No Sleep Till Tallinn

First, to answer some comment queries:

1) The building behind me in the Forum video is the Rome city hall - still active and the residence of the mayor and city government. It's on Campidoglio, the original Capitoline hill where Rome allegedly began. The building does seem to be a Medieval structure built on top of ancient ruins, but then that's quite common in Rome. You'll see bits of millenia-old masonry sticking out of walls at random.

2) It's not a Hugh Laurie American accent, that's what I sound like at the moment. Since English was not always a primary language for me, I don't have an established accent; if I'm immersed in a culture long enough, I tend to pick up local speech patterns. Disturbingly, this happens not just with native-English regions; stay too long in Scandinavia and I start talking in the Swenglish pidgin. Mind you, I spend much more time writing English than speaking it, so I do have an accent beyond the American that I default to.

3) Hmph. I am against cover charges on philosophical grounds; the assumption is that I have to pay for the privilege of giving the establishment my business, which is a pretty fucking bold statement to be making, and let's face it, even in Rome few restaurants live up to it. I don't have anything against, say, a drinks minimum - if you take up space in a busy spot at rush hour, you shouldn't just be nursing a tap water, that falls under my general "don't be an asshole" policy, but Italian restaurants are a bit too eager to fleece you with auxiliary charges for my liking. Apparently the prices for the same foodstuffs are different not just for in-house or takeaway (which could be justified by the difference in waiters' salaries and cutlery washing costs), but for standing at the counter, sitting at a table, and sitting at a table outside. I have the same motivation for intensely disliking the American sales tax practice: it means that the price I see is not the price I pay, and that goes against my fundamental understanding of what is right and proper. It's not the expense that annoys me (although five Euro for a tin of iced tea is highway robbery); it's the mindfuck.

I've still got most of a day tomorrow, which I will probably spend ambling about and maybe looking at some of the shops - might as well; but I am happy to be heading home. Rome is an intriguing place, but it I haven't felt the same affinity with it as I have with, say, Stockholm. It's not an uncomfortable place for me, like Cologne or Berlin were, and it's a lot more comprehensible than London. My aversion is not just down to the heat either: I felt more at home in Jerusalem than I did here, and that was by far the most culturally alien place I've been yet. But it's not as stifling as Reykjavik either. Even as I am underwhelmed by Rome, it seems to have made every effort to accomodate me. (The quintessential Roman experience: watching an old silent movie being shown on an outdoor screen on the Isola Tiberina, standing on the Ponte Fabricio, while nursing a limone gelato.)

I saw a quote somewhere - I think it was by Verdi - "You can have the universe, if I can have Italy". Well, I understand the sentiment mate, but then again - you're welcome to it.

Southtrip: Arrival

The new Tallinn Airport is a massive improvement. Naked concrete, exposed steelwork and lots of glass partitions make it feel genuinely Nordic-modern. I notice that they used rust panels on the outside – it’s a popular gimmick now: untreated metal that gets quickly covered in a thick, uniform layer of surface rust. The intention is to have a warm brown cover that is pretty much impervious to the elements, in that it has already rusted. Looking from afar, the pattern could be mistaken for massive wooden veneers.

There was a Japan Cargo 747 parked at Tallinn Airport for three days. It left as I was waiting for my flight. When a Jumbo takes off from an airfield as small as ours, you feel it in your dental fillings.

Estonian Air is also improving rapidly: only slightly more than an hour’s delay this time. Hey, last time it was five hours. They also persist with the delusion that is Estonian Air’s business class; the chairs are absolutely the same, the only difference is that you might get off the plane first, and you get free booze. Hardly seems worth triple the price of coach.

My first sensation of Rome was the pervasive whiff of urine, but then I suppose that is what I get for arriving at the central train station. My hotel room is basic, but clean, and at ~800 EEK per night in high season in East Central Rome, reasonably priced. Oh, and there is free WiFi in the hotel. Verdict: Italy is a civilized country.

Victim of Advertising

Around this time last year I blogged about summer vacations, and how I bought tickets to London and from Berlin, two weeks apart. Here's what came of it.

Today, I was browsing the Postimees website and clicked on a banner for Estonian Air. Long story short - got tickets to Rome and back, for a week in July. Suggestions for sightseeing and cheap accomodation? I'm tempted to take the train out to Florence and Venice...

Also, two and a half years on - I'm going back to Bollnäs! Also an Estonian Air thing this time, the Tallink ferry is both slow and really fucking expensive. It's cheaper to get a hotel package - one night in Stockholm - than a cruise, never mind individual tickets. So it's a whirlwind round trip this time, a day and a half away from Estonia in total.

Got a big article, but I'm letting Baltlantis get a crack at it first, so stay tuned...

