We continued our walk, first down Pikk through the Lower Old Town to the Fat Margaret Bastion, then back up to the Upper Old Town and the Alexandr Nevsky Cathedral and the parliament buildings. We followed the city wall around and photographed several towers. This is a very photogenic town. We were following the walking tour in the 'Lonely Planet' guide, but later when we got back Mark checked the 'Insight' guide and he thinks it explained the tour better, so we may take it again, especially since we didn't go into anything this time.
Mark was practically falling asleep over lunch and Evelyn was little better. Between sleep we'd lost the previous night, and early rising previous days, we were both pretty bushed. We headed back to the room. We expected just to rest, but we ended up taking a three-hour nap.
We spent the evening (when we weren't sleeping) getting caught up in our logs. At about 22:00 Evelyn went to sleep. Mark went to check out the news on the television in the sitting room and saw that they were running THE NAKED PREY a very good adventure thriller, in English with Estonian (or possibly Finnish) sub-titles. Actually there is very little language in the film at all. Cornel Wilde, who directs, stars as an African safari guide in the 1890s. His client refuses to pay tribute to a local tribe. The tribe kills everyone in the safari but the guide, has everything taken from him, including his clothing, and gives him a chance to run for his life while the tribe hunts him. It is a lot like MOST DANGEROUS GAME with less set-up time and more of the actual chase. Very engrossing film.
This far north the sky stays light very late. At 23:40 Mark could still see light in the sky enough to make out the outline if the building across the street--not so light as Leningrad which never got dark the whole time we were there, but still amazing.
It is now 00:37. THE NAKED PREY just ended and they are running American ads for E-Z-Glider and contour pillows in English subtitled in Estonian.
May 18, 1994: Mark woke up when it started to get light and discovered it was 3:30. That's almost five hours of darkness. Evelyn hopes she's caught up on sleep--she says she'd hate to think she needs that much every day.
The bathroom in our hotel is designed with sparse resources in mind, but it has no loss of convenience. It is a style you see in other countries a lot, but never in the United States. Essentially the whole bathroom is one shower stall. The floor is more cleverly designed than most since it is covered with what looks like a net but with inchdiameter disks of plastic, so it is comfortable to walk on, allowing the water through but remaining mostly dry itself. The toilet is on the left, then the sink, then the water control, then the shower head. There is one set of handles for both the sink and the shower. A toggle determines if the water goes downward to a directable faucet over the sink or up to a hose connected to a hand-held or mounted shower-handle, and unlike in the last hotel, it is mounted six feet off the floor. The facilities are much less expensive than what we have at home, but at very little loss of convenience.
Breakfast was not great. A hard-boiled egg, a slice of ham on buttered bread, another of cheese, a little container of yoghurt, a small orange or an ugly apple, and some juice more like watery Hi-C. All is set out for you. It was as mechanical as an airline breakfast and not quite as tempting.
Marks adds, however, 'But if you eat the egg with the ham and buttered bread you are halfway to eggs Benedict. I could get used to that breakfast for the next few days. We took the fruit and the yoghurt for evening snacks. I think maybe my reaction is not so positive to Tallinn; it was negative on Riga, which I thought was generally overpriced and too touristy. Vilnius was an enjoyable visit and I should not sell it short.'
The weather is equally depressing--gray, cold, windy, and threatening to rain. Well, we've been lucky so far with weather, so we probably can't complain. Evelyn remains happy she brought her thermal underwear.
Estonia was a province of Russia since 1721. They were always treated fairly shabbily by Russia, but even more so in the late 1800s. Came the Russian Revolution, there was chaos throughout Russia, and a small piece of it was one little province that said, 'We aren't Russia any more.' It took so fighting, but they made it stick. So Estonia became the first country that ever seceded from the Soviet Union. Later, of course, they could not avoid being pulled back in, but even then Russia did not say she was part of Russia.
Well now, as for today's activities: After breakfast we walked back up Toompea to see the Alexandr Nevsky Cathedral. Nevsky fought off both invading Teutons and Mongols from the Russian homeland. The Russian Orthodox Church sainted him. The Soviets like him and had Sergei Eisenstein make a now-classic film lionizing the warrior. The great American philosopher and writer Mark Leeper has said that with such opposites as the Soviets and the Russian Orthodox Church both loving him so much, he must have been a real schmuck. Of the cathedral, Tuglas Friedeberg is quoted as saying, 'It looks like a samovar and should be blown up.' (It is a really garish mustard color on the outside.) It has eleven bells on its top. Walking inside you see a high-domed sanctuary. It has a turquoise ceiling maybe sixty feet (twenty meters) high and a dome going up another twenty feet (seven meters). It has lots of paintings in the Russian Orthodox style. Everybody appears dark and swarthy with pronounced wrinkles under eyes and in the face. The face also shows shadows for a dramatic effect. Generally there is a lot of gold ornament in the picture and/or the frame.
