Tallinn, a Snog Attack and Dancing on Ice

There was no improvement in the weather and certainly no sign of snow and if anything it seemed to be getting warmer. After leaving the bus we walked back through the city gates and at the market met up again with Mike and Helene who had just had a nasty little expensive incident in the same café that we had visited yesterday morning. Well, that was their own fault, they should have come with us to Stalag Pirita Spa Hotel where prices were much more reasonable.

For lunch we weren’t especially imaginative and we returned to the same place as yesterday passing by and rejecting numerous suitable alternatives along the way. But the food was good and Sue and Christine were becoming adventurous as they both ordered a bowl of spicy solyanka soup prepared to a traditional Russian recipe. It was a pleasant place, warm and friendly and we took our time over lunch and drinks before returning to the streets where once again even by only mid afternoon it was beginning to get dark.

Outside in St Catherine’s Passage a couple of local men who had had a bit too much gluvine came past us in high spirits and one of them took a liking to Margaret and went in for a full snog attack. He was determined to get his Christmas kiss and Margaret had to stoutly fend him off. I think it was a full tongue assault and it was a good job for him that he didn’t achieve it because that would have left him in desperate need of urgent medical attention.

St Catherine’s Passage took us back to the ‘wall of woolens’ so Kim and I stopped here to make a choice of purchase as a present for Molly. We selected a red cardigan with kittens on it but long before we finished the others became bored with children’s clothes shopping and wandered off ahead and we became separated so we walked back to the market and then into the crooked side streets that run behind the main square with their cobbled streets, decorated shop windows and buildings with attractive pastel facades that were doing their best to cheer up an overcast steely grey day.

We were becoming more familiar with the layout of the town by now and we found our way through the tangle of narrow streets past the city walls with conical topped towers, through medieval stone arches and narrow streets squeezed in between the adjacent houses until we stepped through one of the old city gates and found ourselves back at the Aleksander Nevski Cathedral whose floodlit walls were thrusting upwards into the late afternoon dark sky. We visited the interior, which was full of colourful paintings and golden icons and smelt heavily of burning incense and candles, it reminded us of Riga but it was not as good.

After a drink in the bar and a couple of glasses of wine in the room we prepared to go out again and we were excited about this because some of us were going ice skating. Christine can’t go on the ice of course because she is too accident prone even under perfect walking conditions and neither Sue of Mike S felt confident about taking to the ice but the rest of us were all keen to give it a try so we paid our entrance fee and strapped on the excruciatingly painful bright orange boots and carefully took to the ice.

The strange thing about ice skating is that it is a lot more difficult than it looks and instead of gliding elegantly around the outdoor arena we were stumbling gracelessly across the frozen surface just being thankful to remain vertical. Kim quickly abandoned any attempt at proper skating and went around clutching on to a sort of ice rink zimmer frame, Mike W quickly got cold feet and abandoned the ice almost as soon as he had started but after a shaky start Helen was lapping faster and faster and Margaret was a complete natural with lashings of grace and poise.

I managed to stay upright through a dozen or so circuits but although I was beginning to feel like Christopher Dean and was humming Bolero to myself as inspiration I am fairly sure it wasn’t pretty to look at for those spectating. For a start I found it impossible to skate with both feet so quickly established an awkward style of keeping my left foot in constant contact with the ice and pushing myself along with nervous little stabs of the right foot and then sliding for as long as possible before starting over again. I found that stopping was especially difficult and the only really confident way of coming to a standstill was to plot a course for the side of the rink and then crash into the wooden fences surrounding the ice and it is difficult to make that look in any way stylish!

The entrance fee and boot hire was for a full hour but after twenty minutes without anyone injuring themselves we decided that this was probably quite long enough and to stay longer might increase the risk of broken bones and lacerations so we returned the boots and left in search of a restaurant.

There was plenty of choice but most of the menus were similar in content and price so, just as at lunchtime, we repeated what we had done the previous evening and went to the Peppersack again and had a very similar meal to the previous evening.

We were all quite tired tonight so after we had finished we left and walked back to the hotel via the starkly paved 1930s Freedom Square and its totally unimpressive Freedom Clock and then past the city’s western parks and the massive artillery tower, the Kiek in de Kök, built in 1475 and nearly forty metres high with walls four metres thick. There was no late drinking this evening so we all went to our rooms for an early night.

What the snog attacker nearly got...

Tallinn, Pirita

The weather in the morning was the same as the day before and the snow we had hoped for, and the taxi driver had promised, had failed to make an appearance. A thick blanket of cloud was draped over the city and the darkness made it seem earlier than it really was.