Eurotrip: No Sleep Till Schoenefeld

Cologne is a city of roughly one million, a significant industrial center (Ford's main European operations are based there) that enjoys a big trade fair scene; its zoo is the proud host of a baby elephant.

It also gets about 4,5 million tourists a year. And it's hard to see why.

Yes, there's always the cathedral, and it's a very impressive one indeed (though I still like Sacre Coeur better). There are old churches dotted around the city center, as well as bits of old Roman walls and towers, and a gold-plated Ford Fiesta with wings. However, 92% of the old town was destroyed in WWII; downtown Cologne is almost entirely new, and almost entirely a shopping district. Four point five million people a year, who take an hour to walk up the cathedral spire if they're quite dedicated (I couldn't be bothered), and then spend the rest of their time shopping.

It's also not a very Ordnung sort of town. I'd mentioned this before about Berlin, but Berlin is in East Germany at least; Cologne does not have this excuse. My host said he admired Holland for being so effortlessly clean, and having actually compared the two I can see his point: the Netherlands is where you go in Europe if you want to see stereotypical Germany. Cologne is an industrial town, it feels very similar to Rotterdam in this. However, my host and his friends said that Cologne is a very good place to live, even if it's not overtly pretty. As a Tallinn boy who moved to Tartu, I can appreciate the sentiment.

Total time on the road was just under two weeks - starting on a Tuesday morning and coming home the next Sunday afternoon. I've been to some interesting places, met a lot of wonderful people, and took over six hundred pictures, some of which are available here. I also accomplished my ultimate goals:

1. Get a feel for North Europe. There are things you start to understand only when you've seen a place for yourself, even if it's only a day or two; subtle things about the streets, the buildings, the attitudes of the people. It takes an outside perspective, but the trip has reassured me in the ideal of a single Europe: a lot of people I met had no faith in the EU lasting, but they had no idea of the extent to which the territories I traveled through are in fact one big community.

2. Get a sense of accomplishment. It was an implausible, complicated trek, put together at the last minute in parts, but in the end it went off without a hitch. It was important for me to know that I could pull it off. And now when people ask me what I did this summer, I can tell them that I went to London; Paris; Amsterdam; north Holland; Cologne; and Berlin. And they're impressed.

Next step? Something more exotic. I feel like I've done everything that the germanic North could offer me, and Paris was the most unusual stop on the trip, so I'm now interested in what Latin Europe can offer me. So my next big trip will probably be the Mediterranean Rim - including, quite possibly, North Africa.

Stay tuned.

Eurotrip: Not Holland

From a distance the Netherlands look like, you know, a country - but actually they're separated into two fairly distinct parts. Not quite like the Dutch vs French bits of Belgium, but then comparatively few tourists make it out of Holland proper - the western part generally comprising the rough square of Amsterdam, The "Only City With Its Own Article" Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht. On the leg of my trip following Amsterdam, I was fortunate to be in the company of an outstanding host, who pointed out interesting things and explained the essense of the place as we drove across the dyke into Friesland* and Northern Netherlands - the area dominated by Groeningen, an important medieval city-state.

You'd be forgiven for not getting it, as my host pointed sideways out of the window of a Kia Pride travelling improbably quickly on admittedly very good Dutch highways, and urged me to look down the hill. Now, Estonia is a country comically famous for its flatness, but we do have hills, both in Tallinn where most of the Soviet-era housing developments have "mountain" in their name, and in South Estonia, where the national pastime of uphill skiing reigns. But northeastern Netherlands are predominantly reclaimed lands, and back when dykes were unreliable, a meter's elevation made the difference between a home and a houseboat.

While the architecture of the Netherlands is mostly generic-Germanic, the most remarkable thing is the widespread use of brick even in very old buildings. Whereas in Estonia you'd see wood, or local limestone, out there it was always convenient to use the very good local clay. Forests are conspicuous not by their absense, as in Iceland, but by their suspicious order: the landscape developers had to consciously restrain themselves from planting trees in nice, even rows. In that part of the world, whenever you find yourself driving down a shady, bucolic country lane, you can tell there's a castle nearby: the castlefolk spent generations beautifying the land. Unquestionably admirable.

While the best coffee I've ever had** was in that same little cafe in Paris on my first night, the best spare ribs, by far, were to be found in a restaurant in the main square of Nijmegen, a town at the foot of what I sarcastically referred to as the Dutch Alps (but a very pleasant place, no doubt).

And yes, I did make use of the local tolerance of light recreational substances.

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* The Friese are by far the biggest nationalists in Europe. They have a myth of Friesland ruling all of Northern Europe, and they still figure that was the normal state of things; what's happening now is just a temporary setback.

** You'd think Caffe Latte, Cafe au Lait and Milchkaffe are all the same thing, but apparently not. The Italian version does actually heat the milk enough for the taste of it to change, while the authentic French version doesn't. Both are quite good, though. The Germans have not impressed me with their coffee, though.

