)
Luckily we had printed up all the important information for the trip before we left, so we have paper copies of that, and we still do our logs with paper and pen.
By the way, the 'Lonely Planet' (and other) guides always say that bus and trolley tickets can be bought at kiosks, but they don't say which kiosks. In Lithuania they seem to be the ones that are labeled 'Lietuvos Spauda,' but in general the thing to do is to look at the kiosks just above the cashier's window opening. Kiosks selling tickets will have them (usually two: one regular, on student) stuck up here. They're small, about one by two inches (2.5 by 5 centimeters).
May 20, 1994: Well, the current run of bad luck seems to be holding. What a miserable-looking day! The day is cold. Very cold. And raining. Certainly the worst weather we have had. Luckily we don't have much to do today.
At breakfast we had cheese, burnt coffee, and little Vienna sausages, which are a lot like Wieners, not surprisingly because of the name. The juice is more like a juice drink. And there were cucumber slices which are pretty good.
This was intended as a pick-up day, but we probably don't want to spend a whole lot of time going through the Old City. The wind just cuts right through you.
Mark bought a small paper pad for notes on what he wants to remember for the end of the trip. He no longer can be sure if the batteries die he will have what he inputs.
Everything Mark has heard says that the opera house is formal, so we went to a clothing store to buy a black tie. 'I pick it out,' Mark says, 'and look to the clerk, a woman wearing thick glasses, to try to get her attention. No good. She seems not to see me. I walk over to her and she smiles, takes the tie, holds it an inch from her glasses and reads off the price, 19 EEK (about US$1.50, which is ridiculous; the whole opera is 40 EEK!). The woman pulls two little blank squares out of her pad, not realizing she has two. On the top she writes 19 EEK and starts to hand it to me to take to the cash register. She realizes she has two slips in her hand, and hands me the blank one. I shake my head and point to the other slip. She assumes I just don't understand the system and points me toward the cash register. I don't know Estonian for 'blank,' so again I point and get the same response. Okay, let the woman at the cash register sort it out. We get in line as the woman with the glasses packages the tie and waits on the next customer.'
'Our turn is coming up to pay at the cash register and we have only a blank piece of paper in our hand. We hear a cry of exclamation. The clerk comes over, pulls the blank slip out of my hand, and patiently shows us, no, this slip is blank. You need one that is filled out. She shows us that the other slip is filled in and hands it to us. It must be exasperating to have these Americans touring. It takes them the longest time to figure out how things are done over here,' Mark concludes.
Our first major stop of the morning was the Tallinn Town Museum (4 EEK each). It documents the history of the city from 1710 onward. 1710 was the year that plague ravaged the country, so it was too weak to fight and Peter the Great's forces marched in pretty much unopposed. It is a pleasure to see a history museum that does *not* go back to stone tools. You first go to a room that shows artifacts of the time. More or less what you'd expect: swords, guns, clocks, a spinning wheel, and shop signs, but a surprisingly large collection in comparison to other museums. There was also a typed English explanation of the town's history and many of the cases either had English descriptions inside them (along with Estonian and Russian), or had English translations typed on a piece of paper pasted to the outside. You follow the history up through the 1930s and 1940s when Germans, Russians, and Estonian nationals fought for the future of the country and there were photographs of victims of the conflicts.
And of course of special interest to us are some theater and film artifacts. Coins and paper money are present. An unusual exhibit has dummies of brides and grooms showing what they wore to weddings over the years.
We went into the Holy Spirit Church, with its famous carved wooden altarpiece, and then retired to the Maiasmokk Kohvik, a well-known cafe (it was popular between the World Wars). You go in and point out what you want and then they charge you some obscenely low price. We got a coffee, an orange juice, two meat pastries, and two sweet pastries. All very nice. The price was 12.05 EEK (less than US$1). You pick up your food, share a tiny table with strangers, and clean up your spot when you are done, but the prices can't be beat. And on a cold, wet day sitting in a cafe drinking coffee and eating pastries was very appealing.
But we couldn't sit there forever. The other sights we had scheduled were the Peter the Great House Museum in Kadriog Park and the Estonian Historical Museum north of that (to see their collection of stone tools, as Mark said).
The Peter the Great House Museum wasn't listed in 'Tallinn This Week,' which made us think it might be closed (for renovation?). In any case, this didn't seem like going-to-the-park weather, since by this point it had gotten icy-windy on top of cold and rainy. And teenagers were walking around in nylon stockings and mini-skirts in this very cold wind.
We tried to find where to get the bus to the Estonian Historical Museum. Now, the 'Lonely Planet' lists three different buses that go to the museum from stops along a three-block stretch that curves around the Hotel Viru. We couldn't find any of the stops. At some point we concluded that it made more sense just to grab a trolley and ride it around than to see yet more stone and bronze tools. (Also, we needed to go to the port to buy ferry tickets for tomorrow and still get back for the opera at 19:00.)