The sightseeing contingent of the party was reduced from eight to six as Mike W and Helene made the strange alternative choice of a shopping morning and the rest of us set out with the intention of finding the bus station and taking a trip along the coast to the marina and beach at nearby Pirita. We skirted the old town and headed for the ring road and found a busy bus terminal where we bought tickets from a helpful lady in a nearby kiosk who explained with little English and a great deal of difficulty that we needed to catch the number 5 from a bus stop a little way away and through an adjacent park.

Unless the local Estonian people could speak English (and thankfully many of them could) communication was quite difficult because unlike most European languages, which evolved from 'Indo-European', Estonian belongs instead to the impenetrable Finno-Ugric branch of languages, making it most similar to two of the World’s most difficult languages to learn, Finnish and Hungarian with a large number of vowels which make it a bit of a mouthful for beginners.

We found the bus stop and didn’t have long to wait for the bright green flexi-bus to arrive and once on board we were away and heading out of the city past the busy ferry terminal and then onto a road that followed the shoreline north. There was a scrubby beach and a bleak grey sea that stretched out beyond a couple of islands and then on to Finland. We had considered taking a trip to Helsinki and if the weather had been better, perhaps with some blue sky and sunshine, then we might have made the two hour crossing but the Gulf of Finland didn’t look especially inviting today.

After fifteen minutes we arrived on the outskirts of Pirita and the bus turned inland. This is where we should have got off but Mike, who was in charge of the map, was confident that this would only be a short detour and the bus would promptly rejoin the main road and take us into the middle of town. At the first junction he predicted a left hand turn but the bus went right but there was another junction ahead and he was certain this would turn left but again it went right and we were heading further inland and by now it was too late to get off. Not sure of where we were going we asked a fellow passenger who confirmed that the bus would eventually arrive in Pirita but he seemed genuinely surprised why we hadn’t got off earlier.

The bus passed through deciduous beech woods completely stripped bare of leaves, open parkland and communities of little wooden houses all shut up in preparation for four months of winter. It was a pretty little route that turned out to be one of the more up market suburbs of the city and finally we came to a small commercial centre where the bus turned around and took us all the way back in the opposite direction. And I mean all the way back because at the turn off where we should have left the bus in the first place it turned around to set off back to Tallinn and we had to leave it in exactly the place that we should have thirty minutes earlier. We had no complaints however because this had been a good value trip at only 9 Eeks (about .60p).

As the bus disappeared down the road we wondered if we had made the right decision because the place was austere and charmless with a desolate sea front with only a concrete promenade of obviously inadequate construction that had completely collapsed into the water and was no longer suitable for its intended purpose. Everyone declared it to be coffee time but all that we could find was a forlorn looking monster of a hotel called the Pirita Top Spa that turned out to be a dreary leftover from the days of Soviet occupation.

It had been constructed in the late 1970s and now, as though a symbol of all that communism stood for in Eastern Europe, it is in the advanced stages of decay with crumbling concrete, peeling paintwork and a harsh unattractive appearance and just like communism one day soon it will be gone completely. I generally don’t like to make judgments about people but the Russians are an exception. It must have been lovely having these barbarians as imperial occupiers because one of the most burdensome legacies of the Soviet era is the environmental damage they inflicted on their unwilling hosts and this place certainly contributed to that. As well as monstrosities such as this they left behind widespread pollution and across military installations on Estonian territory the army dumped hundreds of thousands of tons of jet fuel into the ground, improperly disposed of toxic chemicals, and discarded outdated explosives and weapons in coastal and inland waters.

The Estonian people resented the occupation and after regaining independence in 1991 the restored Republic only recognised citizenship of those who were a citizen prior to the Soviet occupation. This affected people who had arrived in the country after 1940, the majority of whom were ethnic Russians who were required to have knowledge of Estonian language and history before being granted citizenship.

Inside the hotel there had been some effort and a bit of an improvement but I don’t think I will be booking my summer holidays there. After returning home I checked the hotel web sites for customer reviews and this simply confirmed this decision for me.

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g274958-d277102-Reviews-Pirita_Top_Spa_Hotel-Tallinn.html

From the outside we could see that the hotel was built in the style of a beached ocean liner and the reason for this was that it built as a training camp for the 1980 USSR Olympic team so presumably was not designed for comfort and pleasure. It has undergone a couple of refurbishments but it must be hard to do anything with a building erected in this period, and one thing for certain is that it will never look good. The 1980 Summer Olympics were held in Moscow and the yachting events were held here in Tallinn, which was the first time that the Games were held in Eastern Europe or that an event took place in an occupied country.

Twenty-one years later Estonia was firmly part of the west and was the first ex Soviet occupied country to win the Eurovision Song Contest followed in the following tear by neighbours Latvia.

It certainly was a curious structure, a monument to the past with no place in the future. We wandered around the boats and the sports shops and then when we certain that we hadn’t missed anything returned to the bus stop and caught the 1A back into Tallinn, this time going directly there without the unnecessary detour.