Eurotrip: Extratemporal

Eurotrip diary will continue with impressions from rural Netherlands, but I'm writing this in Schoenefeld airport, on my way home, and I am astounded by the level of customer service in Germany.

In two words, it Sucks Ass.

Over three days in Cologne and Berlin, I have encountered more assholes per square kilometer than anywhere else I've ever been - and I've been to Paris, South California, and Russia. Maybe I need to go to Bavaria for the stereotypical experience, but up to now I've seen all the twisted, illogical downsides of Ordnung without any of the benefits.

I can comprehend, logically, that there is a reason why shops would prefer one type of card over another, and not take credit cards. I think it's stupid, because I live in a country where anything carrying a Visa logo or the Mastercard double globes is accepted everywhere except the cinema. I've had it explained, by a specialist in the field, why everyone in Germany uses Maestro.

What I don't understand is why, when I find out from a shop floor girl at a gadget supermarket who was standing around chatting to the other assistants that I cannot buy the item with my embossed Visa, and put down the box at the nearest shelf, she demands in an insulted voice that I put it back in the proper location. You get paid to put the box back, you stupid cow.

I don't understand why I can't buy a bottle of mineral water with a bank card at Frankfurt Airport, a major international hub with massive numbers of passengers travelling from one country that doesn't use the Euro to another one. There is no reason to expect me to have cash. Seriously.

I don't understand why the girl at the Deutsche Bahn information desk at Berlin Hauptbahnhof cannot explain to me how to force the ticket machine to actually issue a ticket to Schoenefeld, and not just an itinerary. I'm fairly fucking sure that I'm not the first person to be asking the question.

I don't understand why I have to pay three Euro to leave my bag at the left luggage at ten minutes before midnight, then have to pay another three Euro to retrieve it at 5am because it's two separate days. Even though Every Single Fucking train station in the civilized world charges per 24 hours, including the rather cool auto-stackers in Cologne.

I don't understand why I can't check in to an easyJet flight at the Berlin hub earlier than two hours before the flight, whereas I can do the same thing online 24 hours prior, and can check in way earlier at tiny little Tallinn airport, where airside is quite a cramped affair.

But I swear, if one more German fucks with me today using a completely arbitrary and moronic rule designed to make my life more difficult, I am going to respond by doing the Sieg Heil salute and shouting 'Muskatnuss!!!'.

Eurotrip: Blondies & Aussies

The trick I tried to pull failed miserably: I could not escape the rain that had engulfed Paris. Amsterdam was wet that night.

Fortunately, I had help in the form of a person from the Internet, who came equipped with tickets. Having manhandled my bags up and down some quite ridiculous Amsterdam stairs, I was well on my way with three pints and a curry. Our banter attracted the attention of Monique, an Aussie girl with a Dutch dad who was in town for her gap year. Unfortunately she had a previous engagement for the evening, and so declined our invitation to join us at the gig.

Entertainment for the evening was Blondie. Like a lot of old-school bands, these folks have far too much skill and experience to be perturbed by a shitty sound setup - and before long (in fact only one pint later), we were having a lot of fun. Like I said, I'll mosh to anything with a power chord.)

This wasn't my first time in Amsterdam, but I didn't have time to do too much siteseeing. Best impression that I can pass on is that Amsterdam, more than any large European city I've visited, is a Casablanca. The place accomodates foreigners randomly deciding to stick around. And being the party town, it means that anything can happen in Amsterdam.

Yes, I'm still kicking myself for not getting Monique's number. :P

Eurotrip: Notes on Paris

Axis of Paris
Originally uploaded by Flasher T

Line 14 of the Paris metro is fully automated. The trains do not have driver cabins, but are instead similar to those you would find changing terminals at Frankfurt or Stansted airports (except longer). That is to say: you can look out of the bay window at the front of the train, as it speeds down the tunnel.

This makes it officially the Coolest Public Transport Ever.

I'd started out communicating in restaurants and places of business using only hand gestures and the miserly shreds of French that I can muster. By the third day, I really couldn't be bothered any more, and reverted to English. And yes, the waiters got a lot more rude. Once again, it is a Parisian thing. I got by on hopes that my accent is more European than American or English, and reverting to being Estonian - which means conducting transactions with no eye contact and vague grunts of acknowledgement.

Paris isn't so much smaller than London as easier to navigate - more logical - and easier to grasp. Two full days of hardcore tourism is about sufficient to cover all the major landmarks. Paris also feels foreign in a way that London did not on this trip at least; that neither Rotterdam nor Amsterdam ever did; and that Stockholm hasn't for a long time now. I suppose subconsciously I feel Europe is Germanic.

