Google Maps have finally added street names for Tallinn, along with directions finding, and all the place names I added months ago to Google Earth! I know my way around the main areas fairly well by now, but I don’t actually know what lots of the streets are called.
So occasionally I’ll need to go somewhere but not recognise its address, and spend quite a while finding it on a map, only to eventually realise it’s actually somewhere I know quite well. It’s fairly easy to find places in the Old Town by checking one of the many tourist maps I have lying around, but anywhere outside that is always a little trickier. Hopefully now things will be a lot easier.
One of the many things I really like about the banking system in Estonia is how well integrated it is with various other online systems.
In particular, I really like how, if I’m booking flights on Estonian Air, I can pay directly from my bank account rather than having to use a credit or debit card. At checkout I just select my bank, and get transferred to my normal internet banking system where, once I’ve cleared security, I get a pre-filled form for making a payment to the airline. Then as the transaction can happen in pretty much real-time (Yay for no clearing cycles), the airline can confirm my payment and complete the transaction straight-away.
Estonian life is full of little things like this that just Make Sense. In the UK there would be a million reasons given why you could never do something like this. Here they just make it happen.
With all remnants of the winter snows gone, temperatures up 10°, and a few extra hours of daylight. Tallinn is becoming a different city. The tourists are starting to arrive en masse, wheeling their crates of cheap vodka, beer, and cigarettes around their harbour.
Yesterday I took advantage of a sunny day to explore the Linnahall. This was built for the 1980 Olympics, and serves as a ‘bridge’ into the city from the harbour. Any of my readers who went to QUB can consider it a cross between a Mayan temple and the David Bates Building. Mostly it’s a huge series of crumbling stone steps on a wide variety of split levels. I’ve wanted to investigate this since I arrived here, but it’s precarious enough to navigate parts of it, and it would be almost impossible in snow.
A building like this could never survive in the UK. The safety elf would have it closed down in a heartbeat. Stone steps that have crumbled away into nothingness, with no handrails, and no guard rails to stop you tumbling over the edge are a distinct no-no there. Walking across the top of buildings generall doesn’t seem to be a major tourist pastime in the UK.
It doesn’t seem very touristy here either. A few tourists peer quizzically at it from a distance, or take a few photographs, but clambering all over it seems to be reserved for locals – particularly at the sides and back, which are covered in graffiti, and where you have also have to keep a look out for extreme cyclists racing down the slopes at the sort of speed where they’re not going to be able to get out of your way.
But there are few hidden treasures, and it’s worth spending a while investigating, if even just for the exercise and the great views. There also seems to be some sort of nightclub tucked away at the back, and this is also where the Copterline 18 minute helicopter journey to Helskink departs. I must return soon take some photos of my own, so I can replace these “borrowed” ones…
It’s been a hectic 6 weeks, and I haven’t had a lot to write here, mainly I haven’t actually been in Tallinn much. Two trips to California, and another one back to N. Ireland have fried my brain. I have no idea what month it is, never mind day, or timezone.
Grrr. The story of How Easyjet Ripped Me Off needs to be told more widely than just this little distributary. Hopefully the extra googlejuice from my main blog will spread the warning wider afield.
Estonian Air, on the other hand, have quite happily allowed me to check in 2 x 25kg without charge on a 1 x 20kg limit. Almost every other bag I see coming off their carousels has a “Heavy” sticker slapped on it…
I’ve just returned from California for the second time in a month, and my body is getting really rather confused. One thing that should help this time is the extra daylight. We’re fast approaching the cross-over point of 12 hours of daylight, and the extra 5 or 6 minutes a day adds up quickly. On top of that, even though sunrise isn’t officially until about 7am at the moment, it’s getting light quite a bit earlier than that. 5am this morning looked similar to how 9am looked when I arrived in December. I’m operating mostly on US time so I don’t notice sunset quite so much, but there’s a few interesting events on over the next few weeks that might manage to drag me out of my apartment of an evening.
Last week I was in California for the second time in a month. This caused a raised eyebrow from the immigration officials, and I also got to join the “special screening” line at security (I think it was a mix of having only hand luggage, and not having any part of my journey involve the country that issued my passport). But the most interesting part was trying to book a hotel in Palo Alto.
