The Canadian split to finish his studies in Estonia, and the farm-boy also split for Estonia before heading off to the U.S. to make his fortune and leave us all for dead. They are great friends who go beyond what normal friends might – for instance: the farm boy flying from Chicago to Seattle (a 6 hour flight) just to say hi to me while I was on vacation in the U.S. Who does that these days?
It was at the time of the Olympics finishing that a girlfriend would move in with me, who would later turn out to be my first wife. She would also be the first person I would travel to Estonia with. It wasn’t planned as such that she should come along - she just decided she would. I don’t think she was confident of me returning to her should I be left to run the gauntlet of Estonian women that potentially waited far away, out of her sight. It was a smart move on her part and one I could thank her for as I wouldn’t be where I am (and happier) today.
The only thing more surprising than how short the flight was to Tallinn from Helsinki was the view coming into Tallinn which left me a little underwhelmed. I didn’t get to see Vanalinn (Old Town) or much of anything. Instead all I saw were peat fields, the apartment blocks of Lasnamäe and a flat Baltic Sea. No surf - bugger. I had visions of kissing the ground once I touched down, but refrained when it came to the crunch. It was just a tarmac after all, and I’ve never liked walking from a plane to the terminal, such was the case with Tallinn Airport.
The drive from the airport to our accommodation in Kopli was my first real look at what Estonia really was. It was moving to say the least. I had just come from Helsinki which was clean, planned and had a sense of identity, to Tallinn which showed the obvious scars of a twisted and tortured past from occupation. The latest fashion in architectural design was set against the crumbling lime-stone walls of deserted factories. Well dressed women in high heels shuffled through muddy streets. High end European cars wrestled with barely idling Russian Ladas and Moskvitch on roads no better than an outback Australian town. I felt like my expectations of a glorious country which had clawed its way out of oppression into a blindingly bright future were shot down in flames. In one car ride I could tell this was a real country with real issues and a long road ahead.
What once used to be the hippest suburb in Tallinn to live in was now a recovering slum. My first cold morning in Kopli was one I'll never forget. As we needed some supplies and it was still early morning, only one shop would be open - the bottle shop. On walking into the shop that was situated beside some tram tracks, I was confronted by a man with two of the blackest eyes I have ever seen. He was rambling in some language waving a can of spray paint in my face. It turned out he was trying to sell it to me. Once his attention was diverted away from me, next came the realisation there was an entire wall of the shop covered in Vodka. Everything else for sale seemed secondary. Then last but not least was the lady without teeth who walked in, opened a fridge door, pulled out a large bottle of beer, paid for it and had the top popped of it, then gulped it down like it was a 30C day outside. Priceless. Aside from my first eventful day, that trip itself set no precedent for what it meant to be Estonian, other than my own interpretations. We didn’t attend anything of cultural significance of meet the real people so to speak. We were left to our own devices to wander Tallinn’s many shopping precincts and stumble across touristy places of interest.
Though while I was in Estonia, I found myself answering questions I really hadn’t asked myself before; why I liked murky days; certain types of trees; cool air – things like that. The place just ‘clicked’ like that for me. Of course there were things I found I just couldn’t understand like why people were always looking at the ground while they walked or if they did have their head up, why they would look at you as they walked towards you on the pavement and just collide with you. This was a common occurrence particularly where there was only you and the other person...and no one else. I realised eventually they are trained to put their heads down as they bury their faces into the top of their coats while they walk in freezing temperatures, and that they were walking into me as I was walking on the wrong side of the pavement (remember it’s a left-hand-drive country). After two weeks of touring the country side and hanging in Tallinn, I was back in Australia. As my chance to explore my roots had come and gone (according to my first wife), mediocrity would set for the next six years as I bunked down to begin my Australian dream of buying a home, getting married, going to Bali on my holidays and ‘kickin’ it with like-minded people pretending how rich I really wasn’t. All’s well that ends well as within a year of marriage, I had received my divorce papers.
From that first trip in 2001, it was six years before I would go back to Estonia, this time on my own, and meet the woman who would set my future apart from the rest of my life, my beautiful wife Leen. She would be the one to take my vague idea of what it might be like to really be Estonian and give me the injection of reality I craved.