For some strange reason, I ended up with a first class ticket for the Thalys train to Amsterdam. (Some sort of special offer - it was cheaper for me to buy a discounted 1st class seat than pay full price for 2nd class.) The Eurostar, Thalys and TGV all use the same type of fast electric train, and it really underscores how much sense rail travel makes in Europe. For the price of a cattle-carrier flight bought at short notice, I have a nice, soft seat with my own power outlet, free meal with booze, and a bitchin' view of the French countryside zipping by at 300km/h. Unlike airlines that charge you disproportionately more for business class (this is especially funny on the likes of Estonian Air, where business class gets exactly the same seats, and their advantage is a snack and being the first to get off a plane), the price difference between 1st and 2nd class on railways is quite minor. The final kicker is that while I can arrive at Gare du Nord at noon and step out of Amsterdam Centraal* at five, it would not take me much less time to do the same trip by air, including travel to something like Orly and check-in times. And hey, for a train journey between Schengen countries you don't even need to bring your passport.

As we approach the Belgian capital, the PA comes alive with notice in French that we are about to make a stop at Bruxelles-Midi; then in Dutch and German that Brussel-Zuid is coming up; and finally in English, welcoming us to simply Brussels. Reminds me of the joke about the stubborn blonde in an airplane: "I told her First Class isn't going to Las Vegas."

I'm half disappointed that the Thalys train doesn't have WiFi, but then I'm being Estonian again. Taking connectivity for granted. I'll tell you something though - if one of the Estonian parties runs on a platform (no pun intended) of renovating the Tallinn-Tartu-Riga link to accomodate the European Fast Rail service, they'll have my vote.

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*Dutch pronunciation is very entertaining, but in writing it usually just comes down to English with extra vowels.

Eurotrip: Vive la vie!

Sacred Heart
Originally uploaded by Flasher T

Both London and Paris are big cities, orders of magnitude bigger than my home town - and yet the centers of both of these are all contained in an area within reasonable walking distance. Every city that grew out of a medieval hub maintains the core that was designed before motorized transportation was invented, even the comprehensively rearranged Paris.

Last night, I climbed up Monmartre - on foot; exhausting. Some nice pictures though. On my way down, looking for dinner, I got ushered into a tiny restaurant by a hyperactive landlady, taking my order without speaking a word of English. I'm sure I got wrangled, but what the hell - it was a very Parisian thing.

Big city navigation is aided immensely by the subway. It is an urban hyperspace, where seemingly impassable rules of traffic density, walking speed and map-reading ability are irrelevant. Since nearly all of Paris's landmarks are helpfully arranged in a single line, I started out in the morning with the Arc de Triomphe, then walked down Champs Elysee to the Louvre. Didn't go in - cues far too horrible, and I don't fancy looking at paintings all day; besides, it's a bit too Da Vinchi Code now.

Notre Dame next, then a subway ride to the Eiffel Tower. Got stopped by a street artist who wanted to paint me, then sell me the picture for 50 Euro. The picture wasn't very good, so I eventually just gave him a fiver - I'll consider it a tourist tax on the whole Parisian scene.

Crowd management at the tower is excellent, but it's still a lot of standing around, queueing. Got to go up to the top floor though. Didn't spit across the railing - too cliche.

I'd wanted to go to Harrods back in London - from what I understand it's a perfectly serviceable museum - but didn't have time, so I visited the Galleries Lafayette here. Wanted to look at the Archos gadgets in person. Ended up buying some cheese as the obvious souvenier - the hard, vacuum-packed kind that doesn't need to be refridgerated (apparently); I have to carry this stuff half way around Northern Europe, and I'm afraid that by the time I get home, anything more exotic would have achieved sentience.

I can't believe I still have a week of this left.

Eurotrip: Albion

When the Eurostar reaches full speed, going into a tunnel - not just the one under the sea, but any little overpass - generates a sort of blast wave that makes your ears pop.

First leg of the Eurotrip is now done, and I am on my way to Paris, typing this up in the absense of a network connection. (In Estonia, there'd be free WiFi.) I've been drinking since last Friday, and somehow all three nights in London ended in the same row of bars under the railway arches behind Southwark tube station. Saw the Tower and the Science Museum, as well as a small museum dedicated to the Blitz. Refused to pay money for the Tower Bridge museum, HMS Belfast, the Golden Hind... The tourist meme is that London's museums are free, but actually that only applies to a few, and most of those involve a lot of paintings. I don't have the patience for art galleries.

London is covered by CCTV. The British are famously scared by the prospect of national ID cards, or any form of mandatory identification in fact. For me, as for most Europeans, this is a non-issue. Where Britain has a surveillance culture, Estonia has a visibility culture; you don't worry about being watched, but you do know that you are being seen. The highly advanced and integrated systems of the Estonian civil service mean that things are a lot less obtrusive. Like the howlingly inferior plumbing, this is only one more aspect of Britain's love of tradition getting the better of it - and of Estonia doing a Germany/Japan-like trick of prospering through starting from a blank sheet.