I was booking at the last minute, so all my first choices had either no, or restricted, availability. I eventually got booked into the Comfort Inn Stanford/Silicon Valley, but it was a painful experience. Their website availability guide didn’t work at all on Firefox on a Mac, so I had to switch to the PC just to check if it was even worth trying to call them.
When I did call them (Yay for Skype allowing me to call US Toll-free numbers from abroad), things descended into farce. I don’t think my accent is that strong – at least compared to many people I know – but they just couldn’t understand at all some of the things I was saying. I don’t recall ever having to explain before that ‘eight’ is ‘the number between seven and nine’. I was also pretty sure they got my name wrong (it sounded like they were calling me ‘Tomy’, like the Japanese toy people), but I guessed it was more trouble than it was worth to correct this. They also really couldn’t handle international phone numbers – not only are they too long to enter into their form, but the concept of starting with a plus sign seemed to really confuse them. They eventually gave up on trying to take my address after at least three times around the “Where?” / “Estonia” loop, with a higher degree of incredulity to the question each time.
I never did work out whether this was because they didn’t understand my accent, or they just had never heard of Estonia…
Apologies for the lack of posting for a while, but I was in California. This was largely made possible by the extraordinary service of Estravel in Suur-Karja. The trip was arranged at the very last minute (booked on Friday for Monday departure), and Liis patiently sat for well over an hour trying to find me flights that wouldn’t cost an absolute fortune. Eventually she found me business class flights to JFK via Prague for less than the price that most airlines wanted for Economy.
I’d never even heard of Czech Air before so wasn’t sure what to expect. They’re no BA or Virgin, but I usually hate any flight over about 6 hours, and they managed to make a 9½ hour flight quite passable, so I would certainly fly with them again. (They’re probably equivalent to someone like Iceland Air.) Plus they provided the best airline food I’ve encountered in quite some time. (And with real metal cutlery!)
The main disadvantage became apparent on the return trip – the seats don’t recline enough to sleep well. Even though I was ludicrously tired, having had to leave my hotel shortly after 3am to get the first flight to JFK, I got almost no sleep on the way home. Coupled with the 10 hour difference my sleep patterns are now even more messed up then before…
When people warned me about the weather in Estonia I thought they were mainly referring to the temperature. I’m generally quite warm, so this doesn’t bother me too much, although the couple of times it’s reached sub zero not just in °C but also in °F then I’ve been willing to admit that it is might actually indeed be a little chilly.
However, I wasn’t really expecting the snow to bring quite so much physical danger. I’m getting better at judging whether the maniac drivers are actually going to try to stop when I’m crossing the road, although there seems to be at least one every day who decides just a little too late that driving straight into me might not be a good idea, and ends up skidding at me quite aggressively instead. But the real danger seems to be from huge sheets of snow suddenly falling from the tops of buildings into the street. I had foolishly assumed that people were choosing to walking down the middle of the streets in the Old Town because the footpaths were too slippy or had much more snow to wade through. This afternoon, after a near miss just in front of me, immediately followed by a direct hit on a couple just behind me, I decided that it would be much safer avoiding the footpaths entirely and jostling with the cars instead.
This evening I ventured out to see the Tallinn Light Festival. Most of the lights on Pikk have been replaced with red lamps, and there are five installations of light along between the Three Sisters and Town Hall Square.
For all the people who’ve been asking me for photos, I’ve uploaded pictures of some of these to flickr. However it proved more difficult than I’d have liked to get even half-decent photos. The first problem was that I’d managed to leave my memory card at home! Rather than fighting my way back through the snow (I’d even had trouble getting out my front door as the snow was wedging it shut), I decided to just buy another card – I could do with a spare anyway! The bigger problem however was that I’m not really sure how to take good photographs of lights in the dark. And even aside from the purely technical questions, it’s hard to hold the camera still for long in snow and winds with an effective temperature -14°C!
I got reasonably plausible photos of four of the installations, but completely failed to get a good shot of the fifth; the Pong game that the Three Sisters Hotel was projecting onto the building opposite it. I also tried for a while to get a good photo of the entrance to the Old Town at Fat Margaret’s Tower showing the red lights stretching down Pikk. It was a good idea in theory, but I was completely unable to get a shot that wasn’t blurred, and by this point I was starting to lose feeling in my hands!
The inflatable hands near the Town Hall Square seem to get the most attention, especially as they spring to life as people go past, but I much preferred the strange installation at St. Olav’s.
