer. I am very solemnly repeating my new motto in the hope of avoiding a disaster: In Estonia, You Always Look Where You Are Going.

It’d probably work just as well back home, but I’ve just never had any real reason to consider it until now…

Tere, Eesti!

Tere! Tere! Tere!

They say “Tere!” a lot in Estonia. They say it when you arrive in the airport in Tallinn, they say it when you go through passport control, they say it when you get into a taxi, or enter a shop/restaurant/coffee shop. This is perhaps not terribly surprising when armed with the knowledge that “tere!” means “hello!”, but it’s strange how unaware you tend to be of the number of times people say something in any given day until it’s the only word you actually know and recognise. Then it just sounds like it’s the only thing anyone is saying, ever. “Get some new words!” you feel like screaming, completely oblivious to the fact that the strings of rapid-paced vowel sounds being casually spouted all around you are, in fact, words.

And they don’t just say “tere”, either, in a what would be a very convenient “everything is pronounced exactly as it’s spelt” manner. They pronounce it “ted-day”, rolling the ‘r’ in quite a sexy, Spanish-sounding kind of way. This caught me somewhat off-guard in my enthusiastic “I’m going to speak every language in every country”, particularly as I didn’t expect to hear it before leaving Dublin. “Tere!” said the flight attendant to the person in front of me as we were boarding the plane. “Tere!” replied the person in front of me. “Tere!” said the flight attendant to me. At the last possible second before my bewilderment at all this apparent teddy-talk became undisguisable, my brain caught up with what was going on. “Tere!” I exclaimed suddenly, a little over-dramatically. The flight attendant looked startled at my jubilance, and I hurriedly moved along the aisle.

Estonian is a tricky language, but I’m determined. It is this determination that made my flight here extremely uncomfortable, as I picked up one of the free newspapers in an attempt to soak in as much of the language as possible and fool my brain into thinking it could learn it without exploding in a confused mess. Of course, seeing people reading newspapers turned out to be the flight attendants’ easiest method of identifying which passengers were Estonian-speaking, and which were English-speaking. This meant that I was spoken to in Estonian for the duration of the flight, despite only just having worked out the whole “tere!” thing. In the end, I curled up to go to sleep, so that I wouldn’t have to keep pretending to understand what they were saying to me. I saw people around me requesting pillows. My neck was sore. I would have liked a pillow.

However, I could not ask for one. Asking for a pillow would have meant speaking in English to the flight attendants who thought I was Estonian. I would have let myself down a bagful, and Ireland not even out of sight yet! No, that wouldn’t do at all. And so it was that I slept for a large part of the three-hour flight with my head balanced most uncomfortably on a metal armrest.

My back and neck have been decidedly stiff ever since, but at least those flight attendants don’t know I’m a Fake Estonian.

I’ve been awake since 4…

… which is a little unusual, given that I’ve not actually made it to bed until that time on several occasions of late.

This is my last blog post from Norn Iron. All my bags are packed, I’m ready to go, etc. etc. Except that they’re not, and I’m not, but sure. It’ll all come together any time now, I expect. Last night’s rather feeble attempt at sleep suggests that I’m going to be extremely tired for the next few days, but I’m already on my second cup of coffee of the day and it’s only 6.30am. No doubt the caffeine, suitably backed up by a large dose of adrenaline, will carry me through to my first destination.

Speaking of which. It feels decidedly strange to be heading off to a country I know next to nothing about. In fact, the only thing that sprung to mind when it was mentioned to me was “Eurovison Song Contest”. However, I feel that this is the way forward - leap into the unknown, visit all sorts of foreign places, and discover what’s out there beyond Ballymena. I am no longer afraid of “the unknown”. Well, actually, that’s a barefaced  lie - I’m utterly terrified. But in a delicious, excited, raring-to-go sort of way. Bring it on!

And so, the next time you hear from me will be when I become sufficiently awake to blog from Mystery Destination #1, following a ghastly middle-of-the-night flight involving a 2-hour jump forward in time. Much as I’d love to confuse you all by posting in the local language, I don’t think that’s likely to happen, as it is not one I’m at all familiar with. My passion for learning new languages means that I do, however, have my phrase book, so you can look forward to reading about enthusastic but terrible attempts to talk to the natives, resulting in me purchasing a small patch of land and several cows, when all I really wanted was a burger. It’ll be fun!