I've yet to meet a Brit who actually likes the double taps. Or one who could explain to me their proper intended usage.

Gorged myself on Waterstone's last night. I've mentioned before that it's very hard for me to find appealing reading material. I don't read translations on general principle - professional hazard, the artefacts are too distracting - and I'm not interested in anything Russian writers have to say. (I've read just enough of Viktor Pelevin to have the moral justification to say I don't like him.) I've got about five new books now, which should hold me over for a bit. There's another Waterstone's in Amsterdam, though I'm not exactly sure if I'll have the time to give it the attention it deserves. I arrive in Amsterdam on Monday afternoon, and will go to a Blondie concert with a person from the Internet.

Was walking around central London last night, and got an iced white chocolate mocha* at a Cafe Nero right next to Tiger Tiger - the posh club that failed to be blown up by terrorists recently, though my Londoner friends say it should've been.

Alcohol and coffee. I'm trying to stick to healthy eating - restaurants rather than fast food, proper meat & vegetable meals - but my stimulant intake density is far beyond normal levels. And I've still got Amsterdam to do, remember. This isn't actually too bad, as it does promote the sort of consciousness shift I'm chasing in putting together the Eurotrip - constructing a travel personality that's different from your everyday one.

Who knew that ordering a large latte in a pub in Waterloo station entails a pint of coffee? I'm not even kidding here. It was "large" in the same way that a drink in a multiplex cinema is "large".

Wheee!

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* Yes, yes, I know that every time you drink a cold coffee, God kills a little Colombian kitten. At least this one was quite good.

Eurotrip: Prelude

Vacation starts with a party. On Friday night, I set out from Tartu for a three-odd hour drive across Estonian back roads. My goal: a campground where my employer was holding an annual corporate piss-up.

There are places in Estonia which are not simple to reach - pairs of points on the map that are not connected by any satisfactory freeway. Hundreds of kilometers through small towns and villages, with nothing but a Google Maps printout and twenty gigabytes of music to keep you company is actually a pretty good way to start a vacation.

The corporate party has been the subject of many a rant, and certainly I've lived through some crap ones; however, this one was actually pretty decent - mostly due to the choice of campground. Small separate houses, with proper toilets & showers, sufficiently spread out to give people a chance to get some peace & quiet when they're done partying, really is of paramount importance.

The tequila didn't hurt either.

A big part of corporate outings is the entertainment. At Christmastime and during the Summer Days season, content-starved society rags snoop for information on the parties each act is doing and how much they're charging. For the bands though, this can be miserable. There are plenty of companies in Estonia that can afford a big name, but it's largely an issue of bragging rights, and presuming a minimal level of competence at performing live. You won't make everyone happy. The upshot is that a band that's used to playing in front of a crowd of fans, people who paid their own money to see the show, can find itself in a room with fifteen drunk IT nerds standing around & scowling.

Still, I'll mosh to anything with a power chord.

Independence Day

In a cute sort of coincidence, July 4th is also the day on which I - finally, after two months plus of wrangling with the telecoms company that was supposed to have its shit together by the time the building was handed over - have Internet access at my new apartment.

Feels very liberating indeed.

Two weeks from now, I'll be in London, the first stage in my Eurotrip. The plan, such as it is, is to go from London to Paris to Amsterdam (most likely Gröningen too), to Cologne, to Berlin. London and Paris are definite, and I have to end up at Berlin Schoenefeld airport on the morning of July 29th, other than that I'm mostly winging it.

I'll also be in Tallinn for the first time since early April on July 16th. If anybody's actually reading this blog* and fancies a pint - in any of the listed locations - email's in the sidebar.

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* Just kidding. I monitor my visitor logs religiously.

In Desperate Need of REM Sleep

In my quest to evade stupid yuppie depression by filling up my time with important events, I have succeeded in transcending normal tiredness and passing into that elusive area of sleep deprivation that is sometimes described (by people with authority to speak of such things) as a marginally safer way to experience a drug trip. I spent Monday night in Akureyri, catching a bit of sleep in the relative comfort of a 737 over Scandinavia; that was followed by a two-odd hour drive to Tartu and the remains of a working day. Tuesday and Wednesday nights somehow turned out to be fairly late, and by Thursday I was back on the road, or rather on a ferry. Friday night was, of course, spent in Club Patricia. I'm on my way back now; and whereas on the way here I shared the four-bunk room with one other guy who had been drinking for 30 hours previously and passed out at first opportunity, this time I have been relegated to the least favourable bed. The room is hot, smells of dirty socks and is full of snorring people who haven't showered recently. And that is the reason why it is 3.45 am Estonian time, and I am posting this over the M/S Romantika's free WiFi connection, from the middle of the Baltic Sea.