What we discovered from the trolley is that the base economy looks firmer in Estonia than in Latvia--probably due mostly to Scandinavian tourism. This theory that public drunkenness is a function of the northern conditions? Forget that. Estonia is further north and in four days we have seen one possible street schizophrenic--he was walking around laughing at things nobody else found funny. We have seen no obvious examples of public drunkenness. No begging. Living conditions worse than *we have seen* in Estonia were easy to find in Latvia. There is not a whole lot of difference in living conditions obvious, but of the three republics Estonia seems the best off, and Lithuania is perhaps a little better than Latvia. Mark says, 'If I had to live in one city in the Baltic republics, no question but I would pick Tallinn. Then I would go to operas or concerts two or three times a week. This in spite of the fact that of the cities we have visited, Tallinn seems to have the least 'character.' Incidentally, drinking seems a major cultural activity in all three cities. But I guess a visitor to the United States might get a similar impression.' Evelyn adds, however, that she thinks Tallinn may be more modern than Vilnius or Riga, but it's not as attractive.
Of course, one problem with riding the trolley on a cold, wet day is that the windows steam up. So we may be completely wrong in what we think we saw.
After riding a complete circuit (2 EEK each), we got off the trolley near the ferry port and walked the five-minute walk to it.
The books claim that although you can buy tickets from travel agents, buying them at the terminal gives you an opportunity to avoid commissions and to shop around. Well, the former may be true, but we're not sure about the latter. We went to one window for Tallink and prices were 270 EEK. We went into the next building over, which seemed to be Estline. At the sales window we asked if there was a morning hydrofoil. They sent us to the information window, which said that there was a hydrofoil and a ferry, both at 10:30. The ferry was 180 EEK; the hydrofoil was 350 EEK. We decided on the ferry rather than the hydrofoil, mostly because the weather is so bad. You lose a lot of the fun of a hydrofoil if you don't get out in the wind. Where do we buy tickets? She pointed us back to the first building, in which the only functioning office was Tallink. Tallink said there was an 11:00 ferry and it was 270 EEK each. What happened to 180 EEK? That's only for Estonians; foreigners pay more. This used to be a lot more common, and with greater differentials, but apparently holds on here. Then we said we needed to pay with Visa, since we didn't have enough krooni left to cover the boat, dinner, and a couple of taxi rides. The clerk said she had to charge us in Finnish markka (FIM) because Visa didn't understand krooni. Strange--our hotel charges were in krooni. At any rate, or rather, at *their* rate, this came to FIM 240 for 540 EEK. It probably should have been about FIM 216, so using the Visa card cost us about US$4.35 on a ticket cost of US$41.50 for two tickets. If we had wanted to do all the calculations we might have protested, but there was no place nearby to get the rate for Finnish markka and the trip is still a reasonable price. (The next day we changed 336 EEK to FIM 136, an even worse rate because of the commission, so changing more dollars to EEK would undoubtedly have been a bad idea anyway.)
The sign atop the ferry building, we saw through the rain, said that the temperature was 3 degrees Centigrade. We call that 37 degrees Fahrenheit, far colder than the Baltics are supposed to be in May.
We took a cab back to the room ('$2 well spent,' as Evelyn said). We got ready for dinner. The television said that Germany was having 'the rainstorm of the century,' and it probably wasn't a lot better here. Have we ever told you about 'Luck of Leeper'?
About 17:15, having warmed up and changed clothes, we walked to the Kullassepa Kelder, where we had Russian meat soup (Saljanku) and grilled chicken. The chicken was good but Mark didn't care for the cream dill sauce. At 200 EEK it was more expensive than Eeslitall but not quite as good.
The rain had let up a little by the time we went to the opera house. We were in the back corner of the first balcony, but it is only a small opera house and it was a decent seat. On the way in we bought a cassette of Jose Carreras singing opera arias. He is number three of male opera singers, following Pavarotti and Domingo in uncertain order. Placido Domingo is Mark's choice for best.
'Tallinn This Week' claimed that LA TRAVIATA is the world's most popular opera, but we're not sure why. The production was not bad, but it was not as good as RIGOLETTO, probably, and Mark says he maintains the heretical belief that Verdi was far surpassed by Puccini. Evelyn said tonight that she probably agreed. We think Puccini is by a wide margin the best. Mark would rate Wagner number two in spite of Wagner's anti-Jewish attitude. Mark's father never could accept Wagner's music until maybe ten years ago or so because he did not like the man. Probably how Mark feels about Harlan Ellison is much the same.
Mark notes, 'Even among my friends it is little known that I am an opera fan. Science fiction, recreational math, origami, movies--these are all pretty well known. Opera shows a lot less. Kate Pott found out I was an opera fan. 'You like opera???' she said, giving me the precise expression I'd have expected if it were roasted beetles I'd expressed a predilection for. That year she saw AMADEUS and decided to try a Mozart opera. Now she collects operas more obscure than any I like. I like TURANDOT, LA BOHEME, Mascagni's CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA, and a bunch of others, but a good half of the ones I really like are by the greatest master of melody who ever lived, Giacomo Puccini.'
But tonight we were seeing Verdi's TRAVIATA. Not a bad little production either, particularly considering the price.
Now for the plot of LA TRAVIATA (as described by Mark): 'Violetta is a sort of Paris good-time girl with a bad reputation and worse lungs--mostly due to the ravages of consumption (tuberculosis). |