And I suspect that as long as I can say Ma vajan kohvi, everything will be just fine.

These things happen in threes

The Sister’s phone rings.

“Hello? Why… what? What happened?”

I look up in concern as she walks around, flapping her hands in distress. “This is awful!” she exclaims. “Poor, poor Pop!”

Pop the office goldfish has died. There seem to be strange things happening in The Sister’s workplace, as this is the third fish fatality in just two days. The entire staff has gone into mourning, apart from the one who thought it would be amusing to put a deceased Snap into The Sister’s desk drawer this morning. The Sister was considerably less amused.

I am interested to note that Snap, Crackle and Pop died in the correct order, according to the usual grouping of these words. It’s almost as if they knew. And it will make the inscription on the headstone scan so much better than if, say, Crackle had died first.

“We thought that it was Pop’s fault at first,” explains The Sister, her voice tinged with sadness and regret. “He was black, and the other two were orange. There was a rumour going around that he had been bullying them because of their skin colour. But now he’s dead, too… Loz has just discovered his body. She’s devastated. We didn’t expect him to die, once he’d killed the other two. Turns out he was innocent.” She pauses, looking guilty. ”He wasn’t a racist fish.”

We take a moment of respectful silence in memory of Pop.

“Will there be a funeral?” I ask politely, uncertain of what else to say in a serious situation like this. The Sister does not reply, as she is preoccupied with sending her boss a text to inform him that Pop has passed away. We think it was peaceful, she assures him, trying to cushion the blow.

I once thought that it was only my workplace that was quite surreal and generally detached from normality. Now I’m not so sure.

Guest Spot #2

Recently, there were a few requests for a farewell post from everyone’s favourite lunatic, Kat the Cat. I don’t know whether to be proud or hurt that her writing is clearly much more popular than mine, but my blog is as much for my readers as for myself, and I have grudgingly given in. And so, for the second (and final) time, I give you…

Kat’s Mewsings

One is not amused.

One has had the feeling forrr some time now that Something is definitely Going On, owing to the appearrrance of many boxes and bags in one’s house and Yerrr Wumman’s apparrrent deterrrmination to cause as much chaos and disrrruption to one’s norrrmally strrress-frrree life as possible. Then people starrrted calling rrround and hugging Yerrr Wumman quite tearrrfully. One thought perrrhaps Yerrr Wumman was dying, and was even starrrting to feel a little sympathetic.

But then, tonight, one overrrhearrrd a most distrrressing converrrsation between Yerrr Wumman and Yerrr Otherrr Wumman Who Seems To Have Been Living In One’s House Forrr Severrral Months Without Everrr Asking One’s Perrrmission. It seems that Yerrr Wumman is leaving the countrrry at the weekend! Not that one is going to miss herrr, orrr anything, with herrr ditherrring and forrrrgetting to let one in when one is stuck outside in the rrrain. Why, just today she attempted to thrrrow one out with a bag of videos and clothes, claiming not to have known that one had currrled up inside the bag forrr a much-needed nap! No, it is more a case of the fact that one is apparrrently going to be homeless.

One hearrrd herrr telling Yerrr Otherrr Wumman that she can’t find anyone to adopt one. One is morrre than a little offended. Yerrr Otherrr Wumman is going to rrremain in one’s house forrr a few weeks, but afterrr that, it seems that one is going to be out on one’s earrr.

And so, rrreaders, one asks you to searrrch deep within yourrr hearrrt until you discoverrr yourrr need forrr a Verrry Imporrrtant Cat. One simply cannot become some kind of vagabond, reduced to living on the strrreets like Evil Tom Cat (one’s ex). One has taken the matterrr into one’s own paws. Let the offerrrs commence, please.

And good rrriddance to Yerrr Wumman. One is cerrrtain that one can do so much betterrr…

What is up with WordPress?!

I am not terribly happy right now.

Having just written a typically fabulous post and hit ‘publish’, it published only the title. Not only that, but when I went back to the last saved draft (and I save every few minutes), it showed… only the title.

Someone should pay for this.

Stuff What I Have Found

1 - Teddy Ruxpin. Teddy Ruxpin used to sing me to sleep every night, thanks to the new-fangled technology that was a tape player in his back. This song instantly transports me to the times when I lay in bed cuddling him and feeling all safe and secure in his company. That was at least a year ago, though. I guess I’ve grown up a bit now.