Stockholm was, in a word, glorious. Two days of sunshine and cloudless skies were just what I needed to round off a week in easter-time Iceland. The contrast is staggering. I know that Reykjavik's nightlife doesn't come into its own until after midnight, but Stockholm's center evokes a special feeling even in the early afternoon; a feeling of a proper big city. It feels like things are happening there, like it's a significant hub of global activity; and it is. Swedes are, in my experience at least, uncharacteristically outgoing for this region, and when you combine that with the inevitable sheen of Scandinavian lawfulness and a quiet confidence that everything is right in this part of the world, you get a marvellously friendly night scene. Where else would the bouncer politely ask me to button up my jacket over my Independent MC Support T-shirt, explaining apologetically that they have a policy of no obvious affiliation in the dresscode; even Hell's Angels are required to check their colors. Could you see this happening in NYC, really?

Iceland has a peculiar attitude to its significant tourist industry. Where Tallinn is slightly pissed off at cross-gulf vodka tourists and Easyjet stag parties, and Stockholm embraces its visitors, the Icelanders seem to pay them the minimal possible attention. In a crowded tourist location like the Gullfoss waterfall, the only safety measure on a treacherous, slippery hillside path in early April is a rope at ankle height. It demarkates where you're not supposed to go; if a tourist ignores it and falls off, well, it's the tourist's own fault for being an idiot. In the same way, only a few years ago Easter time apparently meant that the whole of Reykjavik completely shut down; these days some restaurants and shops do stya open for the tourists' sake, but it still feels deserted. I asked our guide whether there were any tourist traps related to Brunhilde's castle, out of the Songs of the Niebelungs; she didn't know what I was talking about. It feels like the Icelanders know that their nature attracts plenty of tourists anyway, so they don't feel obligated to make too much of an effort: there's enough bodyflow to keep the industry healthy, and they're not hoping for too much return business, as you can see all of Iceland you'll need in one visit. Iceland's tourist trade came out of the first cheap transatlantic flights, which stopped in Reykjavik along the way, often with a significant hole in the schedule. Indeed, Iceland is good as a tourist's stopover, like Hong Kong and/or Singapore are supposed to be for Australia, but it's not really up to scratch as a destination.

Stockholm, on the other hand, is wonderful. I was last here roughly a year ago, and on that occasion it was cold and wet; but in good weather it is a visceral pleasure to be in. The city comprises all you'd want, from the medieval core to the authentic bohemia of Södermalm, the inevitable 60s-functional and now somewhat derelict blocks in the shopping area (if you bother to actually look up at the Ahlens City building, you won't be impressed, and whoever planned the escalators in PUB needs to be slapped in the face with a wet trout), the lovely homes of Norrmalm and the noble town houses of Kungsholmen... And it has an extremely cool subway, too.

You couldn't imagine Laugarvegur organically cordonned off by a crowd assembled to watch a breakdance crew performing on a Saturday afternoon, far more for their own pleasure than for any money passersby throw into the hat (it wouldn't even pay for sneakers); but on Drottninggatan, it feels proper. I mean, you really would, wouldn't you? Makes perfect sense.

I'm not alone - I'm on my way home
I am here, I'm standing on my own
Just a little bit tired...
I'm on my way - home

Departure

I'm always on the run
Restless, searching the sun
I'm always on my way
It's all a timeless, neverending story

My life's a civil war
Between all open doors
So little time, so many goals left to achieve...

I apologise for maybe not giving the blog as much attention in the last few days as I should have. At this very moment, I am in the departure lounge of Tallinn's D terminal, about to get on a ferry to Stockholm for an E-type gig tomorrow.

What I can tell you so far is that I'm glad to be back in Estonia - especially after a four-hour delay in fucking Akureyri Intercontinental Airport, as the Estonian Air charter waited for a hole in the weather to land at this tiny airstrip at the bottom of a fjord hemmed in between two mountains, with a single approach vector that is impassable for anything so enormous as a Boeing 737-500 whenever there is any wind at all. I can also tell you that Tallink's booking department 0wns, getting me return ferry tickets and a night in a four-star hotel in Stockholm for 2600 EEK, whereas a single ticket for a Friday departure is 2800 EEK.

Full set of Iceland pics is here if you want it, and I'll be back with a full Stockholm report, as well as final notes on Reykjavik, in a few days. Wish me well.

Beauty of the Beast

Burp!
Originally uploaded by Flasher T.

Whenever I start feeling like I've got the hang of a new place, I ask myself if I'd enjoy living here. Answers are mixed: it was yes for Stockholm, which is a city I click with on an emotional level, and for London, which I want to spend time in at some point in the future. It was no for California and Israel, for roughly similar reasons - wrong climate and wrong mentality.