There are big brass candle-holders that seem to have budded little candle-holders. Evelyn suggests that you probably light the small candles from the large one. There is one panel that has little two-byfour -inch paintings of the Madonna and child. There are thirteen paintings across and ten high, so there are 130 paintings in one frame. They look a little like trading cards.
There was a funeral going on in the cathedral at the same time buses were letting in an army of tourists. They ought to ban tourists when they have a funeral, or have a side room that gives some privacy to the bereaved.
Across from the Cathedral was a post office, where we mailed our Latvian postcards. Postage from here to the United States is 4 EEK per postcard (about US$0.30)--more than in Lithuania. It used to be so much cheaper to mail internationally from Lithuania than Latvia or Estonia that companies in the latter two countries would have a courier go to Lithuania to do their bulk mailing. This may still be true, though prices are changing so fast that nothing is predictable any more.
Just down the hill from the Cathedral is Kiek-in-de-Kok Tower (literally, 'peek in the kitchen' tower), a combined photographic art gallery and military history museum. It is so named because it used to be possible for people in the tower to look into the windows of the kitchens in the town below. Now there is the museum in the tower, and people in the town have put curtains on their windows.
Wednesday appears to be 'free-admission-to-museums' day in Estonia as well as in Lithuania, so we were waved on in. The military museum part features weapons and exciting battle art. The photographs feature a lot of attractive women, many in varying states of undress. They too are exciting in their own way. Each level you climb up corkscrew stairways gives you a different period of history and a different selection of photographic art.
Mark writes, 'Somehow the circular stairs in castles and towers make me nervous, though if truth be known you can fall only a short distance without being stopped by a wall, so they may be in some ways safer than they appear. A few places they have on display plaster replicas of historic cannons because the Soviets decided there were better places to keep the originals, like the (then) Leningrad Museum. The Soviets were really thoughtful people.'
Most of the items had some English description, but then Tallinn has the most tourists of any of the cities we've been in so far. And related to this may be the fact that Tallinn had the first tourist information office in the Baltic republics, though which the cause and which the effect is not clear. We visited this historic site, founded in 1991, and used it to plan our train ride for the next day. True, the office was small by Western standards and seemed to function mostly as a place where one could buy maps and books such as 'Tallinn This Week,' but they could also provide some information on trains and other transportation. And a good thing they could, because it turns out that the 8:00 train that the books list has apparently been replaced by a 7:15 one.
Continuing on the walking tour from the 'Insight' guide, we walked the Town Square with its 14th and 15th Century Town Hall. It combines the Baroque and Gothic styles. The tourist office had told the person ahead of us where there was Estonian music to be bought and we had eavesdropped. We looked for the music store, first finding a bookstand (Raamatu Ari) where we got Estonian editions of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN and Isaac Asimov's END OF ETERNITY, both old enough to have their original priced printer in kopecks, but we paid 15 EEK each.
We found the music store and got two cassettes of Estonian folk hymns for about 21 EEK each. We looked at the Niguliste Church, built 1316, gutted by fire in the 1400s, restored, destroyed again in World War II, restored again, but now used only as a museum.
That brought us back to the Eeslitall Restoran at what just happened to be lunch time. This time Mark ordered what Evelyn had ordered yesterday, the Dragon Chicken and the cream of mushroom soup. Evelyn had the Russian meat soup and trout. Mark says that he has grown to like fish a lot more since when he is not traveling he tries not to eat red meat. Fish adds some variety. Pizza when it is bad is no worse than okay, and fish when it is really good is rarely better than okay. He tasted Evelyn's trout and it was pretty good for fish, but not as good as his chicken.
After lunch went back to Homeros. Evelyn bought the Bronte and the new Tom Holt (for 66 EEK, or about what it would cost in the United States--when it finally got there); Mark got a Graham Greene collection. We need to stock up--books will be much more expensive in Finland and Sweden.
We rejoined the 'Insight' guide walking tour down Pikk toward the Fat Margaret Tower. Mark was reading descriptions of the buildings as we walked and we decided to visit the Great Guild House to see the History Museum since we were right there, instead of saving it for Friday. (Again, we suspect out planned activities will not take as long as scheduled. Museums here are much smaller than we're used to from other parts of Europe and therefore take less time.) As before, exhibits started with this area's apparently inexhaustible supply of stone tools. Exhibits included things like weapons, musical instruments, weaving, and looms. The final display was of Freemasonry paraphernalia. There had been a similar display in Trakai Castle (at any rate, some place in Lithuania). Freemasonry was apparently banned by the tsar at some point.
We stopped at the Raeapteek, claimed by one book to be the oldest pharmacy in Europe, operating since 1422. Of course, since we saw one in Zagreb (Croatia--then Yugoslavia) that has been operating since 1355, we wonder how they define 'oldest.' The Raeapteek is currently not at its traditional location on the Town Square, since its building is being renovated, but is at Pikk 47 instead. It seems like there are a lot of buildings here being renovated. They must have heard we were coming--we traditionally find large numbers of churches, buildings, and airports covered with scaffolding when we arrive. |
