Tallinn
June 1, 2011
Yesterday had three Pieces Parts[1] and two of them were dandy.
For the first part of the day I took myself on a walking tour of Tallinn that I got off the interwebs.
After a few minutes at the ferry disaster memorial and then walked through the gate at Fat Matilda Tower into the Lower Town portion of the Old Town. Old Tallinn is really two towns : The lower town inhabited by the prosperous Hanseatic traders and the upper town where the Estonian locals who worked for the traders lived. The Old Town is wonderfully well preserved.
Part 2 of my first day in Tallinn began when Milana met me at my hotel in the afternoon. Milana, you may remember, is my cousin John’s wife. They live in Vilnius, Lithuania, but lived here in Tallinn for about a year a few years ago. Milana decided, much to my delight, to take a tiny vacation and spend a couple of days with me here. It’s the first time she’s been away from her new baby Vivienne, so it’s a pretty big deal! John and I consider each other a third brother and so Milana, who I’ve known for over a decade, feels like a sister-in-law. She and I discussed this yesterday and she agreed that “My Cousin’s Wife” didn’t really adequately explain our very affectionate relationship. I told her I was just going to start referring to her as my sister-in-law.
We had a wonderful afternoon traipsing around town. We climbed the very tall tower of the Baptist church as the harbor side of Old Town to get a breathtaking series of views. This Church has a dark history, as the Soviets used it during their occupation of Estonia to block television signals coming in from Finland. Now the Baptists use it to talk an invisible character from a Bronze Age book of myths. I leave you to judge which is the more reprehensible.
Okay, now to Part 3. I’m going to try to dispense with this unpleasant conclusion to the day as economically as possible. We were to have dinner with a mutual friend. I do not know what is going on with this mutual friend, nor do I really care, but he was supposed to pick us up and take us to this cool seafood restaurant out in the country. He finally showed up, two hours late, drunk as a skunk, with his appalled ten year old daughter in tow. We had actually given up on him and gone to a local Italian restaurant, but he regrettably followed us there. The dinner that followed was . . . unpleasant.
Although everyone knows I am a teetotaler, I am not opposed to the consumption of alcohol by those who enjoy it. This being said, I have no interest in spending time with drunks. Drunks are boring and pushy. They suck all of the oxygen out of the room. This dude was rude and aggressive and it was all extremely uncomfortable and I thought it would never end. We finally escaped at almost midnight (that is to say, dusk). Bleh.
Anyway, we’re done with him. I must wrap this up because I’m expecting Milana any minute!
A Partial List of the Cities My Cousin John and His Wife Milana Have Lived During John’s Crazy Career[2]
- Prague
- Budapest
- Warsaw
- Frankfurt
- Tallinn
- Vilnius
[1] And parts is parts, right?
[2] I am very likely leaving somewhere out.