For all of Iceland's fundamental similarities to Estonia, I would not want to live in Reykjavik. It feels - and you must remember that this is in comparison to a campus town in an insignificant little country stuck between North and Eastern Europe - extremely provincial. It is a Scandinavian town, but it is viscerally a small Scandinavian town. Most of all it feels like Gjövik - the Norwegian community I visited back in high school. Gjövik's claim to fame is that it was involved in the Lillehammer Olympics, and it has an impressive hockey stadium hewn from a cliffside. Other than that it is a tiny, industrial town with a Main Street, a lot of ugly 60s-utilitarian buildings, and the obligatory Russian drug dealer.

Reykjavik doesn't have any old buildings. It rose to significance in the late 19th century, and before that it was nothing more than just another fishing village. For all of Iceland's proud history stretching back over a millenium, there is no medieval culture to be found; this is another aspect it shares with America. The island was isolated politically as well as geographically, with outside trade handled exclusively by Danes. We were shown today, as a special tourist landmark, a prominent merchant's home, preserved from 1765. As I have commented on an entirely different occasion, I have shat in toilets older than that.

Neither is Iceland a prominent source of Nordic design. Where Norway gathers its inspiration in the breathtakingly gorgeous scenery of its territory, Iceland's nature is only stunning - not pretty. The local specialty is wool, arctic gear, and jewelry styled on runes. The architecture, both in the capital and beyond, is a mix of traditional Scandinavian red-roofed cottages - nearly exclusively out of wood, which is a bit curious as there is decidedly no timber in Iceland to build homes out of - and post-war experiments with form-follows-function and quick-setting concrete. A wave of new construction in recent years has managed to produce no buildings of architectural significance or inspiration. Even the dreary Rotterdam was more exciting than this.

In the countryside, the impression is even more dire. As I mentioned, there are no naturally suitable places for habitats, so villages consist of a grid of bungalos dropped randomly into a bit of landscape. There are no fences, and in early April, no gardens. Our guide tells us it is a lot prettier in the summer, but I feel like I'm seeing the true Iceland right now. And the true Iceland, for a person born in a Hanseatic hub and raised among the lush forests of the Baltic, is an outstandingly depressing place to be.

It's a very impressive country to visit, but I absolutely wouldn't want to live here.

Intercontinental

I've decided that I don't really mind the lack of a safe in my hotel room. This entire nation is smaller than Tallinn, and the island is surrounded by thousands of miles of freezing ocean on all sides. Nowhere to escape to, not even inland, as the nature can hardly a support a single frontiersman, no matter how well-motivated.

This country doesn't merit a police force. It should just have a constabulary.

Joke of the day, in co-authorship with the kid from the Domino's down the street: "The rest of the world thinks that everybody in Iceland lives in igloos. Whereas in reality, everybody in Iceland lives in Reykjavik." The town itself is about equal to Tartu in population, although spread over a far larger territory. The Greater Reykjavik Area houses over 60% of all the people on the island.

Driving down from Keflavik, you pass by the abandoned NATO base. Not even a year ago, the Americans simply packed up and fucked off, leaving behind a couple dozen decent-looking apartment buildings and a bewildered nation suddenly devoid of any sort of armed forces at all. I thought Estonia's military was a joke, what with splitting an air patrol subcontract three ways with the other Baltic nations, but Iceland - a small nation, but not Europe's smallest - does not have an army.

There are no more American soldiers to protect the country, but then there are no more reasons why anybody would bother attacking it.

Iceland is half way between Europe and America, and it shows. In this way it is an extremely curious object for observation, and wondering if this is what Estonia would have been like if the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact hadn't happened. The westward shift is reminiscent of Finland's American fetish, or Sweden's ala raggarbil scene, but to a much greater degree. Cars are everywhere. The very low population density - or rather the fact that all of the landscape is equally difficult to terraform, so you might as well not stick to just the bayside valley - means a sort of urban sprawl without the underlying overpopulation. Consequently the residential areas are largely self-confined: every community has the necessary set of church, musical school and swimming pool, and you can go a long time without needing to leave the immediate surroundings of your home. But if you do, you will need a car, as public transport is thin on the ground.

The Icelandic private fleet is a mix of small Euro-spec hatchbacks and American SUVs. Roads are smooth and sweeping; at their best, these are highways that any Estonian driver would kill for. At their worst, they are chip-sealed, twisty back roads, raised over a landscape devoid of any vegetation reaching higher than the ankle of a very short man. The fact that there is no Icelandic rally champion or even any noticeable drivers boggles the mind. Our tour guide said that icelanders are very keen drivers and love to go fast; but she looked up the numbers and was surprised to see that Estonia has three times the traffic-related fatalities per capita. No wonder: put your average badass icelandic street racer on the Tartu-Tallinn road on Friday night and see how far he gets.

I know that some of my friends reading this blog will never let me live this down, but: the Blue Lagoon mud has really made the skin on my face silky-smooth!