2 - Essays. Lots and lots of essays. It does not bode well for the future that I can’t seem to understand large chunks of the French essays I wrote for my A Level French Literature coursework (and of the parts I do understand, I suspect that the phrases there won’t come in especially handy during my travels. “Mersault a tué an Arabe” is not something that’s likely to come up in conversation at the supermarket). I’m even more disturbed to look at my university essays and realise that not only do I not remember writing any of them , but in the case of a large number of them I have no recollection of studying the book in question, or even taking the class. University was clearly an utter waste of time.

3 - Video footage of myself as a teenager. This is alarming on several fronts. Firstly, it seems that my idea of fun was sitting around making pointless videos of myself and my friends talking utter rubbish. Secondly, it is difficult, if not impossible, to reach into the TV and slap a 16-year old, size 12 me for moaning about being fat. And thirdly, there is nothing quite like hearing a younger version of yourself casually saying “if I’m watching this in years to come, when I’m really old. Like 30.” when you’re now rapidly approaching that point, to make you want to move into a retirement village.

4 - Photographs. Hundreds and hundreds of photographs. Photos from school, photos of family, photos of holidays, photos of long since deceased pets, photos of concerts, photos of parties, photos of special occasions. Photos that make me cringe, photos that bring tears to my eyes, photos that make me laugh, photos that chart My Life So Far. It’s difficult to choose a select few to take with me.

5 - Music cassettes. Remember those?

6 - More clothes than anyone can ever possibly have owned before. It is truly amazing. It seems that I gained a lot of weight, stored all my too-small clothes in the hope that one day they’d fit me again, bought bigger clothes, lost a lot of weight, bought smaller clothes (forgetting existence of previously stored ones), gained a lot of weight, bought bigger clothes, and continued with this behaviour for about 8 years. As a result, I am about to provide a charity shop with enough stock to carry it through to next year.

7 - 15 Odd Socks.

8 - No passport. Not a single one. Anywhere. This one was slightly traumatic, as I distinctly remembered checking that I knew where it was when I booked my flight - you know, the flight that leaves in 5 days from now. The fact that I had just returned from throwing a carload of binbags in skips at the dump meant that the sudden absence of a passport was decidedly alarming. Thankfully it turned up after some panic-stricken unpacking of several “to be stored” bags. I could have cried. I know I definitely kissed it.

It is a very stressful time.

We skinned our hearts and skinned our knees

“We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun…” I sang happily to myself as I lay on my back watching Jay and E2 play Frisbee in the park.

Being currently under great pressure to get A Lot Of Things done in a matter of days, I was in desperate need of a break, and joined my friends for a picnic dinner in the park. After eating, we lay around on the grass, talking and laughing. The sun was shining, the ducks were swimming, Red and Dirk were making daisy chains… it was idyllic, really. Just the thing to lower the stress levels.

Reluctantly, I got up after an hour or so, remembering the chaos that awaited me at home. Dirk, also needing to get back, came with me, and we strolled contentedly along the path to the park exit. Once again - and as seems to be a common occurrence when I become tired and stressed - I seem to have forgotten how to stand upright, because as we were mid-conversation I suddenly fell over for no apparent reason. With a startled scream (because you just don’t expect to fall over without being tripped or pushed, really) I lurched sideways and was caught by an equally startled Dirk, who dangled me by the arm for a moment, trailing me across the ground as he staggered about trying to maintain his own balance, and eventually hauled me to my feet.

We looked at each other. “Um.” I said uncertainly. “Erm.” he added, confused. We looked back at our friends, who were laughing heartily in their usual sympathetic manner. A random passer-by walked on, sniggering, as I brushed myself down with as much dignity as I could muster up. “What,” said Dirk, finally, “was that?” I looked sadly at him. “Sometimes I just fall over,” I explained carefully. He nodded. We resumed our walk. “I thought you were shot,” he confessed after a few moments, looking a little embarrassed.

The afore-mentioned passer-by had stopped and knelt down to adjust something on his child’s pushchair, and I tried to creep past him unnoticed. Dirk realised what I was doing, and helpfully stopped beside the stranger. “Hey, I’m sorry you had to be a witness to that,” he said in his most sincere and apologetic tones. “We’re still teaching her how to walk.” The guy looked like he didn’t know whether to be amused or frightened, particularly as Dirk was wearing a daisy chain on his head as he supported a 26-year-old toddler.

I have cut my knee. It is sore.