Approach

The best thing one can say of Copenhagen Airport is that it really has a sufficient quantity and frequency of toilets. You can see that they have made a real effort to make sure you are never more than twenty meters away from a urinal. Very commendable indeed. The second best thing one can say of Copenhagen Airport is that it is strung out along a single main passageway, so you're not too likely to get lost. But an hour between flights is still really not enough time if you have to find the bloody transfer desk to check in.

Iceland feels very Scandinavian indeed - narrow but well-paved roads, lots of street lighting, and the requisite yob in a bodykitted Astra GSI burning rubber in a KFC parking lot. The three-star hotel I'm staying in doesn't have a minibar or a safe, but has free WiFi in all rooms; on the whole, I rather prefer it to the pompous Sheraton City Tower in Tel Aviv, ostensibly a five-star business hotel, but I still had to open a bottle of Coke against the TV stand.

The myth of Icelandic alcohol prices is overblown - I just bought a pint of the local Viking beer in an all-night convenience store for about $2, which is expensive, but not oh-my-fucking-god expensive. The downside is that like elsewhere in Scandinavia, the best you can get outside a government monopoly store is 2.25% semi-lager. It tastes good enough, but it somewhat offends my sensibilities.

Tomorrow, Reykjavik sightseeing and the Blue Lagoon; and I leave you with a question. Why is it that I had to go through passport control airside at Copenhagen, but arriving in Keflavik Airport - having exited the EU! - I got all the way outside without a single person so much as glancing at any form of identification?

Chasing Sunset

…writing this airside at Tallinn Airport, on my way to Iceland. The airport is improbably busy for an early Wednesday afternoon, and the view out onto the runway is partially obstructed by that most Estonian of sceneries – a construction site. They’re building a new terminal in a T-shape to the old one, designed to accommodate low-cost airlines. Easyjet doesn’t use a second-rate airfield in Estonia, because if you get far enough from Tallinn for there to be any point, you’re closer to Riga anyway.

This is my first time flying after the new rules on liquids in hand baggage, but the imposition is minimal – I can still buy a drink airside and carry it onto the plane. The prospect of a long trip with short layovers and an arrival time of half past ten at night has convinced me that a meal is unlikely until tomorrow morning, so I have gone for that ever-beloved standby of drunks and stoners everywhere: the Statoil hot dog. It’s served by a rather more presentable establishment around here, but form does not change function.

What was supposed to be a direct charter has now turned into a layover at Copenhagen, where I will need to do an airside check-in, but they’re shipping my checked baggage direct, so again it’s not such a massive inconvenience. I’m writing this into a Word file, as Tallinn Airport’s WiFi is restricted; I’m not entirely certain what the connectivity will be like in Reykjavik (the experienced Estonian traveler knows not to take the Internet for granted while abroad; our infrastructure really is preposterously advanced in comparison to most even fairly developed locations), and I probably won’t have time to send this off at Copenhagen. So at the absolute worst, you’re going to get all my travel notes in a big batch next Tuesday.

There’s an increasingly likely chance that I will be going to Stockholm next Thursday night, for an E-Type gig on Friday. If I can pull that off – if I can go from Iceland to E-Type to new apartment to Brainstorm gig to birthday, and all that before the beginning of summer – I’ll have gone a long way to my New Year’s resolution of making more of an effort to be sociable and do fun stuff. Here’s hoping.

UPDATE: No faith. Serves me right. Figured out how to get the airport WiFi working. Enjoy.

Eurotrip!

In the spirit of not having nothing to do on vacation, I just did something relatively reckless.

I've used the fact that my employer kicks everyone out for the last two full weeks in July, and booked me some easyjet. On Tuesday the 17th, I will be flying from Tallinn to London. On Sunday the 29th, I will be flying back to Tallinn... from Berlin.

I have absolutely no idea what I am going to do in the meanwhile, except for the fact that I have friends in various places in Europe (actually several distinct sets in London alone), and this sort of aimless wandering is a really cool and European thing to do, and for once in my life I have the disposable income for it. Might as well do this before I stop qualifying for youth discounts.

It's also something I would not normally do; the lack of organization and figuring-it-all-out-beforehand puts me way out of my comfort zone. I don't mind hostels, and I actually enjoy staying over at friends' places a lot more than even posh hotels; and to a very large degree, I am inspired by Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There - a book about arriving in Europe and going with the flow. But I'm still a bit of a control freak when it comes to itineraries. I am doing this on purpose, to hopefully change something about myself in the same way that people throw puppies into the water to teach them to swim.

So, if you're somewhere in Western Europe, and either know me or would like to meet me, leave a comment or send an email, and I'll see if I can stop by. :)

P.S. And hell, booking this early means that if I completely chicken out, I can just eat the cost. That is the magic of easyjet.